Business

For the wealthy, index funds have an image problem. They are considered the economy cars of the investing world: they’ll get you there but not in style and you’re always worried they may break down. Anyone at a serious level of wealth, the thinking goes, needs the equivalent of a luxury sedan, with strategic stock choices, hedge funds, private equity, real estate.

But as Paul Sullivan notes in his Wealth Matters column for The New York Times, Burton G. Malkiel says this is all hogwash. Read More »

Fortress Europe is now under attack by the market. For months, the conventional wisdom in Europe was that the speculative aims of bond traders and hedge fund investors would remain largely focused on Greece, Europe’s chronic problem child.

But this week the cost of insuring the debt of not just Greece, but Portugal and Spain as well, rose to record levels — causing stock markets to tumble, the euro to fall, and borrowing costs in the most vulnerable countries to soar, The New York Times’s Landon Thomas Jr. reports. Read More »

Update | 6:09 p.m. The New York Times’s Graham Bowley provides more details about Lloyd C. Blankfein’s bonus.

Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, was paid a bonus of $9 million in stock, in an apparent attempt to defuse the public rancor over financial executives’ compensation.

The size of Mr. Blankfein’s 2009 bonus has been the subject of considerable speculation on Wall Street, where there had been estimates of $40 million or more, and considerable anger on Capitol Hill. Instead, Goldman disclosed late Friday afternoon that Mr. Blankfein was receiving less than the $17 million in stock that JPMorgan Chase gave its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, as a bonus. Read More »

The Securities and Exchange Commission will consider adopting short-selling curbs in coming weeks as well as ways to improve market surveillance, Mary L. Schapiro, the S.E.C. chairwoman, said on Friday, according to Reuters.

The S.E.C. proposed a number of ways to curb short-selling, a legitimate form of investing that amounts to a bet that a stock will fall. It was blamed for contributing to the downfall of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Those proposals include marketwide curbs and so-called circuit breakers that would restrict short-selling if a stock fell precipitously. Read More »

Several members of Bernard L. Madoff’s family have agreed to a freeze of their assets pending the outcome of a $200 million lawsuit filed by the court-appointed trustee in charge of recovering money for the victims of Mr. Madoff’s enormous Ponzi scheme.

The lawsuit was filed last fall by the trustee, Irving H. Picard, against Mr. Madoff’s sons, Mark and Andrew, his brother Peter and his niece Shana, who all worked with Mr. Madoff at his investment firm. In the suit, Mr. Picard argued that the family members should return any ill-gotten gains they received from Mr. Madoff’s fraudulent scheme. Read More »

Sex may sell, but not necessarily as an initial public offering.

FriendFinder Networks, the publisher of Penthouse magazine that operates adult-oriented Web sites like AdultFriendFinder.com and Cams.com, said Friday that it had indefinitely shelved its planned $220 million initial public offering, citing market conditions, Reuters reports.

The company did not say when it might again try to price the I.P.O., but it said in a statement it would not proceed “until market conditions improve.” Read More »

Funds and property valued at about $370 million traced to Allen Stanford, who is suspected in a Ponzi scheme, have been found, but disputes over control of the assets are holding up disbursement, liquidators for Mr. Stanford’s offshore bank said on Friday, according to Reuters.

Nigel Hamilton-Smith and Peter Wastell, the liquidators who work for a unit of Vantis, said $100 million in assets in Britain and $100 million in Switzerland have been found, but Mr. Stanford’s receiver in the United States, Ralph Janvey, and federal prosecutors are also seeking control of those funds. Read More »

The Federal Reserve and other financial regulators, which have faced strong pressure from the White House and Congress to stimulate lending to small businesses, prodded banks on Friday to ease such financing, The New York Times’s Sewell Chan reports.

In a joint statement, the regulators said that banks might have responded to the downturn “by becoming overly cautious” in their lending to small companies. The statement noted that small businesses are “experiencing difficulty in obtaining or renewing credit to support their operations.” Read More »

The senator who is shepherding the Obama administration’s package of Wall Street reforms through Congress said on Friday morning that talks with his Republican counterpart had broken down, The New York Times’s Sewell Chan reports.

The senator, Christopher J. Dodd, indicated that Democrats would forge ahead with their own bill, after months of talks that had been aimed at reaching a bipartisan consensus. Read More »

Jamie Dimon can lay claim to the biggest bonus for a Wall Street chief for 2009 — so far.

The chief executive of JPMorgan Chase received a bonus of roughly $17 million, the bank disclosed in a regulatory filing on Friday. His bonus package contains almost $8 million in restricted stock, which begins vesting in 2012, and 563,562 options carrying a $43.20 strike price. (The restricted stock was granted on Wednesday, when JPMorgan’s stock closed at $40.29.)

Like last year, he won’t receive a cash bonus, a JPMorgan spokesman told Bloomberg News. Read More »

The Macquarie Group employee under pressure for looking at pictures from a risqué GQ photo shoot featuring Miranda Kerr while a colleague was being interviewed on television now has a new supporter: the supermodel herself.

Ms. Kerr told The Herald Sun of Australia that she did not think the Macquarie employee, identified as David Kiely, should suffer for his actions. (For a refresher, check out the video on YouTube.) “I am told there is a petition to save his job and of course I would sign it,” Ms. Kerr said.

She doesn’t have to worry, according to Here is the City: Mr. Kiely will apparently keep his job. Read More »

Professors Steven M. Davidoff and Peter J. Henning have teamed up to analyze the latest trials and tribulations of Bank of America in its acquisition of Merrill Lynch:

The Securities and Exchange Commission has announced a new settlement with Bank of America over its inadequate disclosures to its shareholders in connection with shareholder approval of the bank’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch in December 2008. At the same time, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has sued the bank’s former chief executive, Kenneth D. Lewis, and chief financial officer, Joseph L. Price, for securities fraud over the same disclosures, pursuing a case the S.E.C. found unsupported by the evidence it gathered. Coincidence? We think not.

We’ve also been here before. Read More »

UBS, the troubled Swiss bank that has been battered by a tax evasion investigation in the United States, is reorganizing its Americas wealth management division in an attempt to stem outflows, Reuters reported.

The Swiss bank, the world’s second largest wealth manager, said on Friday that the recently appointed heads of its wealth management unit, Robert J. McCann and Robert Mulholland, had outlined broad plans for a restructuring and management reshuffle. Read More »

The American International Group said late Thursday that Steven Udvar-Hazy, director and chief executive of its plane-leasing arm, the International Lease Finance Corporation, would step down effective Friday.

Mr. Udvar-Hazy leaves a business he founded 37 years ago, and his duties will be performed by John Plueger, the unit’s president, until the I.L.F.C. board decides on a successor. Read More »