Word: retail
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...discounting can only go so far before it no longer makes financial sense. For this reason, promotions and price discounts will likely be strategically planned, not panic-driven as they were last year, says Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates Inc., a national retail consulting and investment firm...
More broadly, what sorts of companies should we be worried about? Unfortunately, private-equity firms infiltrated almost every industry - industrials, consumer goods, retail, hospitals, utilities - so a leveraged-buyout bust will be very widespread. TXU, which is now called Energy Future Holdings, one of the largest utilities in Texas, faces huge problems. They probably won't default on their debt until 2013, but at this point, and this is according to ratings agencies, it looks like they have very little chance of paying their debt. The range is from a huge utility like that to HCA, the largest hospital chain...
After the talk, I found myself wondering how these banks grew so large in the first place. In 1999, Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, allowing retail banks (which accept deposits and issue personal loans), investment banks (which trade securities and manage corporate acquisitions), and insurers to merge. Subsequently, the pace of bank mergers accelerated, creating gigantic one-stop financial shops. When these banks teetered on the brink last year, Congress, fearing that their collapse would cause economic cataclysm, was forced to bail them...
...Retail banks and investment banks have fundamentally different functions and thus different appetites for risk. Retail banks are low-risk ventures; their deposits are insured by the FDIC. Investment banking is more lucrative but involves greater risk. When these two businesses are placed under the same roof, the result is a severe conflict of interest...
This is the case because the investment banking division can use FDIC-insured funds from the retail-banking division to indirectly finance excessive risk-taking. The retail bank’s customers will not transfer their deposits to a safer institution because they know that the FDIC will compensate them in the event of a bank failure. This moral hazard encourages further mergers between retail and investment banks, which in turn begets more institutions that are “too big to fail.” When excess risk gets a conglomerate bank into trouble, the bill goes to?...