Word: goldmans
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Remember those defined-benefit programs through which companies promised a certain amount every month to retirees? The market crash may be dealing that already waning concept a final, fatal blow. A new report from Goldman Sachs' Global Markets Institute illustrates that massive equity losses have resulted in S&P 500 companies' pension funds, which had been overfunded at the start of the year, fading so fast that they are now underfunded as a group. Instead of holding 108% of the assets they were promising to provide to retirees, they now hold just 91% (and falling...
...Earlier this month, the government announced that it planned to quickly inject $125 billion of the $700 billion economic rescue package into nine of the nation's largest financial firms, including Wall Street titans Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, as well as Bank of America, which recently acquired securities firm Merrill Lynch. That, along with other Treasury Department moves to rescue Wall Street, will mean the wallets of many investment bankers will be fatter than they would have been...
...government's money directly, but in the case of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, they were facing a severe crunch," says analyst Brad Hintz, who covers financial firms at Sanford Bernstein and is a former chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers. "Had it not been for the government's help in refinancing their debt, they may not have had the cash to pay bonuses." When asked, the Treasury would not comment directly on Wall Street's bonus plans, though spokeswoman Brookly McLaughlin did reiterate the bailout's intent. "There is broad agreement that the Treasury's capital purchase program...
...factor mitigating the financial industry's bonus intentions is the fact that there could be far fewer employed Wall Streeters by the time year-end payouts are made. Goldman Sachs reportedly plans to cut 10%, or 3,250 workers, from its payrolls. Barclays is expected to eliminate 3,000 jobs from the former investment-banking division of Lehman Brothers, which it acquired in September. And Merrill Lynch's John Thain recently said that he expects thousands of job cuts in the wake of his firm's acquisition. All told, Hintz expects Wall Street employment to fall 25%, which could mean...
...those ratios are being unwound with a vengeance. In interviews, Wall Street executives, like John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley, talk of reducing their leverage to a ratio of 12 to 1 - a regulatory requirement, now that both Morgan and Goldman have turned themselves into commercial rather than investment banks - as if there were some button they could push to make it happen. But the truth is that for U.S. banks, reducing their use of debt and rebuilding their devastated balance sheets is a long and painful process. Deleveraging is part of what creates a credit crunch: institutions that have...