Joe Wiesenthal reads into a video of a Spanish bar owner yelling at cops yesterday, as anti-austerity protests turned tense.

Also: Greece. Yesterday's protests in photos.

U.S. Bancorp and PNC Financial Services are the latest banks to experience slowdowns on their consumer websites, said to be the result of cyber attacks. Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase seemed to be the focus of attacks last week.

Mergers and acquisitions have slumped to their lowest level since the third quarter of 2009, when the financial crisis stemmed dealmaking.

Hedge fund managers may be facing lower bonuses this year, as many funds failed to adequately recover from poor performances in 2011, The New York Post reports.

Banks will pay out lower bonuses, rather than cut jobs, to control costs this year, Morgan Stanley banking analyst Betsy Graseck told Bloomberg.

Nomura continues its restructuring with plans to eliminate 30 jobs in its Americas equities division, according to Bloomberg. The Japanese firm is also cutting 100 investment banking jobs in Europe as it attempts to shed $1 billion in costs under new CEO Koji Nagai.

Credit Agricole chief executive officer Jean-Paul Chifflet expects a deal to sell its Greek lender Emporiki in the next few weeks, according to Reuters. The price may be a symbolic 1 euro.

Hong Kong tycoon Cecil Chao is offering a $65 million bounty to the man who can win the heart of his lesbian daughter.

Somewhere, an algorithm read the coverage of yesterday's Senate Banking Committee hearing on high-frequency trading, and figured it will take years for the government to hammer out reforms to fix market structure issues.

Stephen Morse, the Barclays executive who ignored employees' warnings that the bank was manipulating its Libor submissions, has been sitting out the ensuing scandal from his post as head of compliance at TD Bank.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said it may suspend JPMorgan's energy trading business for failing to comply with requests for information about the firm's trading profits, Bloomberg reports.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is scrutinizing whether private equity firms are taking more profits than they should, or taking profits too soon. The agency received increased authority over private money managers under Dodd-Frank.

The federal government's mortgage task force, co-headed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, is getting ready to do ... something?

More than 100 lawmakers have lobbied federal authorities on the implementation of Dodd-Frank, according to The New York Times.

Madoff trustee Irving Picard put checks in the mail yesterday—$2.5 billion in payments to thousands of investors duped by the Ponzi schemer.

Does anyone want to bail out Greece (again)?

Youth unemployment is also on the rise in prosperous northern Europe.

A Brazilian official said that the Federal Reserve's new bond-buying program would set off currency wars—Business Insider explains.

Nomura is eliminating four of 12 investment banking jobs in Dubai, according to Bloomberg, on the heels of the decision to dump a London-based prop trading team.

Britain is considering whether it really wants to be known as the "divorce capital of the world." That means, the Ministry of Justice is reviewing court standards that favor the less-wealthy spouse in split-ups.

Are you reading this from Jeffrey Gundlach's Porsche Carrera 4S? Would you like to make a deal?

Nomura will cut costs by about $500 million in European business, according to Bloomberg. The Japanese financial firm has said previously it will seek to pare costs by $1 billion in its wholesale business.

Morgan Stanley Smith Barney president Greg Fleming has been shuttling between cities of late to reassure financial advisers that the company is working to fix technology issues that have plagued the firm, according to Bloomberg. According to a Reuters report last week, 40 or so advisers have been threatening to leave the firm.

Wayne Chrebet is changing teams ... the former Jets wide receiver is part of a six-member wealth management group that's leaving Morgan Stanley Smith Barney for Barclays.

Citigroup is launching a European commodity trade finance business, according to The Financial Times, as the region's banks marshal funds to meet stricter capital requirements.

Nearly one in four Greeks were out of work in June. France's unemployment rate rose to 10.2 percent, its highest level in 13 years in the second quarter.

Ranji H. Nagaswami, chief investment officer for New York City pensions, is leaving government service for a role at Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund.

Qatar's sovereign wealth fund remains a thorn in the side of Glencore chief Ivan Glasenberg.

