Europe may already have passed its biggest stress test. The euro has rallied 8 percent from a four-year low last month. Greece, Spain and Portugal have managed to sell 50 billion euros ($64 billion) of debt since May 10 when the need to save the single currency forced finance ministers to create a nearly $1 [...]

debt, Euro, greece, IMF, Risk Management, stress test Hide

Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s $550 million settlement with U.S. regulators yesterday will benefit the firm by ending three months of uncertainty at an affordable price. Now the rest of Wall Street begins calculating the cost. Investors welcomed the deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying the company won key points: The cost was below [...]

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The U.S. House of Representatives approved the financial-overhaul bill, moving a step closer to enacting the broadest rewrite of Wall Street rules since the Great Depression. The House voted 237-192 in favor of the bill. It also will have to be approved by the Senate, which delayed action until after the weeklong July 4 recess, [...]

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Wall Street’s biggest firms are considering the suitability of selling opaque financial products to governments, endowments and not-for-profit institutions after the contracts magnified credit-market losses that plunged the U.S. into a recession. “There is no distinction among very different groups of investors, and this is where things might change,” said Dino Kos, a managing director [...]

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“Questions have been raised that go to the heart of this institution’s most fundamental value: how we treat our clients.” — Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’s C.E.O., at the firm’s annual meeting in May As the housing crisis mounted in early 2007, Goldman Sachs was busy selling risky, mortgage-related securities issued by its longtime client, [...]

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Money markets and the cost of protecting bank bonds from losses show investors are concerned the almost $1 trillion rescue plan announced by European leaders may not be enough to contain the region’s sovereign debt crisis. The Markit iTraxx Financial Index of credit-default swaps on 20 European banks was last at 130.5 basis points compared [...]

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Investor Marc Faber said China’s economy will slow and possibly “crash” within a year as declines in stock and commodity prices signal the nation’s property bubble is set to burst. The Shanghai Composite Index has failed to regain its 2009 high while industrial commodities and shares of Australian resource exporters are acting “heavy,” Faber said. The opening [...]

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Have you ever wondered why Chinese monetary policy always increases rates by 18 or 27 bps? An article by Bloomberg in May 2007 clears the air on this. The People’s Bank of China today raised its one-year benchmark lending rate by 0.18 percentage point and its one-year depositrate by 0.27 percentage point. Why 18 or 27 [...]

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Within days — perhaps even hours — of news that Goldman Sachs (GS.N) was facing fraud charges from U.S. regulators, rivals seized on a chance to elbow in front of Wall Street’s most profitable bank. DEALS Investment bankers have been lobbying executives at state-owned Agricultural Bank of China and pushing officials in Beijing to drop [...]

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Former Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer Charles O. “Chuck” Prince said he wasn’t aware of the mortgage-related securities that caused the bank’s biggest losses until the financial crisis struck. Neither was Robert Rubin, the former U.S. Treasury secretary who headed the bank’s executive committee in the decade leading up to the crisis, he said at a hearing today [...]

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