financial news

Merrill Lynch Ending

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Merrill Lynch Ending 1

Once upon a time, the name Merrill Lynch was the most recognized, and maybe most respected Wall Street name. I even worked for the financial advisors part of Merrill Lynch out of the Denver office for a few years back in my financial planner days. Then, in 2008, when the financial markets blew up, it turned out that Merrill Lynch had been selling toxic real estate securities… to itself. That, plus a lot of other damage from the Great Recession drove Merrill Lynch into the arms of Bank of America, who scooped up the company. BoA kept the Merrill Lynch name all of these years since, no doubt hoping that eventually the brand might recapture some of its cache. But, it turns out that American memories aren’t that short, and Merrill Lynch is no longer special, just another part of Wall Street. The Bank of America name actually carries just as much value, if not more. So, BoA has announced that they’ll be ditching the Merrill brand, although it will keep some of the branded financial products (and those will continue to have the trademark bull logo.)

Bank Merger Signals New Phase of Economy

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bank mergers money

OK, here we go. The first big bank merger (or acquisition) since 2008 was announced today. It is significant for several reasons. Banks Are Back? As the financial industry imploded in 2008, it took the banks with them. It also exposed a lot of their shadier practices and brought out new regulations and reporting requirements. As a result, banks were in no way ready for the kind of scrutiny markets, investors, and regulators would perform if they tried to merge or acquire one another. Today, two semi-major banks are merging to become one of the big boys. BB&T and SunTrust are merging. They are going to pick a new name, though they apparently don’t know what it is. Wall Street seems to approve of the deal. Bigger Banks Better? One of the reasons given for the merger is that being a bigger bank is better. The idea is that some of the costs associated with being a modern bank make being smaller less viable. That isn’t entirely true. A small bank, serving one, or a few, states is still a completely profitable and worthwhile venture. Where banks are getting stuck is that area between small, and big. There, it can …

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2011 Outlook for Banks and Mortgage Companies

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Throughout the financial crisis and subsequent bailout of the U.S. banking system, the issue has been one of Wall Street versus Main Street. That is, the idea that greedy bankers, investment bankers, and Wall Street traders duped unsophisticated Americans into mortgages that they could not afford and then left them hanging when things went bad. Whether that versions of events is true or not is open to debate. However, what has been missing so far from the banking crisis scenario is that numerous investors, very sophisticated, institutional investors, were also "duped" by Wall Street titans and those too-big to fail banks. Those investors were buying AAA-rated bonds from reputable investment firms and banks. They were not buying risky, high-yield bond investments, or so they thought. An article over at MSNBC underlines those circumstances and suggests that the next phase of the mortgage crisis debacle may just now be getting underway, thanks in part to the complexities and speed of the U.S. legal system. Banks Sued Over Mortgages Used For Bonds Giants of the bond market’s investing world such as PIMCO Investment Management, and Blackrock Financial Management, two of the biggest fixed-income mutual fund managers in the world, as well as …

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Economy Outlook 2010 2nd Half – June Job Losses

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Recent new that payrolls fell in June here in the U.S. is bad news for the economy, but maybe not as bad as it is being made out by the headlines. Let’s start with what the numbers are and move on to what they mean. As with all economic statistics, employment numbers are compiled from numerous sources which provide an inconsistent snapshot of job activity from around the country. These numbers are made usable by applying a consistent mathematical methodology to them. This results in numbers that may or may not be in any way accurate. What makes the statistics relevant and useful is that because they are always calculated in the same manner looking at the numbers relative to previous statistics is a valid way to analyze growth or contraction in employment. ….More about personal finance tips. Total Nonfarm Payroll US Department of Labor The “employment number” everyone is talking about today is specifically the total nonfarm payroll numbers and is based upon a combination of data gathered from surveying people (the household survey data) and surveying businesses (the establishment survey data). Much like the Nielsen ratings for television, the numbers gleaned from the surveys are then extrapolated to …

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Yahoo Buys Associated Content

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There are plenty of other things Yahoo gets from buying Associated Content, not the least of which is a big fat swath of Internet real estate that ranks obscenely high in Google search results and Bing search results. A great deal of the traffic generated from these high ranking searches is monetized via, you guessed it, Google AdSense which pays content publishers based upon ads placed by Google on those websites. Yahoo, can now switch out those Google Ads and replace them with their own Yahoo Ads.