MER FOUND THE KITCHEN SINK!

and yet the stock has not lost it's closing price from yesterday.....

Roughly three times the forecast loss and it's still green from yesterday...

Gotta admit...they don't even try to hide the props now.

Ciao
MS

Nah... this ain't the kitchen sink. This is that little sink in the tiny bathroom next to the kitchen.

Mo' pain coming.

Anyone else notice EWZ -4%

Goes hand in hand with oil.....

Ciao
MS

Um, well, I closed my COF puts on tuesday when it was $35.

I wonder if I can buy them again with it still over $40.

Nothing like wash rinse, repeat.

As for MER, the rats have been jumping the ship.

I think Blackrock will be glad to find a cheaper relationship for trading and whatnot.

Bought some AHR preferred today, I am a sucker for an 18% divvy.

Especially at the head of the line.
Common can wait.

Someday this war's gonna end...

"I'm sure the CEO's $2 gazillion dollar golden parachute is intact, tho. Always are."

If anything the poor dears will get a little extra money. For all the stress, don't you know.

Makes you wonder, when people talk about bailing out the speculators, is that risk really there anymore? I mean the main wall street banks are losing billions, is that enough of a beat down to deter bad acts in the future?

Probably not knowing human nature, but I kind of wonder what the sweet spot is between the "we must bail them out, for the children's sake!!!" folks and the "we don't need no water" crowd is.

I think a "if the company loses in excess of one billion dollars on your watch, then you lose your pension" clause in an executive contract isn't too much to ask. But I guess that makes me a dirty commie.

MER sold a 20% stake in Bloomberg back to the company for a reported $4.43 billion. This values Bloomberg at about $16-17 billion.

I'd love to see their free cash flow. Are they buying with cash?

Ever see GOOG's balance sheet ? Here's a number the auditor signed off on. This is during a period where even hard assets are getting huge haircuts...

Goodwill 4,791,399

dashingdwl,
I like Anthracite, I have owned it and sold it multiple times since 1999, it does a wonderful job of replicating fear in the markets, combined with a remarkably steady book of business.

They will most likely have to slash the common divvy when CRE blows chunks. They will most likely have to cry and moan about finding long term financing to pick up good deals.

But they seem to always have found ways to make even more money on a fairly small capital base. I further believe that since it has always been a "under the radar" operation, they have been a preferred investment for MER and blackrock insiders.

But hey, your mileage may vary. My wife sold her common at near $15 a share, which was a ludicris price, and just bought preferred for a very large discount.

A good Calculated Risk, as it were;-}

Gotta make up for that 5% hit from GOOG tonight. Ugh.

Someday this war's gonna end...

I find the best colloquial American speech on this site. It's an education.

I wonder is there a correlation between SEC and the rest issuing subpoena to market "makers" and expected write-downs from a large financial players? I mean FED should have the first hand information about their none performing loans.
Hope it is not the case because otherwise it would be just sickening = government agencies trying to influence the markets, etc.

"Merrill's loss would have been a lot deeper had it not been for a $91 million gain booked on the declining value of the bank's own debt. The move, while counterintuitive, is a legitimate quirk of mark-to-market accounting."

It's totally intuitive, it's just dumb. What is counterintuitive is why $91 million is a big gain when you just lost $5 billion.

Re: "Our core franchise continues to perform well despite the extremely challenging market environment," said Chief Executive John Thain.
The Wall Street investment bank has posted net losses of $18.65 billion in the past year and taken $43.4 billion in write-downs since the housing market

Bahawhahahahaaaahahahahaha ROTFLMAO..... HOw can he say that and not be sued????

er....read the "net" loss wrong...

so their net loss is 4.65 Billion
and with 9.75 Billion of the net from write-downs. truly mind blowing that this was for one quarter!

i guess in reading through both news reports and the press release these Merrill is bleeding and the sale of their stake in Bloomberg is just a band aid or...is it a torque and on which limb will gang green set in?

and still the stock price is 2.75% above yesterday's close.....in AH trading

Manipulation abounds.

Ciao
MS

""in 10 years" a lot can happen in 10 days who is counting years!"

that's true, I heard for Traders the time is not uniform, sometimes it slows down sometimes it speeds up depending on Volatility and other factors.

"Billy Hill writes:
Sorry for an OT beginner question.

I understand that (for example) an SP500 index fund could be run in principle by buying the appropriate stocks in the appropriate amounts, charging fees, and selling shares.

I further understand how those shares could be sold short.

What I don't understand is how a "short SP500" fund could be run. If the fund manager shorts the shares and they go up enough, he gets margin calls, but how does he pass these along to the fund's investors?"

When the fund sells short, it will be left with cash (used as collateral).

