Historically a slow month for mergers and acquisitions on Wall Street, August dealmaking is at its highest level since 2000. The corporate merger machine appears to be on overdrive, registering a record $293 billion in global M&A as of Aug. 28, according to Dealogic. That’s 83% higher than the $160 billion global mergers & acquisitions generated last year in August.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba appears to be ready for its debut.
Silicon Valley is white-hot right now. Rapidly growing tech start-ups are scoring sky-high valuations on a regular basis. The latest example is the reported $20-million investment by venture investor Kleiner Perkins in messaging company Snapchat, conferring a lofty $10 billion valuation on the revenue-less company (paywall). And earlier this week, Amazon bought video-game broadcaster Twitch for about $1 billion.
Wall Street observers shouldn’t be faulted for betting against Bill Ackman. After all, it hasn’t been a good few months for him. His takedown of nutritional supplement company Herbalife resulted in the shares of the company soaring more than 25%, and two weeks ago the Wall Street Journal reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into whether his hedge fund, Pershing Square Management, violated insider trading laws with a $53 billion hostile takeover bid for Botox maker Allergan with Valeant Pharmaceuticals International.
It’s one of the most exclusive and coveted clubs in banking, and admission is getting even harder.
Large financial institutions such as Bank of America are increasingly loading up on bonds to fund themselves. As it stands now, banks globally have sold some $764 billion in bonds through Aug. 21–36% more than the $562 billion in bonds sold by this point last year.
Bank of America isn’t digging too deep to into its pocket to cover its new, $17 billion legal tab.
Is the worst behind Bank of America? Its shareholders seem to think so. The bank’s stock is up nearly 2% today, after it announced a long-awaited settlement over a US government probe into its mortgage practices. The $16.65 billion settlement is the US’s largest ever civil penalty leveled against a single corporation. It eclipses a similar $13 billion mortgage-related settlement JPMorgan Chase struck with the Justice Department last year.
It turns out Angelo Mozilo is not yet in the clear with the US government, which reportedly is preparing a new lawsuit against the architect of the behemoth US mortgage firm Countrywide Financial for his role in the housing collapse, Bloomberg reports. This is significant news.
The hedge fund high life is not what it used to be in London. That’s the takeaway from hedge fund research firm Emolument.com, which tells us that London-based hedge fund honchos are getting paid 55% less on average than they were two years ago. Average total pay at London hedge funds is £120,000 ($200,000) now, compared with £265,000 in 2012.
He’s the Wall Street honcho eyeing Brian Moynihan’s CEO suite. Thomas Montag, a 57-year-old former Goldman Sachs partner, is set to be named the sole chief operating officer at Bank of America, Bloomberg reported today. Montag had shared the COO title since 2011 with David Darnell, who is relocating to Florida and will become a vice chairman, overseeing the bank’s global wealth management business, Bloomberg reports.
Wall Street bankers have been getting short shrift in Silicon Valley lately.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has been among the throngs of people protesting in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, who was killed by police nine days ago. Dorsey, a St. Louis, Missouri, native, has been marching and, of course, tweeting his experiences over the past several days.
The dark waters are rising.
Danny Meyer’s hip New York-based burger joint Shake Shack is about to launch an IPO, Reuters reported. The restaurant chain, which started out as a food cart in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park in 2000, has rapidly transformed into a cult franchise with locations peppered across the globe. It’s that following that the chain–part of Union Square Hospitality Group–is hoping to cash in on.
Outspoken billionaire Mark Cuban has a bone to pick with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Less than a year after scoring a huge victory against the regulator, he took to Twitter and YouTube this week to deride the agency, which he locked horns with in a testy, years-long legal battle in which he fought off insider trading charges.
It hasn’t been a great few weeks for hedge fund billionaire investor Bill Ackman.
It’s the latest Wall Street fad. No, not Gucci loafers or flashy Maseratis: corporate tax inversions.
Sometimes banks are like kids. You tell them not to climb up that tree and they do it anyway. The US banking world, for example: It has certainly gotten into some scrapes, but that doesn’t seem to stop it from taking risks.
The IPO market is relishing one of its most productive periods in years, with splashy deals like GoPro’s roughly $430 million initial public offering keeping technology bankers particularly busy. Year to date, tech deals have just surpassed the $25.4 billion raised in all of 2012 (the same year of Facebook’s $16 billion offering).
While global institutions like HSBC have found much to complain about regarding financial reform, US community banks were the ones expected to suffer most—with many in the industry arguing that scale matters and that $1 billion would become the minimum asset threshold for survival.
Can it get any worse for Wall Street’s wearied traders? It looks like it.
Financial institutions have been fined for all manner of malfeasance in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Now we can add improper faxing to the list of bad behaviors.
This was supposed to be the year that global corporate mergers and acquisitions took off, especially if you listen to the investment banks that profit from advising on the deals. Announced global M&A deals hit a seven-year high of $2.3 trillion through Aug. 4, as Quartz reported earlier this week.
