Africa Israel USA, the American arm of Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev's company, was one of the top real estate players when the bubble was at its biggest. Which is to say a lot of expensive investments—The Apthorp, the old Times Building, the MetLife clock tower building on Madison Square Park—have since soured.
Richard Marin was not Read More
The Federal Reserve's $3.3 trillion in bailout maneuvering during the past three years of financial apocalypse has been complicated, and so it's difficult to isolate one particular "winner" from the many, many institutions who benefited from the central bank's largesse. But let's give it a shot anyway.
According to Bloomberg, "Bank of America Corp. and Read More
"Have you ever noticed," the chairman of Citigroup, Richard D. Parsons, asked The Observer this Monday evening, "that in the NFL, or in the NBA, or in Major League Baseball, this guy was a failure at Cleveland, and then he becomes the coach in Houston? These guys just move around from one team to another. Read More
"Are you a bee? Do you like to sting people?" a handsome banking executive in a merlot-colored suit growls to his protégé. It is early afternoon in the third-floor offices of a midtown skyscraper, the News Corporation headquarters, and select middle-aged men are watching an advanced screening of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the Oliver Read More
"My entire family, we try not to dwell on or think about the events of the last two or three years," Ralph Cioffi, the former Bear Stearns hedge fund manager, said on a recent weekday. He was sitting in a low-rise office complex next to a car wash in suburban New Jersey. "I guess if Read More
With few exceptions, many of the CEOs and senior Wall Street executives who oversaw the financial crisis have taken their exit, having been fired or having the foresight to leave before they could get canned. Alan "Ace" Greenberg, the former chairman and CEO of Bear Stearns, is not among them. The 83-year-old has been working Read More
Under the leadership of Bear Stearns' refugee Alan Schwartz, investment bank Guggenheim Partners is apparently busting at the seams.
The Chicago- and New York-based investment firm, which manages more than $100 billion in assets, has hired commercial real estate brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle to locate substantially more office space-about 150,000 square feet-for its New Read More
Even though it took Alex Reyfman, the former head of credit derivatives research for Bear Stearns, four price cuts before he finally sold his Upper West Side co-op, he ended up getting only $540,000 less than his first asking price.
Another former Bear Stearns executive won't be as lucky.
Even if most of New York’s well-heeled homeowners have figured out that their exceptionally huge real estate isn’t worth quite what they once imagined, a few are having a hard time making the adjustment. They’re like smiley Dutch florists in post-bubble 1638.
Trump Park Avenue, for example, that beautiful old hotel-turned-condo, hasn’t had any price Read More
House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall StreetBy William D. CohanDoubleday, 468pp, $27.95
Four years ago, on a grayish morning in late May, I left my Brooklyn home and made my way to Central Synagogue on Manhattan’s East Side. I came thither to pay my last respects to Read More
Wall Street Journal reporter Kate Kelly didn’t know what to expect the week before last when she opened her advance copy of House of Cards, the new book by William D. Cohan on the downfall of Bear Stearns. Would it be great or awful? A clip job or a robust work of original Read More
We're guessing the Read More
With the announcement last week that its top seven executives would forgo annual bonuses for 2008, Goldman Sachs continues to demonstrate why it has always stood out from the rest of Wall Street as a leader that represents the best in capitalism. By giving up tens of millions of dollars in compensation, Goldman’s chief executive, Read More
Barely two weeks ago, The Observer wrote about Sheridan Mitchell Lorenz (daughter of Texas natural-gas billionaire George Mitchell), Alice R. Gottesman (daughter of Warren Buffett's billionaire friend David Gottesman) and Roy Judelson (son of Gulf & Western co-founder David Judelson) all buying new Manhattan real estate. And who could forget January's news that Hummer Read More
But that’s not the way things are. Read More
