banks

PNC, down only 13% this year-to-date, very good for a bank stock, is acquiring beleaguered Ohio bank NCC for $5.5 billion. The price represents a huge discount to the prevailing market price before open today and NCC was down 34% in early…

Bloomberg's Lisa Kassenaar and Christine Harper have written a good, long article about Goldman Sachs, how it dealt with crisis, and what led the venerated firm to the brink of collapse despite being the best run firm on Wall Street.…

Writedowns continued unabated despite the easing global credit markets. While we should see a bear market rally due to this easing, the ill effects of a global recession and new concerns in emerging markets and Asia will cause writedowns…

I love Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase's CEO. He really tells it like it is. At last quarter's earnings call, he called a spade a spade and said "prime looks terrible" in reference to prime mortgage loans. This quarter his quote is even…

My last post's title "The panic is over" was a bit cheeky given the Dow was down an astounding 700-some points today. The crux of the matter is continued economic weakness due to slowing consumer spending. And that means more writedowns…

Just moments ago Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave a speech in which he said the following about Lehman Brother: "there was not enough collateral to support the lending." This was Bernanke's response to a question about whether…

In Scotland, one of the UK's most venerated names, the Royal Bank of Scotland, a bank that prints its own bank notes as legal tender, has been eviscerated by the over-leveraging and risk-taking of its CEO Sir Fred Goodwin. Sir Fred, an…

I knew today was going to be a fantastic day for equities given what we saw in Asia overnight and in Europe. But, 936 points up for the Dow is pretty spectacular. As bad as this past Thursday was for the market in general and financial…

If you don't think that the recapitalisation scheme by Gordon Brown doesn't matter, then take a look no further than Nationwide Building Society. The mutual company is not under pressure in the equity markets like RBS, HBOS or Barclays.…

Spanish banking giant Banco Santander has pulled through the credit crisis with a much higher profile than ever before. I was initially skeptical that the firm was hiding huge losses at it had exposure in Spain, the UK and the US, all…