Grandes tecnológicas brilham nos resultados. Já valem 18,5 biliões de dólares em bolsa

[MozHawk]

luiz22,

Mas é precisamente isso que refere o artigo aqui deixado pela Pata. De igual modo, o que li ontem à noite e já esta manhã aponta precisamente para o fim do modelo da banca de investimento "stand alone". Conforme artigo que vou aqui transcrever integralmente do Wall Street Journal, ontem ao fim do dia, a Reserva Federal Americana aprovou o pedido da Goldman Sachs e Morgan Stanley em se converterem em bancos tradicionais abandonando o modelo baseado unicamente na banca de investimento, depois da catástrofe da Lehman Brothers e fusões da Merril Lynch e Bear Stearns com bancos comerciais.

Goldman, Morgan Scrap Wall Street Model,
Become Banks in Bid to Ride Out Crisis

The Federal Reserve, in an attempt to prevent the crisis on Wall Street from infecting its two premier institutions, took the extraordinary measure on Sunday night of agreeing to convert investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. into traditional bank holding companies.

With the move, Wall Street as it has long been known -- a coterie of independent brokerage firms that buy and sell securities, advise clients and are less regulated than old-fashioned banks -- will cease to exist. Wall Street's two most prestigious institutions will come under the close supervision of national bank regulators, subjecting them to new capital requirements, additional oversight, and far less profitability than they have historically enjoyed.

Already, the biggest rivals of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley -- Merrill Lynch & Co., Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns Cos. -- have merged into larger banks or sought bankruptcy protection.

"This fundamentally alters the landscape," a Goldman Sachs spokesman said Sunday night. "By becoming a bank holding company and being regulated by the Federal Reserve, we have directly addressed issues that have become of mounting concern to market participants in recent weeks."

The rapid pace of change in recent weeks highlights the severity of the financial crisis, and suggests it is deeper than many on Wall Street were willing to admit. Some investors may view the move as a negative signal, for it suggests that Goldman and Morgan Stanley, two institutions who were once considered rock solid, may have been facing greater liquidity issues than was apparent.

Becoming a bank holding company can help both Morgan Stanley and Goldman organize their assets, and puts both in a much better position to be acquired, to merge or to acquire smaller companies with insured deposits. It also may allow Goldman and Morgan Stanley to avoid using of mark-to-market accounting -- which forces companies to value their assets based on the current market price. Instead, these firm may be able to classify assets as "held for investment," as many banks do.

The huge banking firms that have so far survived the credit-market turmoil -- Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Wachovia Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. -- each have bank holding companies overseen by the Fed, and national bank charters supervised by the Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. They can count on their huge deposit bases to serve as an alternative source of funding to other, more unpredictable, liquidity sources.

"The Fed wanted to send a strong statement that they would not allow Goldman and Morgan Stanley to be 'Lehman-ized,'" said a person familiar with the discussions, referring to the bankruptcy of Lehman.

In the short term, the agreement with federal regulators is likely to place on hold Morgan Stanley's talks to merge with Wachovia Corp., the Charlotte, N.C.-based banking powerhouse.

As a bank-holding company, Goldman Sachs would become the fourth-largest such company in the U.S., behind Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup.

Morgan Stanley officials have been talking about this option internally for several months, and Fed officials have been stationed at the bank since the crisis intensified earlier this year. After last week's market crisis, Morgan Stanley officials asked the Fed to speed up its review and grant the bank designation sooner. "It became clear that the world had changed," said Morgan Stanley spokeswoman Jeanmarie McFadden.

She said that the firm would reduce its leverage ratios -- a measure of a firm's risk in relation to the equity on its balance sheet -- over the next few years from current levels to something more in line with that at commercial banks. Investment bank ratios now stand above 20, with commercial banks closer to 10.

