January 2009

Your votes are in, you have chosen the Best and Worst Executives of 2008, the most God-awful year this side of the Great Depression, a year which saw $13 tn, the equivalent of the annual GDP of the US, wiped out of investors' net worth. A year in which both home and stock values read like an EKG printout for a heart attack patient. Before I report to you who won, I must say this--your ... read more

General Motors is on schedule to get $13.4 bn in federal bailout money, as it is now technically insolvent because its net worth, its assets minus liabilities, are a negative $59 bn. But GM faces another serious challenge: Fixing its history of regulatory problems. Namely, financial mismanagement, problems that are deeper than previously thought, due to the sleuthing done by the independent ... read more

Banks will have to raise new capital in 2009, as a sharp increase in credit-rating downgrades on mortgage-related securities will lead to further stresses on bank capital, according to top banking analyst Meredith Whitney at Oppenheimer Equity Research. "From July 2007 to date, over $5 tn worth of securities have been downgraded, but our concern here is that the pace of downgrades has only ... read more

Do you think President-elect Barack Obama's speech yesterday used scare tactics in order to mask what it really was--a sales job to wheelbarrow out a huge fiscal stimulus package that is growing in size even as you read this column? Do you think that the idea that we need another stimulus package, when there is already $8.4 tn in rescue packages from the U.S. government in the pipeline, is more ... read more

As FOX Business first reported Friday, Citigroup (C) is poised to report much deeper losses for its coming fourth quarter on January 22nd than both the company and analysts had anticipated, "the worst quarter in the company's history," insiders say, with quarterly losses estimated to surpass $10 bn, despite the sale of its German retail banking unit. A breakup of what was once the world's ... read more