A note to our colleagues: Now may be a good time to stop sleeping in the office. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had The Observer on his mind yesterday at the Friends of the Hudson River Park’s sping gala, reminding partygoers that FOHRP board chair Douglas Durst ranked fifth on The Commercial Observer’s Real Estate Power 100, Read More
1 percent problems: Steven M. Davidoff digs into reports on private equity and finds an industry in transition: Private equity’s share of takeover deals more than halved last year compared against the first six months of 2007, and the industry is sitting on more than $900 billion in dry powder, which—along with cash-flush corporations Read More
Guess rumors that Facebook is working on building a smartphone of its own didn’t help: Facebook fell another 9.6 percent today, closing at $28.84, 24 percent below the offering price.
That comes after a New York Times story this weekend suggesting that Zuck & Co. have been assembling hardware and software engineers to take Read More
After 16 years presiding over white collar cases in the U.S. District Court’s Southern District, you’d think Judge Jed Rakoff would be hard to disallusion. Not so. It only took six days for the insider trading trial of Rajat Gupta—the former McKinsey & Co. CEO accused of tipping Galleon Group hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam to sensitive corporate secrets—to cause Mr. Rakoff to hang his head in dismay. Read More
Squeeze play: JPMorgan has been selling profitable securities to prop up second-quarter results after the bank’s chief investment office and the trader known as the London Whale incurred billions in losses. The asset sales may be tax inefficient, and will deprive the lender of future gains, which is just too bad for Jamie Dimon’s firm. With its share price down 18 percent from the day before the trading losses were first reported, JPMorgan is under pressure to generate earnings. Read More
“The last month has really exposed the lack of fiduciary behavior in corporate America, from JPMorgan to Best Buy to Yahoo. Imagine if you were a Navy admiral and you ran your ship aground. You don’t get a fat severance payday. You don’t get to take a few years off and try again.”
It was Read More
Muted response: As the clock ticked past Facebook’s scheduled open, Nasdaq stayed mum on the technical glitches that delayed trading in the social media company’s stock by 28 minutes. The resulting chaos lasted hours, causing confusion over who had bought and sold how many shares at what prices—and leading to about $115 million in losses Read More
From the JPMorgan chief executive officer who won’t say what’s in the hedging position that cost his shareholders $2.3 billion, but you know, is owning responsibility for the losses and wants you to rest assured that the position will be wound down by the end of the year, somehow, comes a rather soft RSVP to the congressional Read More
It’s called the FINRA BrokerCheck, people, and before you give some schmloe your money, it wouldn’t hurt to use it. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced charges today against a New York-based fund manager named Jason J. Konior, who allegedly sold $11 million worth of limited partnerships in his Absolute Fund LP, then siphoned proceeds to pay redemptions from earlier investors. So, like, a pyramid scheme. Read More
Henry Blodget, BusinessInsider aggregator-in-chief, disgraced Merrill Lynch analyst and the pundit who spent the weeks leading up to the Facebook IPO hammering on what were at face incongruous themes—overpriced Facebook stock was “muppet-bait” and Mark Zuckerberg was the greatest—is out with a new Facebook trope that’s Internet fantastic:
The ongoing controversy over a Read More
