Monthly Archives: April 2007

American Task Force Argentina is a Washington-based lobbying organization financed by vulture funds, which exists to extract money from the government of Argentina and move it instead to the hedge funds and others who own the country’s defaulted debt. They … Continue reading →

Can you remember a week of late in which Australia’s Macquarie didn’t buy something? Today, it’s a bunch of UK cellphone and TV antennas. Boring, right? Not when you see the price tag: $5 billion. What’s more Macquarie is opening … Continue reading →

David Gaffen has a cute piece up at Marketbeat today, looking at the number of news stories on the subprime mess which contain the word “contained” or its cognates. A Dow Jones Factiva search shows that the number of stories … Continue reading →

John Koblin at the New York Observer today tries to put price tags on New York’s most valuable skyscrapers, and certainly comes up with some eye-popping numbers. The General Motors Building, at 767 Fifth Avenue, is the most valuable building … Continue reading →

Will commercial mortgages of the 2007 vintage turn out to be as misguided as residential mortgages in 2006? Fitch Ratings thinks there’s a serious risk of that. Does this sound familiar to you? The phenomenon has granted borrowers easy access … Continue reading →

$40 million seems to be the going rate for an investment-bank CEO these days. Executive compensation expert Graef Crystal has done the math, and finds that the pay for Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs; Stanley O’Neal of Merrill Lynch; John … Continue reading →

Subscribers to the New York Times got an extra section to throw away unread this morning: DealBook, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s M&A-obsessed blog, now has a quarterly spin-off on paper. The Spring 2007 section is full of mildly fluffy articles about … Continue reading →

Peter Scaturro knows private banking. And when Nationsbank Bank of America bought the company he ran, US Trust, they thought they were buying his private-banking expertise at the same time. Think JP Morgan buying Bank One for Jamie Dimon, or … Continue reading →

Just how big is the Blackstone IPO? Over at DealJournal, Dana Cimilluca calls it “the biggest initial public offering since Google”. But in fact it’s much bigger than that. Check out Renaissance Capital’s league table of the biggest US IPOs … Continue reading →

Blogger Fred Wilson (oh, OK, he’s a venture capitalist too) has sold his West Village townhouse for $33.15 million, a downtown record. He bought it for $7.35 million in 2000. And the rest of Manhattan’s property market is still booming, … Continue reading →

For reasons I don’t pretend to understand, Credit Suisse and UBS — the two big Swiss banks — are also the two big international heavyweights in the world of Latin American equities. Recently, UBS beefed up its presence in Brazil … Continue reading →

I spent a very large chunk of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, sitting in my living room, watching the television, which told me nothing I didn’t already know. I spent a very large chunk of the following week reading hundreds of … Continue reading →

Have you been scratching your head, wondering why public companies, which drove US economic growth for decades, are rapidly being taken private — a seemingly backward step? I haven’t seen any really compelling explanation of this, but I’m beginning to … Continue reading →

Gabriel Kahn of the WSJ has a big front-page article datelined Milan today, on how it’s hard out there for a major Italian industrialist, what with having to deal with interference from the government all the time. Mr. Tronchetti Provera’s … Continue reading →

Sam Zell is providing equity in his bid for Tribune, and he’s certainly taking it private. What’s more, as we’ve seen, he’s loading Tribune up with the kind of debt load normally seen only in deals run by private-equity companies. … Continue reading →

Do you ever get the impression that risk just goes around in circles? I’m relatively sanguine about a lot of the risk being created in the financial system right now largely because so much of the risk has been moved … Continue reading →