tagged w/ Investors
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We need hearings, a committe (and the whole dilema broadcast so the American people can see what happened, why it happened and how to not have it happen again-my imput).
This bailout is not fair.
It is too secret.
It doesn't consider the long-term effects a rush to judgment now will have.
I counted 176 signatures. We need hearings, a committe (and the whole dilema broadcast so the American people... more
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Microsoft has unveiled plans to spend $40bn (£22bn) buying back its shares from investors, the biggest single buy-back plan in history.
Analysts say the move is an attempt by the software giant to use its spare cash to prop up its share price which has fallen by almost 30% this year.
Hewlett-Packard and Nike have also announced major buy-back programmes.
The personal computer-maker will buy back $8bn of shares, while Nike's plan is worth $5bn.
'Attractive prices'
Microsoft said the buy-back plan showed its "confidence in the long-term growth of the company and our commitment to returning capital to our shareholders."
Industry watchers have said Microsoft will be hoping the plan will revive its share price which has declined this year, partly due to its failed $47.5bn (£26.3bn) bid to buy the internet portal Yahoo.
"I'm impressed," said Michael Holland of the deals. He oversees $4bn (£2.2bn) as chairman and founder of Holland & Co in New York.
"When companies have come in to buy their own stock subsequent to a financial crisis, they've bought at attractive prices and it's been a good use of liquidity," Mr Holland told Bloomberg News.
At the end of June this year, the company was sitting on a cash mountain of $23.7bn and has never been in debt in its 33-year history.
The BBC's technology reporter Maggie Shiels said there was little doubt Microsoft had to do something because it simply had too much cash lying on its books following the company's failed attempt to buy either all or part of Yahoo.
Dealogic said the new buy-back, which will run until 2013, was the largest single announced share-buyback in history.
It follows a previous 2004 plan which started as a $30bn project and was later boosted by another $10bn.
'Volatile market'
HP said its board approved an $8bn repurchase following a previous programme which started in November. About $3bn (£1.6bn) remains from that authorisation.
The firm said it gave the go-ahead to the share buy-back to counteract the effect employee stock plans have on ownership percentages.
Just last week the PC-maker announced it was cutting 24,600 jobs in the wake of its acquisition of Electronic Data Systems Corp.
Meanwhile Nike's plan to buy back $5bn of shares over the next four years has been welcomed by Standard & Poor's Equity Research as providing "support to the shares in a volatile market."
Share buy-backs peaked in the third quarter of 2007 at $172bn according to Standard & Poor's senior index analyst Howard Silverblatt. The figure for the first quarter of this year is $113.9bn.
Microsoft has unveiled plans to spend $40bn (£22bn) buying back its shares from... more
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It's all about confidence, stupid. Every financial system depends on trust. People have to believe that the institutions they deal with will perform as expected. We are in a crisis because financial managers -- the people who run banks, investment banks, hedge funds -- have lost that trust. Banks recoil from lending to each other; investors retreat. The ultimate horror is when everyone wants to sell and no one wants to buy. Paulson's plan aims to avoid that calamityIt's all about confidence, stupid. Every financial system depends on trust.... more
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Government has throughout U.S. history stepped in, there are some lessons
The stock market plummets, investors pull out money and loans dry up, triggering global financial turmoil. Enter the government, buying up bad mortgages and other problem assets.
This scenario from the 1930s sounds eerily current, in part because the Bush administration is taking pages from the playbooks Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt used to unfreeze credit and keep Americans from losing their homes three-quarters of a century ago.
From the Great Depression to the Chrysler bailout in 1979 to the savings and loan crisis that cost taxpayers $125 billion in the 1990s, the current administration has many government interventions from which to learn. If the history of previous bailouts holds any single lesson, however, it's that the outcomes are unpredictable and the problems will take years to work out.
Government has throughout U.S. history stepped in, there are some lessons
The stock... more
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Whipsaw losses and gains may continue as markets digest possible bailout
The Dow Jones industrial average may be almost exactly where it was a week ago, but Wall Street is a completely different place.
