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The White House and the Wall Street Factor
Are the early results in the presidential races showing an anti-Wall Street tinge?
Consider what happened last week in Iowa, when Mike Huckabee upset his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, in the caucuses. Mr. Romney is closely linked to high finance: He helped found the private equity giant Bain Capital and has drawn lots of campaign contributions from buyout professionals. By contrast, Mr. Huckabee has gotten virtually no donations from private equity or venture capital sources, according to research by Dan Primack of PEhub.com. MORE »
Latest Dealbook Headlines
Mergers & Acquisitions
Investors Seek a Takeover of CNet
CNet Networks, one of the original online media companies, would typically write about all the gossip and speculation at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas. Now, however, the company is likely to be the one talked about.
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Investment Banking
CIBC Ousts Two Executives Amid Write-Downs
The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the country’s worst-performing bank stock last year, ousted its top investment banker and chief risk officer after announcing debt writedowns of as much as $3 billion, more than any other Canadian lender, Bloomberg News reported.
Brian Shaw, the chief executive of CIBC World Markets, will be succeeded by the TSX Group’s chief executive, Richard Nesbitt, the bank said Monday. The chief financial officer, Tom Woods, will succeed Ken Kilgour as risk officer. MORE »
I.P.O./Offerings
Taking Stock of SPACs
No doubt about it: The number and size of special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, is surging. But SPAC stocks? That’s a different story.
SPACs are publicly traded vehicles whose sole purpose is to make an acquisition. In the last year or so, prominent deal-makers such as Ronald Perelman and investment banks such as Lazard have sponsored SPACs, which are drawing big-name Wall Street firms as underwriters. But Elizabeth Hester of Bloomberg News offers some sobering figures for potential SPAC investors. She writes that the average annual return for SPACs over the last five years was just 5.8 percent, compared with the S&P 500 index, which grew by 13 percent each year over the same period. MORE »
Private Equity
Sallie Mae Appoints New Chairman, C.F.O.
Sallie Mae on Monday appointed a longtime banking executive as its new chairman, replacing Albert L. Lord at that position as the beleaguered student lending giant continues to struggle with tighter credit markets and the wreckage from its failed buyout. Mr. Lord will remain chief executive.
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Anthony P. Terracciano, who formerly held top roles at First Union (a predecessor to today’s Wachovia), Mellon Bank and Chase Manhattan, will take the chairman role at Sallie Mae. John F. Remondi, a former Sallie Mae executive who recently worked at Par Capital Management, will return to serve as vice chairman and chief financial officer. MORE »
Hedge Funds
Motorola Still Not Getting the Icahn Lift
Carl Icahn has said that his corporate agitations have created $50 billion in shareholder value over the last few years. But so far, Motorola isn’t feeling the Icahn Effect.
Shares of Motorola on Monday touched their lowest level since January 2007, which is when Mr. Icahn announced his (ultimately unsuccessful) plan to seek a board seat at the company. Investors seemed unimpressed by the new cellphones that the company introduced over the weekend at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Writing in Fortune’s Techland blog, Michal Lev-Ram said the new models fell short of Motorola’s innovative Razr phone from 2004. That, in brief, is Motorola’s big problem — a lack of post-Razr blockbusters — and not even Mr. Icahn seems able to fix it in the near term. MORE »
Venture Capital
An Intellectual Bent for New Start-Up
Peter Hopkins, a civic-minded and idealistic 2004 Harvard graduate, is hoping that his new Web site, Big Think, will do for intellectuals what YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, did for bulldogs on skateboards.
And his enthusiasm has persuaded Lawrence H. Summers, the economist, former Treasury secretary and ex-president of Harvard, to throw his weight and some of his cash behind this “YouTube for ideas.” Mr. Summers decided to invest (“a few tens of thousands of dollars,” he told The New York Times, adding that it is “not something I’m hoping to retire on”) in Big Think, which officially makes its debut Monday after being tested for several months. MORE »
Legal
Has Measuring Risk Changed ‘Forever?’
For years, three big agencies assigned risk ratings to thousands of securities, helping investors figure out which were likely to be safe investments and which were more speculative.
But one of those agencies, Moody’s Investors Service, said on Monday that such ratings are no longer possible.
Financial innovations in recent years — and a concurrent lack of information — has cut the ability to track risk “probably forever,” the agency said on Monday. MORE »
The Case of the Vanishing Soap
Bank of America got plenty of questions about a cost-cutting memo that seemed to declare an end to free soap. (43 comments) More»
Weather Channel Up for Sale
One of the last privately owned cable channels could fetch more than $5 billion in an auction. More»
The 2007 Deal Highlight Reel
What was the bank of the year? The M&A; deal of the year? The buyout of the year? Here's DealBook's rundown of the highs and lows, as well as what got you talking in 2007. More»
Goldman's $68 Million Man
Lloyd Blankfein's year-end payout has broken the record for a Wall Street chief executive. (43 comments) More»
Revolving Door
The latest hires, promotions and departures at Merrill Lynch, MidOcean, Commerzbank and more. More»
Special Section:
After the Party
What's next now that the buyout boom has gone bust, why Wall Street is playing both sides with its political donations and how young deal-makers are linked by their colleges. More»
Is Wall Street Still on Par?
How deal-makers and titans of finance fared on the golf greens this summer. More»
Masters of the New Universe
In DealBook's special section of The New York Times, a guide to the deal ecosystem, a report on what lies behind the buyout boom, a profile of the hedge fund that may be the next Goldman Sachs, and more. More»
The Value of Merger Advice
DealBook's look at which investment banks advised which buyers, and how the clients’ stock fared 18 months later. More»
Merrill Lynch's Shake-Up
Full coverage of E. Stanley O'Neal's swift fall and the securities firm's naming of his successor. More»
Davos Diary
Complete coverage of the people, the issues and the scenes from the World Economic Forum's annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. More»
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About DealBook
DealBook is a financial news service produced by The New York Times. It is published daily, Monday-Friday, except on U.S. Market holidays and during the last week of the year. A daily digest of DealBook is also available via email, delivered before the market opens. DealBook editorial staff: Andrew Ross Sorkin, Peter Edmonston, Liza Klaussmann, Michael J. de la Merced, Dan Mitchell and Jeffrey Cane. Illustrations by Chris Gash.
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