This turkey is gonna fail - Lehmann brothers.

[The Buddha]

OK hopefully no tax payer $$ to bail the idiotic CDO leveraging, MBS packaging, Fake AAA rated investment crooks ...
Now here is an investment Idea ...
Buy Puts on every WS firm - Goldman, morgan stanley, schwab and every other POS included. The exception is merrill Lynch. They may be bought by B of A, more than likely for pennies on the $$$ ... So the market may have priced in their impending new $$ ... so check the $ on those puts and buy em if you can get a decent $$ on a 3 month out date. Its gonna be in the $3-4 range, and you target ~75% of their today's rate as your strike $.
As in, if they are at 50, you buy $40 puts for dec. Say it costs you 50 c per contract. That turkey drops to 4 bucks, each of those contracts will be worth 36 bucks. Heck I'd buy the 35 strike for 25 cents, I can have 2 X as much and each of those be worth 31 bucks.
Cool.
Buddha.

[GeeP]

They'll bust 'em out on Monday, I suspect.

Edit...  Make it tonight. 

WaMu's next.   

[frankieG]

well it looks good on them,  what these banks did and the brokers is very close to criminal and now they have to pay the piper.  but it is not just the banks, the mortgage brokers and Realtors are to blame too.  i mean how can you give out a no down payment mortgage where you only have to pay a portion of the interest and no principle payments?  they were relying on the housing prises to go up and up and up and that the ones that did foreclose they would get the balance back in the auction.

[The Buddha]

See the whole time bear Stearns was failing, Lehmann brothers were vehemently insisting that they had no CDO's and none of the MBS crap in any significant amount in their sheets.
The truth is, some other companies had and prolly still have more. I just think the others are better capitalised, because lehmann got impossible to raise capital once the rumours too hold. Yea they had some CDO's and MBS's ... but not a lot, and the fact that they were closely allied with BS was bad.
Oh BTW, they also got hit as the target of serious naked shorting. Which is suspected being behind Fannie and freddie too.
This whole thing is simply called marked to market. But of course they want to avoid it as much as possible. being well capitalised lets the delay work better.
Cool.
Buddha.

[frankieG]

the problem is when the financing or capital for these banks come from over seas.  that is just like the government borrowing money from china.  if the capital is kept withing the country then we are just turning it from one source to another.  when it is outside the country it is gone for good.

[The Buddha]

B of A paid 50 billion for Merrill Lynch ...
OK this is the end of the road for B of A, cos Merrill aint worth 35 cents. This on top of their countrywide purchase. I guess I am not working for them and there fore should be very very happy.
Cool.
Buddha.

[spc]

An financial analyst I know said now is the time to get the hell away from BofA and ML..........that is if they don't get rid of you first, BofA should be doing a little house cleaning on non-producing accounts any minute now.