Category Archives: banking

Jim Surowiecki wants the Obama administration to formally relax capital requirements for banks; Ricardo Caballero wants them relaxed all the way to zero, which seems to me to be a form of nationalizing banks without taking any upside, a worst-of-both-worlds … Continue reading →

I have a piece up on the future of Wall Street in the "dual perspectives" area of Portfolio.com; Sam Gustin gives the techy perspective for Wired.com. My feeling is that Wall Street is going to become a lot more boring … Continue reading →

One of the big unanswered questions surrounding the fourth-quarter collapse of Merrill Lynch is how, exactly, it contrived to lose $15 billion in December. The general suspicion in the blogosphere is that it was all a function of marking to … Continue reading →

Those of us in favor of bank nationalization don’t want to nationalize all banks, just the massively insolvent ones which are too big to fail. But let’s say that the government took over Bank of America and/or Citigroup, wiping out … Continue reading →

Lede of the day comes from Reuters: Citigroup Inc views its Mexican banking unit Banamex as a solid business and has no plans to sell it, sources familiar with the matter said. And here was me thinking that Citi’s few … Continue reading →

Many thanks to David Sunstrum, who put this chart together for me. The blue bar is Citi’s book value per share, as reported in the bank’s quarterly reports. It reached a high of $25.53 in the second quarter of 2007, … Continue reading →

Here are the capitalizations of the biggest banks in the world: the blue circles dark blue bars correspond to how much they were worth in the second quarter of 2007, while the green circles light blue bars are the capitalizations … Continue reading →

On Monday, when US markets were closed, Royal Bank of Scotland announced it lost something in the region of £28 billion last year, and the FT ran a column with the headline "Shoot the bankers, nationalise the banks". On Tuesday, … Continue reading →

From Meredith Whitney: C’s core problem is that it simply doesn’t make money in any of its businesses except Smith Barney, which it is in the process of selling. Well, there’s always consumer banking in Asia. But you’ve got to … Continue reading →

I’m very encouraged by the breadth and seriousness of the nationalization debate as it has unfolded in the blogosphere in recent days; Steve Waldman, at the bottom of his latest post, has done a sterling job of rounding up most … Continue reading →

The WSJ has two important articles on Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch today, concentrating on Ken Lewis and John Thain respectively. Both men were very quiet in mid-to-late December, before the acquisition closed, when they were CEOs of … Continue reading →

Washington’s grandees clearly had better things to do this past weekend than orchestrate another bank bailout. Which is bad news for Ken Lewis: Bank of America is down 17% in early trade, at less than $6 a share — the … Continue reading →

Henry Blodget has convinced himself that he’s worked out "the right way" to fix banks. It’s a big debt-for-equity cramdown, basically, which, he says, will "avoid another Lehman" and involve spending "no taxpayer money". Which got me wondering: what do … Continue reading →

From Robert Peston: Barclays’ share price has fallen again today. At the current price of 90p, this bank’s entire market value is ߣ7.5bn. And remember, this is a bank that said on Friday night that its profits for 2008 were … Continue reading →

This comes from Heidi Moore’s excellent round-up of today’s BofA/Merrill news, which included the astonishing figure that Merrill Lynch managed to lose $15 billion in the fourth quarter. “To put [the] $15 bn after-tax [loss] in perspective, 60% of the … Continue reading →

Citigroup’s earnings this morning could hardly have been worse: a $12.1 billion operating loss, which was reduced to a still-whopping $8.3 billion after counting in gains from selling Citibank Germany. But here’s a datapoint you might have missed: Citi’s book … Continue reading →