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 [...]

goldman, investments, Risk Management, structured products, US Hide

European banking shares indicate a Greek debt default may be just a matter of time. Investors have already pushed down financial stocks enough to imply the “erosion” in book value that may result from losses tied to a sovereign debt restructuring, said Dirk Hoffmann-Becking, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in London. A Bloomberg index of [...]

debt, Euro Zone, global markets, greece, investments, Portugal Hide

The U.S. has supplanted China and Brazil as the most attractive market for investors as confidence in the global economic recovery wanes in the wake of the Greek debt crisis. Investors are putting their money on President Barack Obama’s stewardship of the U.S. economy even as his job-approval rating has declined, according to a global quarterly [...]

bonds, China, Euro, investments, oil, stock market, US Hide

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 [...]

goldman, investment banks, investments, structured products, subprime, US Hide

As an investment, gold has never been more popular. And, for individual investors, that’s part of the problem. Gold spot prices hit a record of $1,243.10 per ounce in Comex trading on May 12 before slipping $13.90, or 1.1 percent, to $1,230.10 on May 13. In the past three years, the precious metal is up [...]

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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 [...]

bubble, China, housing, Interest rates, investments, reserves, stock market Hide

LONDON: US insurance giant AIG has agreed to sell its Asian arm, AIA, to British insurer Prudential for around US$35 billion, a source close to the deal said. American International Group (AIG), which received a huge taxpayer bailout to stave off collapse during the financial crisis, had been persuaded to let Prudential buy its Asian [...]

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Google Inc. said it may spend as much as “hundreds of millions” of dollars on an experimental broadband service that offers Internet speeds 100 times faster than current networks. The cost of the test project, announced this month, isn’t known and will depend on demographics, the lay of the land and the number of households [...]

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Royal Bank of Scotland’s deal for ABN Amro is acknowledged as a shocker. But is it the worst ever? Mathieu Robbins counts down the top ten bad deals. Tuesday, 20 January 2009 Is Royal Bank of Scotland’s horrendously damaging acquisition of Dutch rival ABN Amro in 2007 the worst ever M&A deal? According to academics, [...]

financial scandals, investment banks, investments, M&A Hide

The January jobs report could turn the tide for markets Friday, but traders say there’s a lingering global risk aversion that won’t easily fade away. The government’s employment report was supposed to have been the story of the week. That was until markets around the globe started focusing on the idea that sovereign debt risk [...]

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