Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A) has just released its 2008 annual report, along with the ever-important letter to shareholders from the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett. Last year was Buffett’s toughest ever. We are…
IberiaBank Corp. (NASDAQ: IBKC) is a small regional bank which we have hardly ever covered. But we wanted to take a chance to outline the community bank. This was not among the community banks…
Whatever stock options Vikram Pandit, his management team and board have are almost certainly worthless now. News that the federal government will own 36% of Citi’s common shares through a complex deal have the…
Citigroup (C) may not have picked up much in its deal with the federal government. It shareholders will get crammed down. Tax payers will own more of Citi, about 36%, which is not necessarily a…
It has begun to occur to the financial industry and the central banks of the G7 and a number of smaller Western European countries that if some of the nations in Eastern Europe default on…
It is a corporate governance issue as much as anything else. Can one shareholder essentially “fire” most of a public company’s board without the approval of other shareholders? That it what the federal government…
Once a quarter, the FDIC does something which seems to have little purpose. It releases its list of “problem” banks. These are institutions which face a high risk of failure because of their balance…
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has released its list of troubled banking institutions. As you would have guessed, it is far from pretty. The FDIC has said that as of the end of Q4…
The Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB) announced this morning that it was “initiating a private debt issuance to certain institutional investors.” The notes have not been registered with the SEC and will not be available…
It seems like a devilishly clever plan. The US government already owns 80% of AIG (AIG). Why not break the company into pieces and let taxpayers own larger chunks of the parts? The plan assumes…
As the US government goes though the process of stress testing banks, it may want to be instructed by the lesson of RBS (RBS) which managed to loss $34 billion last year. The UK…
The latest way for the government to decide what it should do with troubled banks is to put them though what it calls a “stress test”. The criteria that will be used, among others,…
If you look on the surface, it looks like E*TRADE Financial (NASDAQ: ETFC) is still trying to shrink its operations where it can. This week, E*TRADE said it plans to cut its activities in…
The largest systematic example of inertia since the planets began to orbit stars is the US economy. Its gigantic weight makes it hard to turn, either in the direction of expansion or contraction. When…
BlackRock, Inc. (NYSE: BLK) is launching a new fund that is designed to essentially be a vulture in fixed income securities. This is is technically a distressed fund being created to take advantage of…