Goldman Sachs will not commit to future bonus cuts

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.

Goldman Sachs will not commit to cutting compensation, despite a surprise
reduction in pay for executives, including Lloyd Blankfein, the global head
of the bank.

The Wall Street bank paid Mr Blankfein, the chairman and chief executive a $9
million (£5.8 million) bonus in restricted stock for 2009, despite reporting
a record $13.4 billon net profit.

Read more

Exxon Mobil sees drop in profits

US oil giant Exxon Mobil has reported a 23% drop in profits, but the result was better than many analysts had expected.Exxon made a net profit of $6.05bn (£3.8bn) in the fourth quarter of 2009, compared with the $7.82bn it made in the same period in 2008. Weak demand for fuel in the global economic slowdown hurt the company’s refining business. In the whole of 2009, Exxon made a profit of £19.28bn, less than half of what it made in 2008. Shares in Exxon Mobil rose 1.9% to $65.67 when trading began in New York. Last week, Chevron reported a 37% drop in quarterly profit. Fellow oil giants BP and Royal Dutch Shell also have figures out later this week. Better productionExxon said exploration and capital spending rose by 4% in 2009. “Our financial strength provided us with the foundation to continue investing in new energy supplies to help meet global energy demand and to fuel economic growth,” said Exxon chairman Rex Tillerson. “Capital and exploration spending was $27.1bn in 2009, another record year, and in line with our longer-term plan.” Oil and gas production increased nearly 2% in the fourth quarter, which was better than some analysts had forecast, while revenues rose 6% to $89.84bn. “The two things I like to see drive an earnings beat are better production and better margins,” said Phil Weiss, oil analyst at Argus Research. “They certainly got the production.”

Print Sponsor



Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Bank of America sees $194m loss

Wall Street giant Bank of America has reported a net loss of $194m (£120m) in the last three months of 2009.That compared with a loss of $1.8bn in the same period a year earlier. It added that it had repaid the $45bn government bail-out money it had received, but taking the impact of this into account, it made a loss of $5.2bn. Earlier this week, fellow US bank JP Morgan Chase reported a profit of $3.3bn, while Citigroup said it made a $7.6bn loss in the final quarter. For the whole of 2009, Bank of America made a net profit of $6.3bn, an increase on the $4bn profit it made in 2008. ‘Disappointing’ loss”While it’s disappointing to report a loss for the fourth quarter, there were a number of important accomplishments worth noting,” said chief executive Brian Moynihan. “First, we repaid the American taxpayer, with interest, for the Tarp [Troubled Asset Relief Program] investment. “Second, we have taken steps to strengthen our balance sheet through successful securities offerings. And third, all of our non-credit businesses recorded positive contributions to our results.” Bank of America received the Tarp money after agreeing to buy Merrill Lynch in September 2008 in a deal worth $50bn. The chief executive at the time, Ken Lewis, was widely criticised for going ahead with the purchase of Merrill, and he left the bank at the end of 2009. His successor, Mr Moynihan, was upbeat looking at the year ahead. “As we look at 2010, we are encouraged by signs the economy is improving, as we have seen in the stabilisation of our credit costs, particularly in the consumer businesses,” he said. “That said, economic conditions remain fragile and we expect high unemployment levels to continue, creating an ongoing drag on consumer spending and growth.”

Print Sponsor



Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

JP Morgan infuriates governments in U.S. and UK by paying out billions in bonuses

By
Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 5:14 PM on 15th January 2010

JP Morgan Chase angered politicians on both sides of the Atlantic today by revealing  a record pay bonanza for thousands of its investment bankers.The average £232,269 salary and bonus awards for last year are the most generous in the 115-year history of the Wall Street giant.It said it had put aside £5.7 billion to be paid to its 24,654 investment bankers around the world, of which 4,000 work in London.The staggering deals were revealed just hours after President Barack Obama attacked huge bank bonuses as ‘obscene’.The U.S. government’s tough stance has piled pressure on Gordon Brown to take a similarly robust position on bank bonuses.
Profits: Pedestrians walk past the JP Morgan Chase headquarters in New York as the company reported a big jump in net profit in the fourth quarter

