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 …
Wall Street
Has the Wall Street Pay Czar Paid Off?
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 consequence.
This morning Feinberg released the …
Feingold Delays Financial Reform
The vote to close debate on the financial reform bill in the Senate failed. All but two Republican Senators voted against the moving the bill to a final vote. That’s not much of a surprise. The surprise is that two Democrats voted against the bill. And a look at why Russ Feingold of campaign finance reform fame voted no should give you a …
Just How Rotten Were Morgan Stanley’s Mortgage Deals?
- Eh tu, Morgan Stanley? The Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into whether Morgan Stanley, too, broke securities laws when it structured mortgage securities and then made money by betting against them. The SEC already has brought a similar case against Goldman.
- But
…
Why Jamie Dimon is Afraid of Elizabeth Warren
There are a lot of reasons to like the idea of a consumer financial protection agency. My colleagues Barbara Kiviat and Michael Grunwald have named the more substantive ones here, here and here. But I think I have stumbled across possibly the most telling data point yet on why the CFPA is a good idea: Jamie Dimon is scared of debating …
What the Confidential Goldman E-mails Tell Us
Over the weekend, a Senate Committee headed by Carl Levin released dozens of 4 private Goldman Sachs e-mails. (UPDATE: Dozens more were voluntarily released by Goldman.) They show the computer chatter among Goldman’s top brass, and top mortgage market players during mid-2007, which is the time the housing market was going from …
Greece Gets Snowed Under by New York
It’s a snow day here in New York City, with a foot and a half of the white stuff muffling the traffic noise and frosting the trees in my uptown neighborhood. Downtown on Wall Street there’s snow too, but a slightly different story: Greece is being buried by traders. They have been betting big money that the Aegean nation, familiar to …
Don’t Blame Regulators for Stock Drop
The market is down again today and one of the reasons people have cited for the recent 800 point drop in the Dow is that investors are worried about the bank regulations coming out of the Obama administration. The first part of the argument is that Obama’s plan to tax the banks and limit what they can and can’t do will hurt profits of …
A Year Into Citi’s Confused Breakup
Back in October, I wrote that Citi was basically a big garage sale, willing to sell any part of the bank that wasn’t nailed down (they had already gotten rid of the nailed down stuff). At the time, the PR folk denied that most of Citi was up for sale. They said the bank had made a detailed and logical plan of what was for sale and what …
Why Bank Investors Should Cheer the Volcker Rule
The consensus seems to be that Obama’s proposal to limit the operations of the banks to lending and securities underwriting, and not proprietary trading and hedge fund investing, if enacted, would be bad for banks and bank shareholders. Many pointed to the so-called Volcker rule to explain last week’s market sell-off. Like Ritholtz, I’m …
Ladies, Let’s Gun for That Eight-Figure Salary
So I opened the WSJ online this morning and nearly spat out my decaf:
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. paid its chairman and chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, about $54 million for 2006, a record for Wall Street bosses who are harvesting their share of bull-market bounty.
Say what? Fifty-four million? Can that be right? According to the …