"Just in case it was unclear, you can’t moon your boss and expect to keep your job. Or your bonus."

First went Bob Diamond, who snapped up Lehman's U.S. securities business for Barclays, and who stepped down at the beginning of July after his bank agreed to pay $450 million to settle an investigation into its efforts to manipulate interbank lending rates.

Next fell Nomura chief executive Kenichi Watanabe and chief operating officer Takumi Shibata—who led Nomura's deal for Lehman's European and Asian units—amid an insider trading scandal that roiled the Japanese firm.

This week, it seemed, Barclays and Nomura appeared to pare back their respective global ambitions in tandem. Barclays was first again, naming retail banking chief Antony Jenkins to replace Mr. Diamond as chief executive; Mr. Jenkins told Bloomberg that he was"very confident" about the investment bank, and has previously spoken in favor of the universal banking model. Nontheless, Mr. Jenkins becomes the only CEO of a global, universal bank without an investment banking background, raising speculation that Barclays would back away from Mr. Diamond's quest to build a premier investment bank—a quest defined in part by the Lehman acquisition.

Nomura followed suit today, announcing $1 billion in cost cuts in its wholesale unit in a move that marked a retreat from the play for increased global importance hinged on Mr. Fuld's sloppy seconds. Like Mr. Jenkins, new Nomura CEO Koji Nagai has a background that would suggest a more humble strategy: According to The Times, Mr. Nagai "spent most of his career focused on Nomura’s domestic operations"; last month, Mr. Nagai said he plans to reduce the firm's footprint “to an appropriate size.”

(Carolyn Kaster/AP)

JPMorgan's internal investigation into trading losses associated with the trader known as the London Whale is far from over, and has required the efforts of more than 100 hundred lawyers, Reuters reports. U.S. authorities have also begun interviewing witnesses, and a high-quality internal probe may be helpful in dealing with the government.

As Knight Capital was reeling in the aftermath of a $440 million trading loss, JPMorgan refused to accept thousands of securities Knight hoped to use to obtain financing to stay afloat, The Wall Street Journal reports. JPMorgan's hesitance came amid a review of the banks dealings with brokerages that use JPMorgan to clear trades.

The Journal gathered economists' expectations for Fed chairman Ben Bernanke's speech in Jackson Hole.

Rumor is that Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann, a strident critic of proposed intervention by the European Central Bank in sovereign debt markets, may resign.

Nomura will take $1 billion of costs out of its wholesale unit, which includes investment banking and trading operations, according to Bloomberg.

Spain is considering pumping its own money into Bankia SA, the failed lender thought to be headed for a European bailout, in a move that would protect junior creditors, Bloomberg reports. Does Spain have enough cash?

Greece announced plans to slash public sector wages, pensions and social spending to find the savings needed to satisfy European rescuers.

The unemployment rate in the eurozone rose to a record 11.3 percent in July.

Nobody knows anything about investing, according to an SEC study on financial literacy, and so leave the stock-picking to the experts, writes Kevin Roose.

Last week, Citigroup chief executive officer went around telling everyone (read: The Financial Times and an audience in Singapore) that Citigroup didn't need to be broken up, as former Citi CEO Sandy Weill had argued last month. Mr. Pandit's media tour continued yesterday: Regulators telling banks which products they can sell undermines financial stability, somehow, he told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Occupy Central protesters in Hong Kong face a legal deadline to leave HSBC headquarters, where the group has been protesting for 10 months, according to Bloomberg.

London-based investment bankers would rather work in Singapore than London or New York, according to a survey conducted by recruitment firm Astbury Marsden; 60 percent of those surveyed expect the Asia-Pacific region to be the world's largest financial center in 10 years.

Some European bankers are being asked to watch what they say at the bar.

Spain is expected to tap about $75 billion in rescue funding, about 60 percent of the facility approved by European finance ministers last month, The New York Times reports.

Blackstone adds another name to its succession plan; CEO Steve Schwarzman still expected to "die at his desk."