JP Morgan Chase’s pays deals emerged as it revealed mega
profits of £7.18bn last year - more than double its
profit in 2008.
Dozens
of JP Morgan’s ‘Masters of the Universe’ employees will have received
at least £1million in pay and bonuses.
News of the massive bonuses triggered an angry response from
British politicians and union leaders who said there was ’something
fundamentally wrong’ when bankers could be paid so much so soon after
bringing the world economy to its knees.TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: ‘These obscene bonuses paid so soon after the world’s taxpayers had to rescue the banking system show that there is something fundamentally wrong in the relationship between banking and the rest of the economy.’Banks are meant to support society, but instead taxpayers’ support guarantees that whatever happens to the economy banks will continue to pay gigantic bonuses.’The best way to reintegrate banks into society is to make sure they pay a proper contribution through a transaction tax - a solution rapidly gaining support both here and abroad.’
Although it was JP Morgan’s largest-ever ‘compensation’ pot, it
actually represented 33 per cent of its income, compared to 62 per cent
last year.

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon at the Congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on Wednesday
In total the world’s biggest banks are expected to pay out about $100 billion (£61.3bn) in salaries and bonuses for last year.
Profits on Wall Street and in the City have been boosted by a loss
of competition after the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers
and by a massive increase in trading of Government debt issued to save
the world economy from a second Great Depression. 
JP Morgan Chase has emerged as one of the main winners from the
financial crisis, swallowing up failed rivals Bear Stearns and
Washington Mutual in 2008.
The bank took $25 billion (£15 billion) from the US Government at
the height of the meltdown - which it has since paid back - but avoided
the worst of the sub-prime meltdown and never posted a quarterly loss.
Chief executive Jamie Dimon however added that he remained ‘cautious’ over the outlook.
‘While we are seeing some stability in delinquencies, consumer
credit costs remain high, and weak employment and home prices persist,’
he said.The bank’s total revenue did fall below expectations and the company’s stock fell 78 cents to $43.91 in premarket trading.

Read more

From bad to worse: Broken bank RBS lost another £2.2bn in last three months

By
Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 2:37 PM on 07th November 2009

Another 10,000 jobs at the state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland could be axed, its boss admitted yesterday. This adds to the almost 20,000 redundancies already been announced, and comes in the same week that the Government agreed to pay a further £33.5billion to keep the troubled bank afloat - bringing the total cost of the RBS bailout to more than £50billion.The bank has agreed to abide by government rules that none of its investment bankers will get a cash bonus.
Debt trap: RBS swung to a third-quarter net loss of £1.8 billion from a net profit of £871 million a year earlier
RBS boss Stephen Hester said he was ‘upbeat, though realistic’ about the bank‘s futureBut hundreds could get share packages worth millions of pounds. Some of the shares could be cashed in as early as next year. Accounts released yesterday suggest that its 20,000 investment bankers will earn an average of £152,000 each in pay and bonus for this year. Its high flyers will see their packagesrun into the millions. RBS chief executive-Stephen Hester defended the job cuts, arguing he needs to strip out costs to return the bank to profitability to pay back the Government for the bailout. But unions are incensed that the bank is causing further misery among employees by sacking workers in the run-up to Christmas. Mr Hester said yesterday that RBS was ‘well over half way through’ on what it had to do on jobs, suggesting there could be as many as 15,000 further cuts in the pipeline. He refused to deny thousands more jobs could go, saying only: ‘I have been adamant that the first people to hear are my staff.’ The RBS accounts revealed that the bank lost £1.5billion in the third quarter of this year, compared with a £2.3billion profit in the same period a year ago.

Share this article:

Here’s what readers have had to say so far. Why not add your thoughts below,
or debate this issue live on our message boards.

