- Obama’s Bank Tax Seeks $90 Billion to Repay Bailout
- US Rep Frank: Determined To Look Into Wall Street Pay
- Geithner faces demand for AIG phone records
- Fed’s Dudley Defends AIG Bailout
- Top bankers forced on to the defensive
- Wall Street bankers on defensive in grilling over financial crisis
- Panel Rips Wall Street Titans
- Bank of America May Trim Cash Part of Bonuses to 15%
- Hedge funds seen losing staff to the SEC: survey
- Inquiry Panel’s Head Is Known as a Scrapper
- Foreclosures May Rise to Record 3 Million U.S. Homes This Year
- LaBranche to sell NYSE specialist unit to Barclays
- Crackdown on Unsupervised Stock Trades May Spur More Brokerages
Obama’s Bank Tax Seeks $90 Billion to Repay Bailout – NY Times
President Obama plans to call on Thursday for taxing about 50 big banks and major financial institutions for at least the next decade to recoup all taxpayer losses from the bailout of Wall Street.
The tax on banks, insurance companies and brokerages with more than $50 billion in assets would start after June 30 and seek to collect $90 billion over 10 years, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters late Wednesday……
US Rep Frank: Determined To Look Into Wall Street Pay – Wall Street Journal
Congress is well within its rights to look further into the “excessive” pay that executives at financial companies receive, House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) said Wednesday.
“There is a legitimate concern about the growth of compensation for people in the financial industry in the country as a whole,” Frank said.
In the wake of the global financial meltdown over the last 18 months, public outrage has been sparked by the rapid return to generous compensation paid to bank executives, especially when the jobless rate across the country stands at 10%…..
Geithner faces demand for AIG phone records – Financial Times
The House oversight committee has submitted a legal demand for any phone records and e-mails from Tim Geithner that discuss payments from the New York Federal Reserve to AIG’s counterparties.
Republicans on the committee are attempting to link the Treasury secretary to the bail-out of AIG’s counterparties – a list headed by Société Générale and Goldman Sachs – which were made while Mr Geithner was president of the New York Fed…..
Fed’s Dudley Defends AIG Bailout – Wall Street Journal
The U.S. government, by preventing American International Group Inc. from going into bankruptcy, protected “all the counterparties of the firm,” William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in an interview with the Public Broadcasting Service.
“We didn’t have the ability to pick and choose who was going to lose money on AIG” when the insurer was rescued, Mr. Dudley said on PBS’s Nightly Business Report when asked whether the AIG rescue could be characterized as a back-door bailout for other players…..
Top bankers forced on to the defensive – Financial Times
Four of Wall Street’s top executives offered some contrition and a solid defence of their actions as the head of an inquiry promised to use wide-ranging powers to establish the causes of the financial crisis and pursue any wrongdoing.
Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America maintained a united front as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, headed by Phil Angelides, probed the bail-out of AIG, risk management and executive compensation……
Wall Street bankers on defensive in grilling over financial crisis – Financial Times
Wall Street’s top executives were grilled by a new commission yesterday on whether their pay, risk management and trading were responsible for a financial crisis that put millions out of work.
Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, bore the brunt of questions from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, whose chairman said he would use sweeping legal powers to unearth causes of the financial system’s near-collapse and punish any wrongdoing.
“We are after the truth . . . the hard facts . . . we’ll use our subpoena power as needed. And if we find wrongdoing, we’ll refer it to the proper authorities,” said Phil Angelides, who compared the FCIC, created by Congress, to the landmark 1930s’ Pecora hearings into the Great Depression……
Panel Rips Wall Street Titans – Wall Street Journal
Comparing Wall Street titans to shady car salesmen, a committee investigating the financial crisis grilled the nation’s top bankers Wednesday in the latest example of Washington’s smoldering anger at an industry many there feel hasn’t atoned for its role in the slump.
“It sounds to me a little bit like selling a car with faulty brakes, and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars,” said former California state Treasurer Phil Angelides, chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, while questioning the chief executive of Goldman Sachs Group Inc……
Bank of America May Trim Cash Part of Bonuses to 15% – Bloomberg
Bank of America Corp., the biggest U.S. lender, plans to cut the cash component of investment bankers’ bonuses to about 15 percent as politicians seek to rein in the payouts, four people familiar with matter said.
Senior bankers will get 5 percent to 15 percent of their 2010 bonus in cash, compared with about 50 percent at Bank of America last year, said the people, who declined to be identified because the talks are private. Junior bankers may get 25 percent of their bonus in cash, two of the people said. The rest will be paid in shares and cash over time depending on the stock’s performance, the people said…….
Hedge funds seen losing staff to the SEC: survey – Reuters
U.S. hedge funds last year lost staff to endowments, sovereign wealth funds and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the trend is likely to continue in 2010, according to a survey by executive recruiter Heidrick & Struggles International Inc.
Veteran hedge fund and markets professionals are also in demand at the SEC, where a promise of increasing government enforcement and the creation of a new Division of Risk, Strategy, and Financial Innovation are leading to new hires, according to the survey.
Heidrick & Struggles surveyed more than 400 portfolio managers and studied more than 100 hedge fund firms for its report, released on Wednesday…..
Inquiry Panel’s Head Is Known as a Scrapper – Wall Street Journal
Phil Angelides, head of the commission digging into causes of the 2008 financial crisis, has a reputation as a political pit bull.
During his eight-year tenure as California treasurer, he used the state’s huge public pension funds to force shake-ups on corporate boards. He joined with New York and other states in pushing for caps on executive pay and pressuring companies to make more socially responsible decisions. He led a movement to divest from firms doing business in Sudan and other countries with questionable human-rights records…..
Mr. Angelides says he wants “to shed light, not heat,” but he also wants to channel public outrage over Wall Street practices. The nation’s top bankers, he says, have yet to fully acknowledge—much less atone for—actions that helped precipitate the crisis…..
Foreclosures May Rise to Record 3 Million U.S. Homes This Year – Bloomberg
A record 3 million U.S. homes will be repossessed by lenders this year as high unemployment and depressed home values leave borrowers unable to make their house payment or sell, according to a RealtyTrac Inc. forecast.
Last year there were 2.82 million foreclosures, the most since RealtyTrac began compiling data in 2005. More than 4.5 million filings are expected this year, including default or auction notices and bank seizures, said Rick Sharga, senior vice president for the Irvine, California-based seller of default data and forecasts. There were 3.96 million filings in 2009……
LaBranche to sell NYSE specialist unit to Barclays – Reuters
LaBranche & Co Inc (LAB.N) said on Wednesday it agreed to sell its New York Stock Exchange specialist business to Barclays Plc (BARC.L) for $25 million in cash, reflecting the difficulties standalone market makers face in a shrinking industry…..
Crackdown on Unsupervised Stock Trades May Spur More Brokerages – Bloomberg
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s plan to ensure all orders sent to U.S. exchanges are subject to risk controls may prompt high-speed trading firms to convert into broker-dealers.
Commissioners voted yesterday to ban brokerages from giving clients unsupervised access to stock markets, a practice that Aite Group LLC says accounts for two of every five shares that change hands in the U.S. SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said so- called naked sponsored access, in which customers bypass the controls of brokers and reach exchanges directly, may expose the market and firms that offer the service to too much risk…..
Tags: AIG, Bank of America, Banks, Barack Obama, Barney Frank, Bonuses, Compensations, Foreclosures, Hedge funds, Politics, Real Estate, SEC, Taxes, Tim Geithner