The Times takes a closer look at Luis A. Aguilar, the SEC commission who scuttled the agency's attempts to impose new rules on money market funds.

Nomura is getting ready to slash jobs in equities and investment banking, according to Reuters.

Deutsche Bank introduced rules that allow it to claw back shares bestowed on employees in return for unvested stock awarded by their previous employer, the Financial Times reports. Other banks may follow suit.

A producer for The Wolf of Wall Street, which stars Leonard DiCaprio as a crooked stockbroker, is suing the film's production company for reducing her role behind the scenes, The New York Post reports.

Chinese investors are buying up Bordeaux vineyards.

Day-trading settlement: The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is expected to enter a settlement today with Swift Trade founder Peter Beck, and The Wall Street Journal as a long and excellent piece on the Hungarian-born entrepreneur's global operations. Mr. Beck founded Swift in 1998 after reading about internet trading on an airplane; By 2008, the network employed about 4,000 traders in places like Romania, China and Nicaragua, where the firm could hire on the cheap. Swift also took an aggressive stance towards the law, failing to create a supervisory structure, creating an atmosphere in which traders reportedly manipulated prices.

Post-whale world: The type of hedge fund that profited on JPMorgan's $5.8 billion trading loss in credit derivatives are looking attractive, Reuters reports, as investors seek less volatile investments. The obvious question (which probably has an obvious answer) is whether the credit funds are more stable, or just found themselves in the right place to take advantage of the trader known as the London Whale.

Whither Europe: Deutsche Bank blamed a 46 percent drop in a second-quarter earnings on the European debt crisis. BBVA said net income fell 58 percent, as Spain's real estate crisis weighed on earnings. Things may be getting worse: the bank will set aside more than 3 billion euros against souring real estate loans in the second half of the year, after provisioning 1.43 billion euros in the first six months. Greece is running out of cash to pay everyday expenses such as police department salaries and pension disbursements. Unemployment in the eurozone rose to 11.2 percent.

Tale of the tiger (cub): As a student at the University of Virginia, John Gerson talked his way into an internship at Julian Robertson's Tiger Management. Then joined John A. Griffin when the former Tiger deputy founded Blue Ridge Capital. Now Mr. Gerson, 37, has raised $1.2 billion to found a fund of his own, Falcon Edge Capital.

Fall guy? As Royal Bank of Scotland negotiates a Libor settlement with authorities investigating the bid-rigging matter, CEO Stephen Hester may be forced to leave his job ahead of plans.

Taking medicine: Nomura Holdings, Japan's biggest brokerage, faces unspecified penalties after regulators recommended that the firm be disciplined after employees participated in insider trading schemes by leaking information about public offerings.

Soccer riches: Manchester United set a range of $16 to $20 a share in updated documents describing its initial public offering; at a midpoint of $18 a share, the offering would value the British soccer club at $2.95 billion.

Market crash: The bottom is falling out of the market for used private jets, according to The New York Post, hitting the one percent in their wallets.

Kohlberg director out: Christopher Lacovara, one of two managing directors at Kohlberg & Co., the private equity firm founded by Jerome Kohlberg, has left the firm to pursue other opportunities. Kohlberg & Co. was founded by Jerome Kohlberg, who also co-founded buyout giant KKR.

Simple Sandy: Former Citigroup chairman and CEO Sandy Weill went on CNBC yesterday and said we'd all be better off if banks split off their investment banking units. That was a little like Joe Camel swearing off cigarettes, a friend quipped, for Mr. Weill was the driving force behind the creation of the "supermarket" banking model in the 1980s and 1990s. But the banking boss has been simplifying his entire life lately, selling off his penthouse at 15 Central Park West last year, and spending more time in California. "I think that simpler is better. But my life is still not very simple," Mr. Weill told CNBC's Robert Frank.

Drab banking: "There's no sexiness, there's no fun, there's no intellectual intrigue" in banking these days, a former Credit Suisse and Bear Stearns trader tells Bloomberg.

