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Of all the merger decisions in the banking industry of late, BofA’s decision to back Countrywide Financial is the most risky. The fallout from Countrywide only gets worse day by day. I am astounded that this deal is on track. BofA Shareholders will regret it.
Bank of America’s Ken Lewis is trying to [...]

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Wachovia has hired Goldman Sachs and UBS has hired Wachovia to help each with a ’strategic review.’ For those in the financial services business, strategic review always means ‘merger options’.
Lazard has almost no business except its corporate finance and M&A business, so UBS hiring Lazard especially strikes of a firm seeking merger opportunities. [...]

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Now that it’s come to light that Barclays went hat in hand to Japan to recoup some of the losses from its credit writedowns, one begins to understand that the Japanese banks are in a much better position today than their western counterparts. After years of recovering from their own property and stock market [...]

Banco Santander, to date, has looked very robust as a financial institution in weathering the credit crisis. Despite significant exposure to bubble markets Spain and the UK, the company has not been required to write down a large amount of credit losses.

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The word on the street is that Lloyd’s TSB, one of the major British banks not hit hard by the mortgage crisis may be considering a bid for Germany’s Dresdner Bank, now owned by the insurance company Allianz.
If this sale does in fact go through it will be a major, major event because it will [...]

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You kind of saw this one coming. Bank of America is crazy to take Countrywide Financial’s balance sheet onto its books. Apparently, S&P Equity Research agrees and correctly downgraded BofA to a sell rating because of the risk.
Note: Oppenheimer’s Meredith Whitney expects BofA to eventually be forced to cut its divided. [...]

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The Globe & Mail has a storyline out today that caught my eye. It suggests that Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) would find some god takeover opportunities in the US. While I dismissed a similar storyline regarding UBS in Europe from the Financial Times, the Globe & Mail story does make sense.
This past [...]

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It looks like the BofA-Countrywide deal is still on. In fact, BofA is making room for some of the Countrywide executives in its own executive suite. I reckon we will look back on this deal as a very bad call by BofA.
Bank of America Corp. has chosen several senior Countrywide Financial Corp. executives [...]