Monday, September 15, 2008

Totally Not a Good Day To Be in the Financial Services Industry

I won't pretend like i know what a lot of this stuff means, but for real this is really a gloomy day for investment banks and employees [well, if they haven't been let go yet] and pretty much any investor worldwide. I mean if the Dow is down 500 points, which is the most since 9/11, you don't really need an MBA to know that the situation is jacked up!

Poor Lehman Brothers [NYSE:LEH]. I mean if just look at the stock snapshot and see them trading at $70 a year ago compared to 20 cents currently, I don't even need a calculator to determine they lost like 99.9% of their value. So imagine the dude, not even the uber-rich ones, but someone who's just been working there for awhile [they've been around since financing our countries railroad system] who had like $100K worth of stock a year ago and now that isn't worth the paper that its on. And that example is just one of the 25K employees on the payroll. Poor dudes. To have like $500 billion in assets and still file bankruptcy just sounds insane-o.

BOFA [NYSE: BAC] also acquired Merrill Lynch [NYSE: MER] for $50 Billion in stock then dropped 20% dang. I think the same people who questioned their Countrywide acquisition are doubting this transaction as well. Well I think they always wanted to be the one-stop shopping of anything money-related so we'll see how that goes. Anyway MER has 60K employees if anyone is hiring.

AIG [NYSE: AIG] also took a fat hit since it might not be able to oover all it insures. I mean if you need to borrow $40 billion from the government real quick then that can't be a good thing!

WAMU [NYSE: WM] isn't looking too good either, since no suitors want to touch it even at $2 a share.

But there's hope! 10 of the biggest baddest banks in the world pooled up about $100 Billion for troubled financial institutions to help stabilize the worldwide markets. Hmmm, so do they just setup a wire transfer for that?

To make matters even worse, my place of employment might not even have a Christmas party this year! No but for real, I just pray that I'm employed everyday.
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