How bad has the mood gotten on Wall Street? Judging by an article in the new issue of New York magazine, the answer is bleak indeed. Even as the broader economy shows signs of improving, Wall Street is coming off a year in which earnings — and the all-important bonuses dependent on them — were down sharply. Some 200,000 financial-sector workers lost their jobs. Public outrage against the big banks remains high and the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill has already curtailed some of Wall Street’s more aggressive practices — and it hasn’t even been fully implemented yet. In short, bankers and traders now face a significantly-altered landscape, and they’re not happy about it
Wall Street enjoyed a broad-based rally on Friday as two key stock indexes rose to the highest levels since before the Great Recession, propelled by better-than-expected employment data released earlier in the day. The strong upward movement by stocks suggests that investors are gaining confidence in the U.S. economic recovery and putting money back to [...]
NEW YORK — Bank of America is back to basics — slimmed down, stripped of its swagger and no longer the biggest bank in the country. And investors, after pummeling the company for two years, finally like what they see. The stock soared 4 percent Thursday after Bank of America reported that it made $2 billion from October through December, reversing a $1.2 billion [...]
Morgan Stanley posted a fourth-quarter loss of $275 million Thursday, its first since early 2009, dragged down by the cost of a settlement over soured mortgage securities. But the loss was far smaller than investors were expecting, and the company’s stock was up 5 percent in the early afternoon. Morgan Stanley’s loss was equivalent to [...]
After the financial crisis, regulators and politicians said they were going to rewrite the rules to ensure that big banks don’t end up with huge losses that put a country’s and indeed the world’s financial system at risk. Allowing the big banks to make big bets was out. And yet, here we go again. On [...]
So the Feds got their big fish. The takedown of Raj Rajaratnam for insider trading is going to give U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara plenty of momentum in using an old prosecutorial weapon to go after a new set of miscreants. Rajaratnam was fried by his own words, obtained by the kind of wiretap that the [...]
It’s been an interesting couple of days in the place where money and gambling intersects, otherwise known as Wall Street. Over the weekend, the Internet gambling sites PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker got taken down by Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which among other things covers [...]
Last month, I asked in this space if the global recovery was becoming a sure thing. Some economists had started to become buoyant about the world’s economic prospects and boosted their growth projections, but I had a few doubts. There seemed to be too many risks hanging about out there to be fully comfortable that [...]
After a stress-inducing day on Wall Street, investors have finally woken to the potential dangers to the world economic order posed by the giant earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The Japanese economy is the world’s third-largest, and its companies play important roles in everything from heavy industry to high-tech to finance. There is no doubt [...]
Time to say Goodbye to the Pay Czar Nearly a year and a half ago, Kenneth Feinberg was appointed to overseeing the pay of Wall Street executives and top officials of other companies that had to be bailed out in the financial crisis. Today is most likely his final day on the job of any [...]
