A coalition of union leaders, homeowners, elected officials, and others launched a statewide campaign today urging JP Morgan to change its mortgage policies. The campaign states that unless the firm modifies its practices to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, participants of the coalition will boycott the bank, and encourage others to do the same.
This Read More
With JP Morgan Chase’s announcement that it will shutter dozens of Washington Mutual bank branches around the city, we mourn the passing of a perennial trend piece: the story about all those bank branches around the city. (The Observer wasn’t immune.)
The bank-branch-explosion trend piece was as reliable as a Yankees post-season the Read More
Down on Wall Street, the word of the hour is “deleveraging.” In the financial markets, deleveraging is a brutal and unpleasant thing, where lots of innocents get badly hurt.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have become plain old-fashioned bank holding companies. Lehman declared bankruptcy. The bull (Merrill) and the Bear (Stearns) have both been Read More
Given the woes on Wall Street and the billions upon billions in write-downs financial-services firms are facing, it would seem like a fine time for the financial sector to vacate some office space—or so one might think.
But movement on the financial front has been almost eerily quiet in the real estate world. Few Read More
Governor Spitzer was about limiting the lure of “off-the-shelf” tax incentives when he announced this morning that JP Morgan Chase had agreed to lease Site 5 at Ground Zero from the Port Authority. But he gave three different estimates on how much those tax breaks would be.
“They are all a part of pre-existing, lower Read More
The newest member of an obscure panel that gives out hundreds of millions of dollars in city tax breaks each year, the Industrial Development Agency, is promising to cast a skeptical eye on the process.
“New York is so vibrant and strong that companies are under significant pressure to be in New York City,” Kevin Read More
The most ferocious investment firm of the last six months, Broadway Partners, is in contract to purchase 280 Park Avenue from Istithmar for a little more than $1.2 billion, a source said.
The building was purchased in a very quiet off-market transaction, and represents another gaudy move for the extremely young yet impossibly strong Broadway Read More
Dana Vachon, the 28-year-old banker turned blogger turned novelist about town, was not wearing socks. Just loafers. A buttery brown leather pair that may or may not have been Gucci and cocooned his feet to reveal just the manliest hint of hair-sprinkled skin. Set against an outfit of cobalt blue jeans, gold-coin cufflinks, and a Read More
Claire McCaskill recently got a chance to do something that millions of us have wanted to do. She got a chance to tell the executives of the major credit-card companies what she thought of them.
Ms. McCaskill is the junior Senator from Missouri, one of the good things that happened in the last election. As Read More
Like many torch-bearers of old family-owned businesses, Steve Chahalis hopes that his son, too, will one day work behind the same counter as he has—as a bartender, though, not a bank teller.
But in order to keep his clan’s longstanding P&G Café Bar from devolving into yet another ubiquitous Manhattan bank branch, Mr. Chahalis might Read More
