Shareholders at Wachovia and National City — two banks hit especially hard by the mortgage disaster — just approved takeovers of the banks by stronger rivals. This kind of distressed deal could be a major theme for next year, as troubled companies link up to weather the financial crisis,...

Break-ups are never easy. But in the split between Morgan Stanley and Discover Financial Services, there are some particularly hard feelings on both sides. Morgan Stanley and its former subsidiary, Discover, are suing each other over the spoils of a $2.75 billion legal settlement that Discover colle...

With losses at $3.3 billion tied to the alleged Bernard Madoff scam, clients of Tremont Group Holdings may not be the biggest money-losers, but that doesn’t make the experience any less shocking for its clients. The Wall Street Journal reported that the experience of Tremont, which is part of ...

Since Bernard L. Madoff was arrested 11 days ago in connection with a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, the Fairfield Greenwich Group has portrayed itself as an unwitting victim of the fraud, the biggest of Mr. Madoff’s many losers. Clients of Fairfield, a secretive hedge fund advisory company, lost $7.3 ...

Daniel Alpert, managing director at Westwood Capital, an investment bank in New York, offers this view of the government’s bailout of General Motors and Chrysler: As the game clock is running out on the Bush administration, it has once again faded back to its own goal line and punted the ball ...

Bernand L. Madoff’s giant Ponzi scheme has created legions of losers across the world. These include huge European banks, charitable organizations, Eliot Spitzer’s family and many, many others. But a few people seem be getting a boost from the debacle. One of these may be Levi Touger, wh...

How in the world can someone make $50 billion disappear? That is one of the many baffling questions hanging over the scandal involving Bernard L. Madoff and his suddenly infamous asset-management business. It is also the inspiration for a game from Breakingviews, in which anyone can try his or her h...

American banks have steadily increased their inventory of hard-to-value assets, or level three assets, with the biggest institutions holding $610 billion of them in the third quarter, The Financial Times reported. That 15.5 percent growth, set off in part by the near-impossibility of selling toxic m...

Creditors of the Tribune Company are leaving a margin for error, Breakingviews says. The company’s senior buyout loans are trading at about 35 cents on the dollar. Breakingviews, assuming that is a proxy for Tribune’s enterprise value, the total of its market capitalization and debt, calculates ...

Update: John Thain will not receive a bonus from Merrill. Andrew M. Cuomo is watching Merrill Lynch very closely. On the day that the investment bank was reported to be weighing a $10 million bonus payment to its chief executive, John A. Thain, the New York attorney general weighed in. It wasn’...