Finance and M&A News and Updates

The victims of Bernard L. Madoff's fraud includes no small number of boldface names and institutional investors. There are Hollywood moguls Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, financiers Fred Wilpon and Henry Kaufman, and actors Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. Then there were banks like HSBC and Banco Santander, and nonprofit groups including Yeshiva University and the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation.

The Persian Gulf states have taken huge strides in recent years in showing that they can be aggressive and savvy investors of their petrodollars. The collapse of a $17.4 billion joint venture with Dow Chemical is a step backward.

Over the years, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life has become a Christmas classic—a heartwarming, eye-watering parable about virtue being its own reward.The story of George Bailey, the big-hearted proprietor of Bailey Savings & Loan, is morally uncomplicated. Bailey is a generous lender and lenient collector; his rival, a miserly, hard-hearted millionaire banker named Henry Potter is an unrepentant villain who derides Bailey for his lack of business acumen and lax lending standards.

Morgan Stanley's fourth quarter wasn't as bad as it was last year, but it still wasn't good enough to please Wall Street. The bank narrowed its loss for the quarter to $2.3 billion from $3.6 billion, but the $2.34 per share loss was much wider than the 34-cent loss analysts expected. Still, it was able to report net income for the full year of $1.7 billion.Making matters worse, Moody's downgraded Morgan's senior debt rating by one notch, citing the bank's fourth quarter loss and the overall economic outlook.

There will be no party hats and noisemakers in Times Square, but today will be the start of 2009 as far as the economy is concerned. For 2009 will be a search for the bottom in the economic slump. Leading the way will be an absolute bottom in interest rates. Today, the Federal Reserve will start pulling out all the remaining stops. The drive to zero interest rates will accelerate with a cut of a half point, and possibly more, in the Fed's benchmark rate of 1 percent.