This is just plain shady if true: leveraged, leveraged buyouts? From the sounds of this article Guy Hands Rejects Bank LBO Debt Offers, Sees Subprime Parallels it seems that banks are participating in a ridiculously sketchy-sounding practice: they appear to be bridging sales of bridge-loans that they can no longer sell to the same private [...]
I am willing to bet that there is a group of radicals huddled up in a cave somewhere with half-eaten cans of beans muttering to one another “see…we were right!”. According to them, the horrible earthquake in China today, the tragic storm in Burma, and the financial calamities on Wall Street are all part of [...]
I guess another way to stop the bleeding is just to stop valuing assets. Merrill Says Level 3 Assets Jump 70% in First Quarter Merrill Lynch & Co. said so-called Level 3 assets climbed 70 percent in the first quarter, as the largest U.S. brokerage reclassified commercial mortgages and other assets as hard to value. [...]
One might wonder how a rainy May afternoon in the midst of finals produces optimism, but somehow this afternoon, as I trudged through an overly-gloomy Cambridge afternoon, I felt another twinge of optimism start to bite. It was surely not hindered when I turned down to my “device” a few moments later to see yet [...]