Citi and Major Banks Stabilizing

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/07/18/Citigroup-Narrows-Loss?TID=email/news/top5
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, is the title of the novel by Richard Fariña. It could also describe how investors are looking at America’s biggest bank.
The bank had its third consecutive quarter in the red, reporting a $2.5 billion loss. It took another $7 billion of write-downs on top of [...]

Citi Falls To New Low…Bank of America Says “What Me Worry”?

Citi (C) fell 6% to a new low Thursday after analysts at Goldman Sachs downgraded the stock, citing the prospect of $8.9 billion in additional asset writedowns. The move comes just a week after Citi financial chief Gary Crittenden said the bank would take “substantial” writedowns in its second quarter ending this month. Analysts at UBS [...]

Subprime Hindsight…It Takes A Pillage

(From the Salt Lake Tribune)
Yes, the executives at Countrywide Financial Corp. planned a top-dollar shindig at a ski resort earlier this year, just after the bank’s multibillion dollar losses on subprime mortgages required a shotgun marriage to Bank of America. (A Wall Street Journal story forced them to cancel the party.) And sure, Bear Stearns [...]

Giant UBS Loses Big On Subprime…

(From Bloomberg Markets)
Shareholders say Ospel and his fellow managers took a profitable Swiss bank and wrecked it on the shoals of structured finance and subprime mortgages. “He built up enormous risks, which were damaging the whole organization,” says Herbert Brändli, president of Profond, a Swiss pension fund that has been selling down its holding of [...]

Banks Downgraded…WaMu & Wachovia Demote CEO’s

June 2, 2008, 1:30 pm     

“The outlooks on the large financial institutions sector in the U.S. are now predominantly negative,” S&P said in a statement. It cited “continued weakness in the investment banking business” for Lehman, Merrill and Morgan Stanley, after a deeper look at the “vulnerabilities of the wholesale and less diversified model of [...]