In a matter of days, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. went into bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch & Co. was snapped up by Bank of America Corp. and the insurer American International Group Inc. was bailed out by the government. One big mutual fund broke the buck, and another was shut down.
And now, the government is planning to assume banks' risky assets.
Whipsaw losses and gains may continue as markets digest possible bailout
The Dow... more
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A financial crisis being described as the worst since the Great Depression has left investors thinking far beyond the realm of whether it’s time to buy or sell.
No matter how close they are to retirement, many are considering getting out of the stock market entirely by shifting to cash or even gold, believing the market is so shaky they’re willing to take the potential tax and inflation erosion they’ll suffer from a quick pullout.
Others are staying in, even after this year’s 14 percent decline to date in the Dow Jones industrial average has eaten away at what they had thought were safe portfolios
A financial crisis being described as the worst since the Great Depression has left... more
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Unemployment is at a five-year high. Financial firms that withstood the Great Depression are failing. Congress and a lame-duck president are gridlocked. So when John McCain declared that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," it drew ridicule from Democrat Barack Obama.
McCain later toned down his remarks, but his observation reflected a debate among analysts and policymakers about the economy's underlying health. Plenty of them think he's right.
Polls show a majority of voters put the economy as their No. 1 concern with seven weeks to go until the presidential election. Many economists believe we are now in a recession. Signs of economic distress are everywhere as housing prices continue to fall and the nation's financial system is pounded by a series of shocks, including the Federal Reserve's stunning $85 billion takeover of insurance giant AIG Tuesday evening.
Unemployment is at a five-year high. Financial firms that withstood the Great... more
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The Feds okay a request by the LaSt two major U.S. investment banks (Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) to change their status to "bank holding companies".
The Feds okay a request by the LaSt two major U.S. investment banks (Goldman Sachs... more
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major central banks banded together on Thursday to inject as much as $180 billion into money markets in a bid to stave off the growing global financial crisis.
The Federal Reserve joined with the European Central Bank, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank to pump more short-term dollar liquidity into the financial system.
major central banks banded together on Thursday to inject as much as $180 billion into... more
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Dow drops more than 500 points or 4.5 % as investors panic after Lehman Brothers files for chapter 11.
US stocks were slammed on Monday after a stunning upheaval on the Wall Street landscape. The Dow Jones fell more than 504 points or 4.42 percent, the largest one-day drop since September 2001. This as investors reacted badly to a shake-up of the financial industry that took out two storied names: Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co. Lehman Brothers, which had 60 billion US dollars in soured real-estate holdings, filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition in court after attempts to rescue the 158-year-old firm failed. Employees started to clean out their offices in New York on Sunday night. About 26000 Lehman Brothers employees lost their jobs worldwide. Another Wall St. icon Merrill Lynch was snapped up by Bank of America in a 50 billion dollar all-stock transaction in what was essentially a forced sale. Merrill Lynch was said to have 80-plus billion dollars of risky asset exposures. The disappearance of the two firms could mean the loss of up to 50,000 jobs in the financial sector. That industry has already lost 100,000 jobs since the start of the credit crisis a little more than a year ago.
Doug Henwood is the founder and editor of the Left Business Observer.Dow drops more than 500 points or 4.5 % as investors panic after Lehman Brothers files... more
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Treat someone special with the ultimate gift, a Hotel Room in a Box. Their very own luxury hotel room in London where they can stay when they want and make money when they don't!
Luxury hotel rooms are available in The City, Bayswater and Notting Hill, all perfectly gift wrapped. Prices start from £291,000
Under the GuestInvest model, investors can buy a room in a hotel, stay there for up to 52 nights a year and receive a return on their investment by allowing the hotel to let the room out for the remainder of the year.Treat someone special with the ultimate gift, a Hotel Room in a Box. Their very own... more
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"An entrepreneur stricken with cancer sets up firm to develop 'virtual' biotechs:
Jay M. Tenenbaum became a multimillionaire in the Internet boom of the late 1990s. But it wasn't until he was diagnosed with a lethal cancer that he found his calling as an Internet entrepreneur.
