Category: Financial Institutions
Doubling down at AIG
The U.S. government is throwing money at the financial sector like nobody’s business. The latest salvo in this ridiculous affair comes in the form of more money for AIG. Rather than prattle on about how shambolic the U.S. bailout has become, I will defer to Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism who was on top of
Two more FDIC Friday Night Specials: Franklin and Security Pacific
It is now a ritual. Every Friday night the FDIC announces which banks have been playing fast and loose with our money and need to be shut down. This week, there are two banks, Security Pacific of Los Angeles and Franklin of Houston. Franklin is the bank run by Lewis Ranieri, of Liar’s Poker fame
Writedown News: 5 Nov 2008
This past week I have been particularly distracted by the political headlines in the run-up to the U.S. Presidential election, so I apologize if I have missed a few stories in the financial press. The writedowns do continue unabated and we have now seen over $670 billion in losses and writedowns since the beginning of
Forstmann on Charlie Rose: easy money caused crisis
Teddy Forstmann, one of the co-Founders of LBO giant Forstmann Little & Company, sounded the alarm earlier this year on the credit crisis. In an article from the Wall Street Journal that I chronicled here, Forstmann warned of impended crisis. Now, he has come out to explain his views in full in a recent interview
Fifth Third takes on assets of Freedom Bank
This past weekend, the FDIC closed yet another bank, Freedom Bank of Bradenton, Florida. The bank had total assets of $287 million and total deposits of $254 million. Super regional Fifth Third, based in Cincinnati, Ohio will take over the insured deposits of the institution and all Freedom branches have opened today as Fifth Third
Credit crisis timeline updates
I have not posted all day because I have been spending most of the day doing site maintenance — importing the data from the credit crisis timeline into a database, which will make it a lot easier to update, backfill and make changes to the timeline. We now have about 700 discrete events catalogued in
Writedown News: 28 Oct 2008
This week, I can practically repeat what I said last week verbatim – so, I will. Writedowns continued unabated despite the easing global credit markets. While we should see a bear market rally due to this easing, the ill effects of a global recession and new concerns in emerging markets and Asia will cause writedowns
Hedge Fund Panic
If you recall, I have been warning for a while now that hedge funds were going to take a beating. There are many progosticators out there including Nouriel Roubini which feel that many hedgie bankruptcies are on the way. Below is a snippet of a well-written article from the UK site “Money Week” which I
National City sold
PNC, down only 13% this year-to-date, very good for a bank stock, is acquiring beleaguered Ohio bank NCC for $5.5 billion. The price represents a huge discount to the prevailing market price before open today and NCC was down 34% in early trading. PNC is issuing $7.7 billion in stock and warrants to the U.S.
Writedown news: 21 Oct 2008
Writedowns continued unabated despite the easing global credit markets. While we should see a bear market rally due to this easing, the ill effects of a global recession and new concerns in emerging markets and Asia will cause writedowns to mount for quite some time. Below are the writedowns from the previous week. These links
Jamie Dimon: “If You Are Not Fearful, You Are Crazy”
I love Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s CEO. He really tells it like it is. At last quarter’s earnings call, he called a spade a spade and said “prime looks terrible” in reference to prime mortgage loans. This quarter his quote is even more to the point: “If You Are Not Fearful, You Are Crazy.” -Deal
Writedown news: 15 Oct 2008
My last post’s title “The panic is over” was a bit cheeky given the Dow was down an astounding 700-some points today. The crux of the matter is continued economic weakness due to slowing consumer spending. And that means more writedowns to come. Rather than belabor this point, I will note that the monetary authorities