An amazing showing from the Turkish national team that makes me proud!
Czechs floored by Turkey turnaround
by Peter Sanderson from Stade de Genève
Two late Nihat Kahveci strikes booked ten-man Turkey a place in the quarter-finals of UEFA EURO 2008™ in an exhilarating climax to their Group A match against Czech Republic in Geneva. Gripping finale Jan Koller gave the Czechs a 34th-minute advantage with a thumping header before Jaroslav Plašil turned in Libor Sionko’s cross to double the lead two minutes past the hour. Turkey gave themselves a fighting chance thanks to Arda Turan’s low effort before Nihat capitalised on a Petr Čech mistake to level three minutes from time. With a penalty shoot-out looming, Nihat galloped clear to send Turkey through with a spectacular finish, although there was still time for goalkeeper Volkan Demirel to be sent off for shoving Koller. Tuncay Şanlı took the gloves as Fatih Terim’s men set up a quarter-final against Croatia.
My previous posts on this:
JP Morgan to buy Bear Stearns for $2 ashare
Credit Crunch, Private EQuity and venture Capital
It is in evitable..
From the New York Times:
By JENNY ANDERSON and LOUISE STORY
Richard S. Fuld tried for months to persuade Wall Street that Lehman Brothers, the investment bank he runs, could weather the storm in the financial markets. But by last Wednesday his time had run out: Confidence in Lehman seemed to be slipping away.
In the days that followed Mr. Fuld scrambled to secure a financial lifeline for his hard-pressed investment bank and avert the kind of panic that brought down Bear Stearns. The result, announced Monday morning, was $6 billion in fresh capital from an array of blue-chip investors, enough to shore up Lehman, at least for now.
But the news also came with a stunning admission: Lehman Brothers, whose veteran executives pride themselves on their ability to manage risks, lost a staggering $2.8 billion in the second quarter, its first deficit since going public in 1994. The loss far exceeded even the most pessimistic forecasts and reflected a twin blow of soured assets and bad trades.
What is more, hedges that Lehman had put in place to cushion potential losses from mortgage investments went wrong, adding to the red ink, rather than minimizing it. The news heightened fears that other banks might run into more trouble.
The developments mark a stark reversal of fortune for Lehman and for Mr. Fuld, its longtime chairman and chief executive. Mr. Fuld earned accolades — and more than $40 million in 2007 — for steering Lehman through tumultuous markets last year and, two months ago, he proclaimed that “the worst is over” in the markets.
Instead, a crisis of confidence again threatened to engulf his firm. Shares of Lehman slid week after week and doubts grew about whether bank, one of the smallest players on Wall Street, could survive as an independent firm.
The debate over Lehman’s future is unlikely to be put to rest by the infusion of new capital, which comes after Lehman raised $8 billion this year. The stock market rendered a harsh judgment on the latest deal on Monday. Shares of Lehman fell $2.81, to $29.48, bringing its loss for the last year to 60 percent.
Erin Callan, Lehman’s chief financial officer, said Monday that the bank had moved aggressively to reduce its leverage, which some investors feared might undermine the firm. Since April, Lehman has sold about $130 billion in assets, reducing its exposure to mortgages and loans used to finance leveraged buyouts.
To shore up its finances further, the bank will sell $4 billion of common stock priced at $28 a share and $2 billion of preferred stock that will covert into common stock in three years. Buyers include the state pension fund of New Jersey and C. V. Starr & Company, the investment fund by Maurice R. Greenberg, the former head of the American International Group. Investors in the deal said they were reassured by Lehman’s actions.
“I think they’ve done a pretty good job conservatively marking down the things that should be marked down,” Mr. Greenberg told CNBC.
He said further markdowns were possible, but that would not “harm the company in any great degree.”
But Lehman may not be out of the woods. The firm has been engaged in a public battle with short-sellers who have questioned the way Lehman values assets that are difficult to trade, like mortgages and private equity stakes. Moody’s Investors Service downgraded its outlook on Lehman to negative from stable on Monday. Fitch Ratings cut Lehman’s credit rating.
And Lehman’s savvy hedging activities, which had helped the firm avoid the big blowups that rocked many other banks in late 2007 and early 2008, failed to work during the second quarter.
While the firm took a smaller total, or gross write down in the second quarter — $4 billion, compared to $5.3 billion in the first quarter — its hedging, especially hedges on commercial mortgage related positions, failed. That meant Lehman wrote down $4.1 billion in the most recent period compared with only $2.4 billion for the first quarter.
Mr. Fuld has piloted Lehman Brothers through rough waters before. But he also helped transform the bank into a player in the mortgage market, a position that cast doubt over Lehman when the mortgage crisis erupted.
Those concerns came to a head last week. Confronting the gaping second quarter loss, a team of seven executives, led by Thomas A. Russo, Lehman’s chief legal officer, left at midnight on a Saturday to fly to Asia. They met with investors in South Korea who had expressed an interest in buying a stake in the bank.
But as Lehman’s stock price plummeted anew, falling 8 percent last Monday and then 9.5 percent on Tuesday, it became clear that Lehman did not have time to negotiate such a deal. Executives in the United States, including Mr. Fuld, were courting investors at home.