The Fed said it would also extend additional lending to the broker-dealer arms of the two firms, as well as to that of Merrill Lynch, as they make the transition. The steps effectively mark the end of Wall Street as it's been known for decades. It also formalizes a quid-pro-quo that regulators have warned about in the months after Bear Stearns's near collapse -- that in return for access to the Fed's emergency lending facilities, the firms would need to subject themselves to more oversight.

The conversions of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to bank holding companies could deal a blow to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who had tried to preserve the existing structure of financial institutions over the past several weeks. Now, the parent companies of almost all major U.S. financial institutions will be overseen by the Federal Reserve. Sunday night's development also further expedites the ascendancy of the Fed as universal supervisor, as it now has even more direct authority over nearly all big financial companies in the country.

These actions "constitute a powerful statement by the Federal Reserve as to its views on the safety and soundness of these institutions," said H. Rodgin Cohen, chairman of the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm and a top adviser to financial institutions.

Instead of being overseen just by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will now face much stricter oversight from numerous federal agencies. The Federal Reserve will regulate the parent companies, the Comptroller of the Currency will oversee the national bank charters, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will likely play a bigger role because the companies are expected to seek much higher volumes of federally backed deposits.

It had become increasingly clear to Fed officials in recent days that the investment-banking model couldn't function in these markets. Investment banks depend on short-term money markets to fund themselves, but that had become increasingly difficult, particularly in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. As bank holding companies, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will be allowed to take customer deposits, potentially a more stable source of funding.

Officials held a series of talks with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs executives over the weekend. While Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke stayed in Washington for meetings on Capitol Hill about the government's plan to buy hundreds of billions of dollars of distressed assets, Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Kevin Warsh, a Fed governor and former Morgan Stanley executive, worked in New York to sort out the details with Goldman and Morgan Stanley.

Officials had become more alarmed about the positions of both firms as their share prices continued to fall in recent days. One person involved in the talks said last week's bankruptcy filing by Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch's agreement to be sold to Bank of America Corp., served as a wakeup call to the two investment banks. One person involved in the talks said the two firms had been flirting with the idea of becoming bank holding companies for some time, and that took on a new urgency in recent weeks.

Morgan Stanley Chief Executive John Mack engaged in serious discussions with Wachovia Corp., whose new CEO, Robert Steel, recently left a top post at the Treasury Department to take the reins of the regional banking powerhouse.

Goldman -- and to a lesser extent, Morgan Stanley -- has maneuvered through the credit crisis better than other investment banks. But its business model, which relies on short-term funding, is under attack. Some stockholders worry that its strategy of making big investments with borrowed money will go wrong someday, which would make it more difficult for the firm to get favorable borrowing terms. Such problems could also prompt the firm's clients, including big hedge funds, to move their assets to other banks, including larger commercial players.

To many analysts and investors, Morgan Stanley and Goldman still depend too much on leverage, or the use of borrowed money, and don't set aside enough cash against the bets they make on everything from commercial mortgages to non-U.S. stocks.

"They've been so close to a near-death experience, something needs to change," says Glenn Schorr, a brokerage-industry analyst at UBS. Surviving as independent companies is possible only if their business models become less risky, he adds.

Lots of commercial banks also blundered on risky mortgages, including Citigroup, UBS AG and Wachovia. Their salvation has been their size and their ho-hum source of reliable funding -- bank deposits.

Goldman has expressed wariness about joining up with a big commercial bank. When asked about the idea on a conference call Tuesday, the firm's chief financial officer, David Viniar, downplayed the attractiveness of the idea. "It is not the business model, it is the performance that matters," he said.

The most fundamental problem is how to generate profit growth in a world that no longer tolerates high leverage. At Merrill Lynch, the leverage ratio soared to 28 last year, from 15 in 2003, according to UBS. Morgan Stanley's leverage ratio climbed to 33, while Goldman's hit 28.

When markets were booming, borrowed money fueled record earnings. Investors showed few signs of concern. The ugly flip side of leverage is now obvious, and massive write-downs have shattered confidence in Wall Street's risk-management machinery.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman have been taking steps to reduce their leverage, but that hasn't been easy in a market where prices are dropping for many assets. It has proved difficult to find buyers for many distressed real-estate assets.

In contrast, Bank of America and Wachovia had leverage ratios of 11 as of the second quarter, less than half the average of the four big investment banks. The profit upside isn't as high as it is on Wall Street, but the downside isn't as steep. If a bank loses $1 billion on a loan, it has twice the capital an investment bank might have to absorb it.

The ascendancy of commercial banks largely reflects their use of customer deposits to fund much of their business. Retail depositors tend not to yank their money out, even in turbulent times, thanks to backing by federal deposit insurance. Even at Washington Mutual Inc., a Seattle thrift-holding company battered by mortgage losses, deposit levels are basically unchanged so far this year.

Still, plain-vanilla banking isn't a cure-all for what ails Wall Street. Commercial banks also run securities units that are highly leveraged and that have little to do with bank deposits. Also, the track record of so-called financial supermarkets such as Citigroup is so-so.

"It's not obvious that there's a clear economic benefit" to investment banks merging with commercial banks, says Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University.

Um abraço,
MozHawk

[luiz22]

Goldman Sachs e Morgan Stanley não deverão resistir até ao final do ano


22/09/2008


Esta crise é de tal forma nova e abrangente que, até se ver a luz ao fundo do túnel, "é difícil ser optimista", defende António Caçorino, que acaba de sair da direcção mundial do Citigroup, que acredita que a Goldman Sachs e a Morgan Stanley não deverão resistir até ao final do ano como bancos de investimento.



Em entrevista ao Negócios, quando questionado se é o fim da banca de investimento tal como a conhecemos, António Caçorino foi peremptório: “Sim, não tenho qualquer dúvida. Até ao fim do ano provavelmente não irá existir nenhum banco de investimento que não esteja 'casado' com um grande banco comercial, ou que não tenha um grande investidor que detenha parte significativa do seu capital (por exemplo um fundo soberano) que lhe dê maior estabilidade de longo prazo”.



Quanto à Morgan Stanley e á Golfman Sachs, o responsável assegurou “duvido que cheguem ao fim do ano em pé com o mesmo modelo de negócio. O curioso é que, na minha opinião, o Merrill Lynch e o Lehman tinham melhores modelos de negócio que o Morgan Stanley e o Goldman Sachs”.



http://www.bpionline.pt/comum/Com_Notic ... vegaScroll

[Pata-Hari]

Fonte é a bloomberg

Goldman, Morgan Stanley Bring Down Curtain on Wall Street Era

By Christine Harper and Craig Torres

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The Wall Street that shaped the financial world for two decades ended last night, when Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley concluded there is no future in remaining investment banks now that investors have determined the model is broken.

The Federal Reserve's approval of their bid to become banks ends the ascendancy of the securities firms, 75 years after Congress separated them from deposit-taking lenders, and caps weeks of chaos that sent Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. into bankruptcy and led to the rushed sale of Merrill Lynch & Co. to Bank of America Corp.

``The decision marks the end of Wall Street as we have known it,'' said William Isaac, a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. ``It's too bad.''

Goldman, whose alumni include Henry Paulson, the Treasury Secretary presiding over a $700 billion bank bailout, and Morgan Stanley, a product of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that cleaved investment and commercial banks, insisted they didn't need to change course, even as their shares plunged and their borrowing costs soared last week.

By then, it was too late. As financial markets gyrated -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average whipsawed 1,000 points in the week's last two days -- and clients defected, executives at the two firms concluded they had no choice. The Federal Reserve Board met at 9 p.m. yesterday and considered applications delivered that day, said Michelle Smith, a spokeswoman for the central bank. The decision was unanimous, she said.

`Blood in Water'

``There's blood in the water in the industry and the sharks are circling,'' Peter Kovalski, who helps oversee about $10 billion at Alpine Woods Capital Investors LLC, said at the end of last week. ``It all comes down to perception and the current trust within the community.''

Wall Street hasn't had such a shakeup since the 1980s, when firms including Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns Cos. went public and London's financial markets were altered forever with the so-called Big Bang reforms implemented in 1986. Bear Stearns disappeared in March, when it was bought by JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The announcement paves the way for the two New York-based firms, both of which will now be regulated by the Fed, to build their deposit base, potentially through acquisitions. That will allow them to rely more heavily on deposits from retail customers instead of using borrowed money -- the leverage that led to the undoing of Bear Stearns and Lehman.

Morgan Stanley has taken $15.7 billion of writedowns and losses on mortgage-related securities and other types of loans since the credit crunch started last year. Goldman's tally stands at about $4.9 billion. While both companies have remained profitable and avoided money-losing quarters suffered by Lehman and Merrill Lynch, their revenue from sales and trading and investment banking have been declining this year.

Depositors Rule

``Deposit-banking is king right now,'' said David Hendler, an analyst at CreditSights Inc. in New York. ``It's the only meaningful critical-mass way to make money.''

Morgan Stanley may feel it has more time to contemplate alternatives to the deal that it began to shape last week with Wachovia Corp., said Tony Plath, a finance professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

``This means Morgan Stanley is reassessing its plan for a merger with Wachovia,'' Plath said. ``Morgan Stanley is going to try to go it alone, and I expect it will try to buy a bank with a market-to-book ratio that is next to nothing. It means they are walking away from Wachovia.''

Morgan Stanley, the second-biggest securities firm until this week, had $36 billion of deposits and three million retail accounts at the end of August. The company plans to convert its Utah-based industrial bank into a national bank.

`Certainty'

``This new bank holding structure will ensure that Morgan Stanley is in the strongest possible position,'' Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Mack, 63, said in a statement last night. ``It also offers the marketplace certainty about the strength of our financial position and our access to funding.''

Goldman, the largest and most profitable of the U.S. securities firms, will become the fourth-largest bank holding company. The firm already has more than $20 billion in customer deposits in two subsidiaries and is creating a new one, GS Bank USA, that will have more than $150 billion of assets, making it one of the 10 largest banks in the U.S., the firm said in a statement last night. The firm will increase its deposit base ``through acquisitions and organically,'' Goldman said in a statement last night.

``Goldman Sachs, under Federal Reserve supervision, will be regarded as an even more secure institution with an exceptionally clean balance sheet and a greater diversity of funding sources,'' Lloyd Blankfein, 54, Goldman's chairman and CEO, said in the statement.

Citigroup, JPMorgan

The Washington-based Fed is the primary regulator of bank- holding companies, which are firms that own or control banks. Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan are bank- holding companies regulated by the Fed.

Securities firms, by contrast, had been regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC's future becomes dimmer with the change in Goldman and Morgan Stanley's structures.

``You can't kiss goodbye to the last two important investment banks without noting that the house is empty,'' said David Becker, a former SEC general counsel who is now a partner at Clear Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton in Washington. ``It's a downward spiral where the less significant the population you regulate, the less your available resources.''

Less Risky

The change is also likely to lead to less risk-taking by the companies and possibly lower pay for their employees. Both Goldman and Morgan Stanley held more than $20 of assets for every $1 of shareholder equity, making them dependent on market funding to operate.

Goldman, in particular, has been remarkable for the high bonuses it pays to its employees. Goldman's CEO and two co- presidents were each paid more than $67 million last year.

``They're going to have to protect their deposit bases by law, and the days of high leverage are gone,'' said Charles Geisst, a finance professor at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York, who wrote ``Wall Street: A History.'' ``The days of the big bonuses are gone.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Christine Harper in New York at charper@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: September 22, 2008 01:17 EDT