Read more

Nintendo profits plunge as Wii sales tumble

AFP

Published: 8:55AM GMT 29 Oct 2009

The company, which was initially relatively resilient to the global economic
downturn, said net profit in the six months to the end of September fell
52pc to 69.5bn yen (£470m) on revenue down 34.5pc to 548bn yen.

Nintendo, which competes with Sony and Microsoft in the multi-billion dollar
video game industry, sold 5.75m Wii machines worldwide in the period, down
from 10.1m a year earlier.

“There were fewer software titles that briskly drove hardware sales this
six-month period,” the company said in a statement.

Read more

Morgan Stanley beats third quarter forecasts

Morgan Stanley today ended a three-quarter losing streak when it reported an
expectation-beating third-quarter net profit of $757 million (£456 million).

The bank‘s institutional securities division, which includes investment
banking, reported an $857 million net profit. Investment banking revenue was
up 11 per cent to $1 billion.

However, revenue from trading with the bank’s own money was down 77 per cent
to $2.9 billion, despite an increase in the amount of risk Morgan Stanley
was taking in the third quarter.

Read more

British director Timothy Summers to leave TNK-BP venture

The most senior British executive at TNK-BP, the British oil group’s Russian
joint venture, is set to leave this autumn for personal reasons, the company
announced yesterday.

Timothy Summers, TNK-BP’s chief operating officer and a former employee of BP,
will step down in mid-October. He will be replaced at the joint venture by
Bill Schrader, president of BP Azerbaijan.

Mr Summers emerged as a pivotal figure last year during a battle for control
of TNK-BP, Russia’s third-biggest crude producer, between BP and AAR, a
consortium of four Soviet-born businessmen that is the British company’s
50-50 joint venture partner.

Read more

Magna plans to sack 20% of Vauxhall workforce

The Canadian bidder for Vauxhall is planning to dismiss about a fifth of the carmaker’s workforce if it wins control of the group, leaked documents revealed yesterday.
In bid proposal documents shown to the German Government and the head of GM Europe on July 17, Magna International said that it planned to sack 830 workers at the Vauxhall plant in Ellesmere Port, and another 354 at Luton. It is not known whether the documents are final proposals. It also emerged yesterday that executives at General Motors in Detroit have rejected an offer by BAIC, the Chinese bidder, leaving only two parties in the race for its European business.
Although unions had expected that Magna and its main rival bidder, RHJ International, the Belgian industrials group, each planned to sack about 10,000 workers across GM Europe as a whole, it had not been made public how the axe would fall geographically.
The ownership of Vauxhall was thrown into doubt this summer when General Motors, the American owner of GM Europe, filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States.

The near-collapse of GM forced the carmaker to break itself up and put its European business up for sale. However, no bidder will touch the European business without state aid from countries where the carmaker operates. It is also not clear whether Magna has made any commitments to the remaining Vauxhall workers, although it has said that it would keep both factories open until at least 2013.
According to the documents, Magna also reckons that it can return GM Europe to profitability by 2011 and that workers will share 10 per cent of profits. Should the job cuts go ahead, pro-rata, the British workforce would suffer the same proportion of redundancies as the businesses across Europe. Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, is pressing General Motors to indicate which bid it favours by the start of next week.
• Ford made a $2.3 billion (£1.39 billion) second-quarter net profit, up from the company’s worst quarterly loss of $8.7 billion last year, and said that it was on track to break even in two years. The company relied on one-off items, including a $3.4 billion gain from debt reduction, to generate the profit after an $11 billion fall in revenue to $27.2 billion.

Emerging markets thirsty for Coke

Published: 8:19PM BST 21 Jul 2009

The US soft-drink giant said it had net profit of $2.04bn (£1.24bn) in the
second quarter, up 43pc from a year ago when heavy charges were taken. Unit
case volume growth increased 33pc in India and 14pc in China, while“sound”
growth occurred in Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Thailand, Korea and
Northwest Europe, it said. Volumes were down in North America and Europe.

Next Page »