Geithner didn't know...About the "specific conversation" in which a Barclays employ told the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that the British lender wasn't posting an honest Libor rate as early as 2008. Mr. Geithner, who headed the New York Fed at the time and is now Treasury secretary, told the House Financial Services Committee yesterday that he thought the FRBNY took appropriate action by sharing its Libor-related concerns with U.S. and U.K. regulators.

New odds on Grexit: Citigroup economists hung a 90 percent chance on Greece leaving the euro in the next 12 to 18 months.

Pain in Spain: Banco Santander, Spain's largest lender, said profit fell 93 percent in the second quarter as the bank set aside more cash to offset soured loans.

Libor-ated: Employees at Lloyds Banking Group have received subpoenas as parts of investigations by regulators across the globe into the manipulation of Libor and other interbank lending rates, the company said yesterday in announcing second-quarter earnings. Until those investigations have run their course, the bank doesn't see a need to set aside funds to settle civil lawsuits arising from the matter, executive George Culmer told investors on a conference call.

Look out below: Zynga plummeted 37 percent in trading after the close of New York markets yesterday, as the firm announced disappointing second-quarter results. Key Zynga partner Facebook announces earnings today.

Tax hole: The official in charge of multinational effort to tax offshore accounts questioned a report released last week that rich individuals are hiding as much as $32 trillion. "I was wondering where the equivalent of 450 Bill Gates are hiding from everyone," OECD official Pascal Saint-Armans told Reuters.

Now a wry Nomura Holdings shareholder has offered a new spin on the debate. Japanese investors who have held at least 30,000 shares in a company for at least 6 months are allowed to submit proposals for vote at annual shareholder meetings, and this year some anonymous rogue offered Nomura 100 suggestions, including that the investment bank change its name to “Yasai Holdings," or roughly translated, "Vegetable Bank."

Nomura deemed most of the proposals unfit for vote, but this pearl was among 18 to find it's way onto the proxy statement:

Nomura's board opposed the proposal. In other news, Nomura raised executive pay 79 percent last fiscal year, even as net income plunged 60 percent and shares reached their lowest levels in 37 years. Shareholders will vote on all 18 of the oddball proposals on June 27.

Probably not.

Still, it’s possible to lose track of just how many deals Fried Frank partner Meyer Last inked in 2011. Call it the Jon Mechanic effect.

Meyer Last. (Photo by Kiki Conway)

Mr. Mechanic, the head of Fried Frank’s real estate practice, is a staple of industry social and speaking events as well as host of the firm’s annual holiday party, one of real estate’s biggest gatherings of the year.

On top of it, Mr. Mechanic is often the attorney on the city’s largest leasing and sales deals. As a result, he has become the city’s most recognized real estate lawyer and, in a business where brokers and landlords usually get the credit for arranging transactions anyway, tends to overshadow the rest of his ilk.

“Jon is this incredible combination between being a brilliant marketer for the firm and also an exceptional lawyer. Very few really can combine both the way he does,” Mr. Last said. There isn’t an ounce of rivalry in the way Mr. Last speaks of his colleague; he’s genuinely in awe.

After a year like 2011, however, Mr. Last may give Mr. Mechanic a run for his money. While Mr. Mechanic was one of the lead attorneys on the year’s biggest and most prestigious leasing transaction, Condé Nast’s one-million-plus-square-foot deal at 1 World Trade Center, Mr. Last has tallied his own dizzying array of high-stakes deals.

He represented the landlord George Comfort & Sons in its 900,000-square-foot lease with the Japanese financial company Nomura at Worldwide Plaza. He also was the attorney for Brookfield Properties, one of Fried Frank’s biggest clients, in its 750,000-plus-square-foot renewal at the World Financial Center with Bank of America.

The two deals caused something of an awkward situation for Mr. Last.

Nomura was one of the World Financial Center’s largest tenants and for a time Brookfield was competing fiercely with George Comfort & Sons to hold onto the company. So while Mr. Last was negotiating to keep Bank of America on the one hand, he was simultaneously arranging to have Nomura go elsewhere.