Dr. Tenenbaum learned in 1998 that he had melanoma, the most serious kind of skin cancer. He underwent surgery and took an experimental vaccine for a year. Then, nearly five years ago, the cancer returned, having spread to his liver. "That's when I started looking at my mortality seriously," says the 65-year-old from Portola Valley, Calif.
Frustrated with his treatment options, Dr. Tenenbaum began investigating other potential therapies. He found dozens of patient-advocacy organizations dedicated to melanoma that raised money and supported scientific research. They "all had good ideas," he says, "but no one had put the different pieces together in the right way that would let them make progress in finding a drug in the lifetime of a patient."
So he tapped his own Internet savvy -- and his connections -- to create a company aimed at helping patients develop new therapies faster and cheaper for less common diseases, like melanoma, that often don't attract major pharmaceutical company research funding. He set up his new company, called CollabRx, with $2 million he had available and is trying to raise $3 million more from family, friends and private investors.
Dr. Tenenbaum's idea taps into the recent phenomenon of patient-supported research -- a trend largely driven by people wealthy enough to help fund drug-discovery projects and who are affected by rare or overlooked diseases...."
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Quite an interesting man. Usually I rail on people of wealth but it's not often we get to see a man so in touch with the fragility of life that he moves to improve conditions, not only for himself, but for others also. I'm sure we could all learn a lot from him, knowing that collectively, together, we have the best chances to make sincerely meaningful differences and change in this life, here and now. I pray that the resolve of active compassion from many many many people rich and poor meet this man's venerable efforts to meaningful success--even if it isn't (may God forbid) evident by present or immediate accounts.
Much hope and grateful thanks to and for Dr. Tenebaum for taking the power back for the people who need it most... "An entrepreneur stricken with cancer sets up firm to develop 'virtual'... more
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echoz
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added this
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3 years ago
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Citigroup has become the latest big bank to quell Wall Street's worries about a financial sector implosion, posting a $2.5 billion second-quarter loss that was smaller than expected.
Citi rose nearly 9 percent Friday and helped lift other financial stocks, having joined JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. in convincing investors that the prognosis for the sector, while gloomy, may not be as dire as the market feared.
But it's hard to get too enthusiastic about clearing a low bar. It was Citi's third straight quarterly loss and neither JPMorgan nor Wells Fargo managed to notch a profit gain compared to last year. Meanwhile, the brokerage Merrill Lynch & Co. reported a wider-than-expected quarterly loss. And next week, Wachovia Corp. and Washington Mutual Inc. are anticipated to reveal losses, too, with Bank of America Corp. expected to report a steep profit decline.
"I don't think anyone's breathing too easily right now," said Prakash Shimpi, who works in the risk management practice at Towers Perrin. Determining the dollar value of certain assets backed by debt is still a tricky process, he said, even a year after the crisis began.
Citigroup, the nation's largest banking company by assets, lost the equivalent of 54 cents per share in the April-June period. In the same timeframe last year, the bank earned $6.23 billion, or $1.24 per share.
The shortfall was tamer than the 66-cent-per-share loss that analysts, on average, were expecting, according to Thomson Financial.
Citigroup Inc.'s securities and banking division wrote down the value of its assets by $7.2 billion, before taxes, and an asset revaluation cost its consumer lending business $745 million. Those write-downs totaling about $8 billion are significantly lower than write-downs taken in the first quarter and in last year's fourth quarter.
However, credit costs jumped to $7.2 billion as more consumers defaulted on their loans — implying that while losses in the credit markets are decelerating, losses from actual defaults in Citigroup's mortgages, home-equity loans, auto loans and credit card lines are mounting. The $7.2 billion in credit costs included $4.4 billion in credit losses and a $2.5 billion charge to bulk up reserves for future loan losses.Citigroup has become the latest big bank to quell Wall Street's worries about a... more
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kushan
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added this
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3 years ago
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