Help plan the Financial Women’s Association New Jersey’s 2008 agenda, while meeting and networking with new people.
The Committee On Women In Law is presenting a multi day event on helping women further their legal careers. Under New York’s MCLE rule, this program has been approved for a total of 4.5 credit hours, 3.0 in skills and 1.5 in Ethics for all attorneys including those newly admitted.
The Dynamic Women in Business conference is a powerful forum for women to learn, share, and inspire one another.
Investment Week has joined forces with HSBC Investments to present a panel of top fund managers in front of an audience of intermediaries and discretionary advisers.
The Financial Women’s Association is offering a fast-paced workshop to enhance and fine-tune your leadership skills. The speakers panel will include: Carol Frohlinger, Jane Linder, Stacie Nevadomski Berdan, and Shoya Zichy.
The news on Wall Street has been pretty grim, no doubt about it. Here, in the manner in which we would normally bow our heads for a moment of silence, we recap the avalanche of write-downs and looming layoffs announced by major financial institutions this week.
On Tuesday, January 15, 2008, Citi dropped the bomb that it would be writing down $18 billion in the fourth quarter because of its subprime mortgage exposure. The Glass Hammer published an article in November about star analyst Meredith Whitney of CIBC World Markets and her prediction that Citi would be forced to cut dividends in the wake of the subprime debacle. At the time, this call was met with stiff denials by Gary Crittenden, Citi’s CFO, during a November 5 conference call and a general backlash by other investors. However, as reported in the New York Times Dealbook blog, Citi was forced to eat a huge slice of humble pie yesterday when it announced that it would cut its dividend by a whopping 41% in order to shore up capital.
Oh, and as if that weren’t bad enough, Citi is likely to announce job cuts of about 4,000 positions, many of which will be in investment banking. That would follow the bank’s announcement that it was cutting 17,000 jobs in April 2007. At the end of 2006, Citi had about 327,000 employees.
Despite Bank of America’s $4 billion deal to buy floundering mortgage giant Countrywide this week, the bank announced a 32% drop in third quarter profits, a 93% hit to investment banking profits and big layoffs to come. In light of this, in a much maligned and scoffed at cost-cutting measure, BofA released a memo indicating that it would no longer be stocking its office kitchenettes with the following items, “soup, crackers, flavored teas, sugar free hot chocolate, and soap.” What? This American banking giant can’t spring for soap anymore? Can a sister get some Purell around here? However, BofA spin managers responded to the outrage by promising to bring back the soap. Still, this sign of the times is too depressing.
Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? If so, it’s probably in the form of a sovereign wealth fund. Citigroup and Merrill Lynch both announced on Tuesday that they would raise a combined $19.1 billion from government-backed funds in Korea and Kuwait. Never thought you’d see the day when Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Singapore, Korea and China joined forces to bail out America’s largest investment banks? Well then you might be the only one on Wall Street who’s having a lucky day.
Euromoney is sponsoring the premier investment event for the CEE region. Speakers will include Dr. Hannes Androsch, & Dr. Leszek Balcerowicz.
Silicon Valley is buzzing about women CEOs in tech, although whether there are more—or fewer—CEOs seems to be in question.
Last week, USA Today ran a piece highlighting how many more opportunities there are for women in technology and profiled several women CEOs in top tech firms. On the very same day, the San Jose Mercury News ran a piece entitled “Female CEOs At Top Silicon Valley Tech Firms Down To Zero.”
Is this an issue of perception, accounting, or semantics?
IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, sponsored by IEEE Communications Society, is a major annual international conference organized with the objective of bringing together researchers, developers, and practitioners from academia and industry working in all areas of consumer communications and networking.
As if the financial industry hasn’t seen enough of a market shake-up in recent months, a new futures exchange is set to launch in early 2008. The exchange, backed by heavy hitters in the capital markets, will serve as a low-cost alternative in the existing futures market. The exchange will start trading U.S. Treasury futures and then move into currencies, stock indexes and wheat products.
Founders of this new venture were concerned that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group, a working collaboration of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, had cornered the futures market and inflated prices. To bring competition to the futures industry, Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Barclays Capital, Credit Suisse, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank have formed an alliance to spawn this yet unnamed futures exchange.
Other investors in this exchange include the online company e-Speed, which will provide electronic trading platforms and three Chicago based trading firms: Peak 6, Getco and the hedge fund giant Citadel.
Robert Hamada, a former Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) director, recently spoke with the Chicago Tribune about the new exchange. He said that the founders of the new futures exchange wanted to prohibit the CME Group from becoming a “monolithic monopolist.”
“What keeps prices down is the potential for competition,” Hamada explained.
While many believe the industry needs this competition to thrive, others see this move as a sign of a major industry overhaul.
John Lothian, a futures broker, reminded investors of Cantor Fitzgerald’s attempt at forming an exchange in 1999 and of BrokerTech, a combined effort by investment banks in 2001. Both failed as competitors but did prove successful as change agents.
The Glass Hammer
Executive coaching, leadership development coaching and career navigation coaching for women looking to develop, advance and lead in top roles.