Such is the balancing act of being one of the city’s most successful real estate attorneys.

“Needless to say, I never mentioned the word Nomura during the Bank of America talks,” Mr. Last said. “Brookfield is an incredibly sophisticated owner and they’re able to recognize that I’m not the one deciding where Nomura is going. I’m working for my client. In theory sometimes every attorney has to watch out for conflicts of interest. Usually my connections facilitate deals though.”

Mr. Last said he wasn’t even sure the Nomura deal was going to go through until only days before the lease was signed during the summer—a revelation that shows just how uncertain the world of big-time dealmaking can actually be. Though it takes many months to arrive at a deal, last-minute decisions, even whims, can unwind or seal even the most carefully planned transactions.

George Comfort & Sons, Mr. Last said, was also in serious negotiations with another tenant, which, though smaller than Nomura, was in talks to do a deal for higher rents.

“The final week, the week before the Nomura lease was done, I would have guessed the other deal,” Mr. Last said. “We had a meeting with Nomura on a Sunday. All day we met and were able to close a lot of the points and get it near completion and Peter Duncan [George Comfort’s chief executive] decided to go with it.”
Mr. Last sat with The Commercial Observer at the company’s Midtown conference center high in the Seagrams Building, one of Midtown’s most exclusive towers. The space is small, purposely so, to assure that the location is strictly a place for meetings and doesn’t evolve into something more akin to a small Midtown branch where attorneys begin to regularly hang their hats. Fried Frank’s main offices are downtown, in 1 New York Plaza, an office building owned by Brookfield Properties.

“We felt like it was important to be downtown, that if we moved to Midtown, we probably wouldn’t come to lower Manhattan as much,” Mr. Last said.

There’s no denying the building’s elegance. Even the original amber-tone lights, hardly within the spectrum of a typical office environment but that by landmark regulations must be left untouched near the building’s windows so that they continue to produce the building’s signature bronze glow, have a charm.
“I’ve grown to love the building,” Mr. Last said. “It’s a calm environment, the lobby, the way the building is in the middle of everything but at once also removed because of the plaza area.”

Mr. Last came to Fried Frank in the 1980s. By the 1990s he was made a partner. Large leases are nothing new to him. Last year probably wasn’t even his biggest year. Years ago he arranged a million-plus-square-foot deal to have Standard & Poor’s take space at 55 Water Street, which, at a staggering 3.8 million square feet, is the city’s largest office property. He also worked on the deal to have Citibank sell 1 Court Square, the large office building it owned in Long Island City, and lease back about 1.4 million square feet of space there.

Still, if 2011 wasn’t the biggest, it missed out only by a hair and it easily could have been even bigger. Mr. Last represented the Swiss bank UBS in its talks to take 900,000 or more square feet at the World Trade Center. The deal would have anchored a whole new tower at the site, 3 World Trade Center, and would have allowed the bank to relocate staff there from Stamford, Conn. The lease was in talks for months, but when the European debt crisis boiled over, the bank eventually canceled the plan.

Mr. Last said it wasn’t hard juggling all the deals during the year.

“When you’re in the middle of it, it’s adrenaline, the deals are exciting and when you’re in the thick of negotiating them, there’s definitely that adrenaline factor,” Mr. Last said. “I can get going a lot quicker on three hours sleep during an exciting period than on a full night if there’s not much going on.”

His pipeline doesn’t show signs of flagging. Already, in the opening days of  2012, he helped arrange a deal in China outside of Shanghai, representing the New York-based development company Tishman Speyer in a 600,000-square-foot lease to have the apparel giant Nike anchor a new office complex Tishman is going to be build in the area.

“To me there is nothing more fun than working on development deals,” Mr. Last said. “You’re transforming an empty hole in the ground into a new structure or piece of infrastructure. They’re always the most interesting deals.”

dgeiger@observer.com