Stock Preacher

Ken Lewis, CEO of Bank of America, will step down in December, leaving the country’s biggest lender without a successor for now. Mr. Lewis’ surprise departure, announced late Wednesday night, ends a turbulent 8 year run at B of A and comes days after Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo swept their executive suites. The move comes as Wall Street has rebounded from the crisis that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers last year and led the US government to inject US$45B of taxpayer’s money into B of A. Mr. Lewis and B of A have been at the center of investigations by the US SEC, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the New York AG’s office over the bank’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch. Read more

Popularity: unranked [?]

The S&P 500, since sinking to a 12- year low of 676.53 on March 9 surged 25% as banks from Citigroup Inc. to JP Morgan Chase said they made money in the first two months of 2009 and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced plans to finance as much as US$1T in purchases of distressed assets from financial firms.

“No matter how you feel about the stimulus package, some of it is going to stick and the economy should stabilize in the second or third quarter,” said Bruce Bittles the Nashville- based chief investment strategist at Robert W. Baird & Co.“If that’s going to happen, the market will sniff it out.”

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This is what happened last week…

Bad news, bad news and bad news again (tell’em, tell’em again and tell’em what you told them). Nevertheless, last Friday, the market rallied some off of Thursday’s technical reversal action.
The banks are still sending out the worst news, what with Citi breaking up and Bank of America needing more cash to digest Merrill Lynch, it is a fact that Wall Street has moved to Washington, D.C., perhaps never to return to Manhattan. If that was not enough, the production capacity numbers were worse than anyone expected.
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The Bank of Japan is expected to cut interest rates after the government urged more support the ailing economy.

Investors saw a 40% chance that the policy board will reduce the overnight call rate from 0.3% at this week’s meeting, according to calculations made by JP Morgan Chase & Co. based on interest-rate swaps trading, up from 20% earlier in the day.

The meeting ends today (Dec. 19th, 2008)

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* City Bank of New York opened for business in New York City on June 16, 1812 with $2 million in capital. Today, Citigroup is New York City’s second largest private employer.

* Citicorp merged with financier Sanford Weill’s Travelers Group — itself a combination of insurer Travelers, brokerages Salomon Brothers and Smith Barney and financial planner Primerica — in 1998.

* Citigroup has 200 million customers in more than 100 countries across six continents. It is the world’s largest provider of credit cards.

* Citigroup was the world’s largest bank by market value as recently as 2007, when it was worth more than $250 billion. At Friday’s close it was worth just $20.5 billion, making it smaller than each of Canada’s top three banks.

* Citigroup had been the top U.S. bank by assets until it was overtaken by JP Morgan Chase & Co in October. Citigroup ended September with $2.05 trillion in assets, compared with $2.25 trillion at JP Morgan

Popularity: 2% [?]