If the stocks go up enough, the fund will get margin calls, and have to buy back shares (at a loss) using the cash on hand. The Net Asset Value of the fund would drop, and the value of the fund shares would drop.

The fund investors are shielded from their investments going below zero, so they won't get margin calls (unless they bought the fund on margin from their broker, in which their broker will contact them.)

Friends, enemies and those unsure,

I come before you tonight, not in a state of inebriation, but a state of higher consciousness, a state one must dwell within to see the light of market capitalization.

Capitalization is a word, a term, a process and perhaps the root of The American Dream, thus just as well, a part of the current American Nightmare of subprime intoxication, toxicity and the interleaving and insidious nature of the cancerous beast that is destroying a generation of American wealth.

Capitalization is a tool to some, which can be used to evade taxes, shelter taxes, supercharge profits and evade accounting regulations. Capitalization is a form of liquidity that can be subdivided into fractional components that can become derivatives which can link a security to a rube or a shill, or to lemmings, or to retards that are greedy and in lust with the idea that they should have more than what they can't fucking steal.

Capitalization is a profound starting point in understanding the subprime bastardization which is robbing the future value of children whom are just being born -- born into the most corrupt time in American history -- a time where there are no heros, no saints, no good guys like George Bailey, that somehow got stuck in a living room taking charity from strangers in what amounted to socialist welfare.

Ok, I gotta go for a walk..... I may need to work on that last part, have a little chicken and rice.... another shot (this your fault Misean)...

Ok, wait,

Before I go on that walk, and cook that dinner which will simmer as I gather my wits.

Capitalization is truly at the heart of The American Experience, the core pump that breathes oxygen and life into the blood and fabric which makes us a great (fucking) country!

I bring this point up, because the stock market is no longer a proxy of economic health, the bond markets, commodity mkts, the ICE, the multiple globalized casino-like entities that like parasites, like leeches, like a cancer, took over The American way of life.

We are now a society linked to derivative products that are as ingrained as commercials on TV shows, we are a society that has no clue why the blackbox called a TV works or why it has a cable, or why stock compensation is connected to a currency bet which is linked to the LIBOR. As a society, we have a reatrded mentality that is at odds with understanding the mechanics of supercomputer dice tosses by corporations that have billions of dollars to slosh around the world, in a tsunami of bullshit that splashes from Bermuda to Switzerland to China to London and repackaged in NY City -- we have no comprehension as a society as to what money is, we have no fucking clue as to what is intended by the theoretical conceptualization of what capitalization refers to -- and thus, when a company writes off a few billion, or a bank goes belly up because of capitalization inadequacy, or reserve shortfalls, or technical problems with QSPEs or mark-to-market reality -- what the fuck does that mean, other than our government is corrupt, and has allowed a bunch of crooks to control America!

America should be a free country, free from the evil filth that sit in every fucking chair in The Senate, Congress, DOJ, FTC, SEC, obviously White House... you name it -- it's corrupt -- and capitalization and monetization have nothing to do with building the future, because these bastards are stealing more money than exists!

after working at mer for 13 yrs in nyc, any loss of $50mm by a bond trading desk alone would incur firm-wide wrath and firings..thats $50mm...their writedown on cdo-related positions now amounts to $45bln? to think that they are still alive for business is simply preposterous. i just simply cant f'n believe the scope of these losses, which are clearly now criminal..people will goto jail. when does the wrath of district attorneys come into play? how was mer allowed to use 75% of last yr's income to pay bonuses?

What's with "franchise"?

I keep seeing this word in relation to ML: from insiders, "analysts", etc. When I read a dictionary, I see that my own understanding of it was basically correct, so how the hell does it make any sense in this context? I thought the journalists at least understood English.

OR... if ML is indeed a franchisee, is
Bernanke the franchisor? Of what,
precisely? Of course that's not really the case, but how telling if that's how ML see themselves!

Or am I missing an idiom here?

-ag

Anybody have the oath of office for bernanke?

correction: What did Bernake do.

Fed has two major priorities
1) Inflation watch
2) Stability of Financial System

the reason they didn't act strongly on inflation front yet, is because usually slow down reduces inflation, unfortunately this is not the case right now.
bailout of the B.S. was an attempt to stop the panic; and it wasn't that much of bailout as the takeover.

As of Greenspan and the period of low interest rates. Well how else could government encourage the Competitiveness of US firms when Chinese kept their currency artificially low and no one in Senate or Whitehouse did anything to level the field?

And YEAH, blaming someone else for our RE greed is a good solution; it wasn't me getting an equity loan and getting latest BMW, it was the BAD guys @ the bank that seduced me with their vicious marketing campain...
The only problem, with mentality like that no one will learn the lesson, which is - you ether live within your means or you are screwed!