Ms. Callan, also courting investors, said in an interview last week that she believed the situation would improve once Lehman released its earnings.
“I feel good that when investors are able to hear our story at earnings, the market will react well,” she said.
By Wednesday night, however, Lehman decided to announce its dismal results ahead of schedule in an effort to quell speculation about its financial health.
A marathon weekend followed. Mr. Fuld and his team prepared the earnings statement on Saturday, returned early Sunday, broke for a sandwich, and were back again at 5 a.m. Monday.
The long weekend was not without a bit of levity. On Saturday, Joseph M. Gregory, Lehman’s president and chief operating officer, arrived at the office in an unfashionable green suit.
“What are you wearing?” Mr. Fuld bellowed.
Mr. Fuld then marched Mr. Gregory from office to office on the 31st floor to show off the outfit. “It was an attempt to make people laugh,” one Lehman executive said.
An abridgement of the letter from Albert Einstein to Eric Gutkind from Princeton in January 1954, translated from German by Joan Stambaugh. It will be sold at Bloomsbury auctions on Thursday
… I read a great deal in the last days of your book, and thank you very much for sending it to me. What especially struck me about it was this. With regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common.
… The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.
In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.
Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual ‘props’ and ‘rationalisation’ in Freud’s language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things. With friendly thanks and best wishes
Yours, A. Einstein
My wife and I were at the MFA in Boston last night. The MFA School had its annual award gala and presented Julian Schnabel a Lifetime Achievement Award Medal followed by a painful 45 minute interview with the award recipient conducted by a museum person who was just too overwhelmed to know when to stop talking, a lovely dinner and the Boston premiere of his new documentary movie (Lou Reed’s) Berlin.
The surprise of the night was Berlin. I am a Schnabel fan. I know less about his art but I really liked his first movie Basquiat and his most recent movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly which I consider one of the best movies I have ever seen.
Lou Reed’s Berlin is a different animal all together. It is great concert movie shot in a warehouse in Brooklyn over a period of 4 days on a makeshift stage designed by Schnabel in front of a live audiance.
An emotionless Lou Reed center stage with movie clips that mimic the mood of the song projected in the background on top of the painted Schnabel canvases and the powerful music of the album - overall it was a delightful sensory overload well worth watching.
My wife and I sneaked in a movie tonight, Forbidden Kingdom - the martial arts flick where Jackie Chen wears a ridiculous wig. The fight scenes were excellent but the dialogue was absolutely terrible. Halfway the movie my made an amusing and wise observation:
“Martial art movies are like porn. You are not there to listen to the dialogue!”
Magid Abraham’s post on the Google Paid Click Data. Interesting read.
I have been feeding my twitter feed into tumblr and I realized it was too much noise and for me it defeated the purpose of keeping a tumblog.
All these means of self expression like blogging, tumbling and twittering seem so close to each other until you start to use them. They each fulfil a seperate and unqiue purpose and they are definitely not a substitute for one another.
I can see this getting very addictive and dangerous at the same time. I certainly had fun!
Live video can be dangerous. Especially when it’s in the wrong hands. Santo grabbed the nokia N95 on the table at lunch yesterday and started filming and it went out live via flixwagon. (disclaimer: very dorky video)
I tried to tell Santo that with great power comes great responsibility.
:)
This is what I was talking about a couple of months ago. If the banks loose in court it would spell big problem for most investment banks. They all signed up for the debt assuming they’d be able to syndicate it after the transaction closed at a premium. Now they have all these liabilities, $400B worth, which they are contractually obliged to fund.
Oh, oh…
From Market Watch:
By Riley McDermid, MarketWatch Last update: 3:45 p.m. EDT March 27, 2008
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — A Texas district court judge sided with Clear Channel Communications Inc. and ruled Thursday that a group of six investment banks cannot walk away from funding the $19 billion private-equity buyout of the nation’s largest radio-station owner.
I used to be a Celtics fan when I was growing up in Turkey. They used to broadcast select NBA games every Sunday, especially the finals in the goverment controlled TV station - TRT with all the US commercials in tact. I watched religiously, especially all the Celtics - Lakers games. Post game, I would go out to the playground and try my best to imitate “America’s green footed bird” Larry Bird - does anyone remember the Comverse commercials?
When I moved to NYC in 1987, I switched and became a Knicks fan. It was hard not to like Rick Pitino, Ewing and the untalented but scrappy New York team which against all odds made it to the playoffs with solid team work and excellent motivation and coaching from Pitino. I have been a tortured Knick fan ever since so much so that I stopped watching the NBA a few years ago just not to suffer.
The Celtics are exciting again, they are a great team with excellent coaching (remember, Doc Rivers was a Knick) without all the drama. I am watching basketball again and I love it. If I only I get to play again!
I am also finally coming to terms with living in Boston now and loving the local team. I always hated the Giants so the Patriots was easy. I am not sure if I’d ever be a Red Sox fan (I am Mets fan for sentimental reasons), and I see no shame in rooting for the Celtics again.
