Entries from Chemicals & The Economy tagged with 'Merrill Lynch'
LyondellBasell may be largest-ever bankruptcy
The financial fallout from the Lyondell (LBI) bankruptcy continues, as the banks slowly begin to acknowledge their losses. According to Bloomberg, RBS has taken a $1.47bn hit, Citigroup $1.4bn, and Goldman Sachs $850m. UBS are also believed to have lost...
And then there were none
20 years of investment banking as an independent activity came to an end on Wall Street last night. Bear Stearns was the first to go in March, rescued by JPMorgan. Last week Lehman failed, and Merrill Lynch sold itself to...
Lehman goes bust, Merrill rescued
The blog has never liked disaster movies, but it was quite a weekend for those who do. First, there was the hurricane hitting Houston and Texas. I used to live in Houston, and watching the pictures of the damage, could...
$514bn and counting
There seems no end to the losses being revealed by the world's major banks. The total has now reached $514bn. 110 banks and investment firms have now posted writedowns. CitiGroup, the largest US bank, tops the list with $55.1bn of...
Merrill cuts back on private jets
I suppose when an industry has lost $400bn in a year, some sacrifices have to be made. In May, I documented how Deutsche Bank was no longer approving expense claims for 'adult entertainment'. Well, things have got worse since then,...
Deutsche Bank ends porn channel expenses
Spare a thought for the plight of the world’s investment bankers. According to the Financial Times, some minor cutbacks are finally taking place in the extravagant lifestyle to which they have come accustomed: • UBS, having lost $11bn in Q1,...
IMF identifies ‘serious slowdown’
The credit crunch and associated debt crisis has elicited an unprecedented response from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Today, the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kohn, told the Financial Times that the new IMF economic forecasts would ‘show a serious...
Will lower interest rates help?
A reader has kindly sent me an interesting analysis from Richard Bernstein, Chief Investment Strategist at Merrill Lynch (ML)*. He argues that ‘the Fed can lower interest rates quite a lot, but they will likely have minimal impact on the...
The subprime black hole
Black holes are an apparently empty region of space, with the power to destroy anything that comes too close. The US subprime crisis seems to be turning into their financial equivalent. It never seems to get resolved. It just...
Subprime claims its first casualties
Back at the end of August, I suggested that we had only reached the end of Phase1 of the credit crunch. I feared that it had the potential to get much worse, and to damage the ‘real economy’ where all...
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