Business Comment
Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Last of the 'bulge brackets' are forced to fold their tents
A little while back, in the run-up to the Bank of America takeover of Merrill Lynch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, I posed the question of whether this was the end of "bulge bracket" investment banking as we know it. With news yesterday that the last two remaining independent bulge bracket firms – Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley – are to become fully regulated commercial banks, the answer can now be given as an unambiguous yes. The revelation that Mitsubishi UFJ, part of the once bust Japanese banking system, is to take a stake of up 20 per cent in Morgan Stanley further underlines the point.
Inside Business Comment
Stephen King: 'Capitalism can be incredibly unstable and state intervention is back, big time'
Monday, 22 September 2008
Phew! That was some week. Lehman Brothers, the American investment bank which opened for business back in the 1840s, has gone. Merrill Lynch has been swallowed up by Bank of America. Manchester United's shirts and AIG are owned by the US government. Lloyds TSB has taken over HBOS. And, on Wednesday and Thursday, it looked like we were on the verge of another Great Depression, with shares in all manner of companies in freefall, and banks the world over on the point of capitulation.
Hamish McRae: Every silver lining has a cloud and even if shares may be over the worst, our finances aren't
Sunday, 21 September 2008
Phew. What next? Let's assume this is really the turning point for the markets, because if it isn't, then things could get very worrying.
Margareta Pagano: Has Sir Victor's deal of a lifetime given the markets a lifeline?
Sunday, 21 September 2008
Now the Lloyds chairman must make the HBOS takeover work
Jeremy Warner's Outlook: America resorts to well-tried solution... when Wall Street stumbles, bail it out
Saturday, 20 September 2008
The US authorities have tried just about everything else. They've cut interest rates, they've flooded the system with liquidity, they've engineered rescue takeovers, they've nationalised Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG, yet still the storm kept building, threatening the very foundation stones of the financial markets and the American economy.
Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Short sellers are just the start of regulatory purge
Saturday, 20 September 2008
Better late than never, I suppose. I've been warning for years about the explosive growth of short trading, but nobody in Government or at the Financial Services Authority took any notice, preferring instead to take their instruction from the tortuous defence of this invidious practice that you tend to read in the establishment press. You know the sort of stuff – oh, but it would interfere with the efficient workings of capital markets and price discovery if you did anything about it, or, horror of horrors, undermine London's competitiveness as a financial centre. Tosh. The way things are going, there will soon be no financial centre left to be competitive.
Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Lloyds-Halifax shows policymakers are starting to get it right over crisis
Friday, 19 September 2008
There were two distinct views in the City yesterday on Lloyds TSB's £12.2bn bid for HBOS. Some think Lloyds is paying far too much, as in the absence of the bank's rescue takeover bid HBOS would have been facing the possibility of Northern Rock-style nationalisation, leaving shareholders with nothing.
Hamish McRae: Easy money won't help economies weather this global banking crisis
Thursday, 18 September 2008
The turning point for the banks but the beginnings of a deeper slide for the real economy? This week has been extraordinary. We were talking yesterday with some senior bankers and they agreed that the only similar time in terms of the febrile mood in London was the collapse of Burmah Oil and the plunge of equities at the beginning of 1975. For New York, well, what has been happening there is surely bigger than anything since the 1930s.
Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Lloyds holds all the cards as HBOS seeks shelter from financial hurricane
Thursday, 18 September 2008
As trailed in these columns yesterday, so life-threatening has the situation at Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) become that it has been forced to seek a rescue takeover by one of its UK rivals.
Jeremy Warner's Outlook: With HBOS under renewed attack, forced takeover may be the solution
Wednesday, 17 September 2008
Notwithstanding yesterday's trouncing of the Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) share price, and the separate downgrade by credit rating agencies, Britain's largest mortgage bank cannot and will not be allowed to fail. Some £258bn in retail deposits tells you exactly why not.
Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Wall Street and the City get their comeuppance
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
As the credit crunch enters a new and more lethal phase, all prediction has become essentially worthless. The events of the last 48 hours are without precedent on Wall Street and in the City. Nobody knows how they are going to pan out.
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10 Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Last of the 'bulge brackets' are forced to fold their tents
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1 Fury at $2.5bn bonus for Lehman's New York staff
2 $521,000: The average pay of Goldman Sachs employees and that includes secretaries
3 Hedge funds suffer mass redemptions
4 US investment banks switch status
5 Gieve warns of deflationary impact of credit crisis
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