Merrill Lynch reported a third straight quarterly loss ($1.96 billion or $2.19 a share) as ongoing write-downs for soured mortgage investments and other bad credit bets continued. The company also said it is cutting 4,000 jobs. CEO Thain characterized the three months of the year as "probably as difficult a quarter as I've seen in my 30 years on Wall Street." !uarterly revenue fell 69% to $2.93 billion, on a combined $4.5 billion in write-downs and valuation adjustments related to CDOs. ML also detailed $2.3 billion worth of write-downs from leveraged finance and residential mortgage exposure, offset by a $2.1 billion benefit from a change in value on long-term liabilities. after taking those valuation adjustments on board, the firm reported that it still has $64.8 billion of net exposure to complex mortgage-related vehicles known as CDOs, residential mortgage securities and leveraged loans at the end of the first quarter. Amazingly the stock is UP 4.2%. Crazy crazy market.
[Source: MarketWatch]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment