Word: crediteers
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...best time, you might think, to sell shares in the biggest initial public offering (IPO) in Wall Street history. Especially not a financial IPO. Yet here we have credit-card giant Visa, now owned by its member banks, announcing plans to peddle up to 446 million shares of stock in late March for an expected take of between $15 billion and $19 billion...
...times to go public. One is that Visa makes its money (a $424 million profit in the last quarter of 2007, up 70% from a year earlier) from transaction fees, not lending, so it doesn't have to worry nearly as much as banks do about people making their credit-card payments. Another is that the banks that own Visa stand to make more than $10 billion from the IPO--JPMorgan Chase alone should clear $1 billion--and they need the money...
...main reason Visa can contemplate an IPO now is that, for all the troubles, large parts of the global financial system continue to function just fine. If you have bad credit and want a mortgage or you run a private-equity firm and want to finance a $15 billion takeover, forget it. But if your credit's O.K. and you want to charge a trip to Hawaii or you're the profitable, growing leader of the global electronic-payments business and you want to raise $15-plus billion...
...slumping economy has sent the banking system into panic mode, making it tough for even people with the best credit rating to get a good interest rate. So a rising number of folks looking to consolidate debt, buy an engagement ring, finance their small business or pay off a mortgage are using the Internet to ask for help from a friend or, more often, a stranger...
...users, and Lending Club, described below, are sort of financial eBays: borrowers post a request, and lenders bid on how much and at what interest rate they want to give. Several--or several dozen--people fund the loan at a rate agreeable to all. The intermediary runs a credit check, calculates returns and takes...