Financial Week
Recent regulatory settlements by Citigroup and other big banks have set the tone for what corporate investors can expect out of the auction-rate securities mess. Bottom line, advisers say: Wait and see, but keep your lawyers on speed dial. Citi said earlier this month that it will buy back $7.5 billion in ARS from retail […]
Financial Week
While Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and UBS have said they will buy back a total of $36.7 billion in illiquid auction-rate securities, the settlement agreements focus mostly on retail investors. Those pacts leave serious questions for corporate money managers, many of whom still hold hundreds of millions of the illiquid securities. Citi, for example, said in […]
The Deal
Three years ago, an obscure Chicago-based home mortgage lender called Capital Assurance Group decided to tap the student loan market. It hired veterans in educational lending, changed its name to FinanSure LLC and unveiled various products designed to grab a chunk of the $100 billion market in loans for post-secondary education. By early 2007, FinanSure […]
Dow Jones Newswires
Securities regulators have created a special process for resolving claims related to auction-rate securities, a move that was welcomed by some who have been pressing for change in the arbitration process. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a non-governmental regulator for securities brokers and dealers, said Thursday that qualifying investors will have the option of having […]
Bloomberg
Four days before Merrill Lynch & Co. stopped supporting the auction-rate securities market and left thousands of individual investors stuck with securities they couldn’t sell, the firm’s analysts recommended clients buy. “Reports of the imminent demise of the auction market seem to be greatly exaggerated, again,” analyst Kevin Conery wrote in a Feb. 8 research […]