ubs
It's Complicated: Insurance Firm Spills Space Gobbled by Former UBS President, Cleary Gottlieb
Big news on multiple fronts thanks to a very complicated transaction just completed by CB Richard Ellis.
Arch Insurance Company, which CBRE just announced is consolidating its back-office operations in Jersey City, moving 300 employees to 107,000 square feet in Mack-Cali Realty Corp.'s Harborside Financial Center, is releasing space in midtown Manhattan and in the Financial District to an investment banking firm founded by the former head of UBS, and to Cleary Gottlieb, the white-shoe law firm.
Arch Insurance has subleased 30,000 square feet at 245 Park Avenue to Moelis & Co., former UBS Investment Bank president Kenneth Moelis' eponymous new firm that is, as CBRE broker Mark Ravesloot put it, "bursting at the seams" in its current space. read more »
How the Subprime Mortgage Crisis Is Like the Iraq War
"Put an end to the Americanization of the Swiss economy!"
So screamed a UBS shareholder at a February meeting of the Swiss banking giant's top executives and shareholders, according to an excellent report in the Sunday New York Times by Nelson D. Schwartz. The report catalogued the far-reaching effects of the American subprime mortgage crisis; one of those effects has been to fuel an anti-American bias in even the more traditionally serene parts of Europe.
Case in point: UBS at one point controlled $80 billion in subprime mortgage-backed securities. It's been forced to write down about $37 billion because of that gamble. It wasn't so much the financial loss that angered UBS shareholders (though that surely stung) but that the loss came because of what some Swiss saw as old-fashioned American over-consumption. read more »
