The Inquisitr » finance

Lazard CEO Bruce Wasserstein dead at 61

Kim LaCapria — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:19:36 +0000

CEO of one of the world’s largest investment banks, Lazard Ltd, has died.

Bruce Wasserstein, 61, was admitted to the hospital three days ago for arrhythmia, and was said to be in serious but stable condition. Wasserstein, a graduate of Harvard and Brooklyn native, had a 40-year run on Wall Street, brokering over 1,000 transactions worth more than $250 billion. Wasserstein worked on the Time/Warner Brothers merger, as well as the deal combining Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter. In the days before his hospitalization and eventual death, Wasserstein was working on Kraft’s bid to take over the UK’s top candy brand, Cadbury.

News of Wasserstein’s death hit press just after the bell on Wednesday. Wasserstein has an estimated net worth of over two billion dollars. He is survived by fourth wife Angela Chao, to whom he was married since January, 2009. Lazard is currently declining to comment on the death of their CEO.

[TimesOnline]

Morgan Stanley, Raters Must Face Fraud Charges

AHN — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 22:41:40 +0000

New York, NY (AHN) – Investment firm Morgan Stanley & Co. and two ratings agencies must face fraud allegations that they gave overly favorable ratings of a firm that later became one of the first to crash in the credit crisis.

Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected arguments by Morgan Stanley, Moody’s Investors Service Inc. and Standard & Poor’s Rating Services that their reports were protected by the First Amendment.

The banks and ratings firms had provided investment advice to Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and King County, WA, about purchases of notes issued by Cheyne Finance LLC between October 2004 and October 2007. Abu Dhabi and King County sued after Coyne collapsed in August 2007 and sent parent company Cheyne Finance PLC into receivership.

Cheyne had been one of the largest structured investment vehicles on the market.

According to the suit, the defendants claimed Cheyne’s financial instruments to be highly rated and safe investments when the instruments actually concealed embedded risks that caused their value to drop steeply as the mortgage market collapsed.

The banks and ratings agencies knew that the assumptions and models they used to rate the instruments were flawed, the suit contends, but never told investors.

The California Public Employees Retirement System sued Moody’s, S&P and Fitch Inc. in July on the grounds that they rated Cheyne and other SIVs excessively high, causing the pension fund to lose up to $1 billion.

The ratings firms had argued their advice was protected by the First Amendment because they were merely reporting their opinions.

The judge dismissed 10 other allegations against the firms, as well as all claims against another defendant, Bank of New York Mellon.

TweetDeck Picks Up $1.5 Million In Latest Round Of Funding

James Allen Johnson — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:40:34 +0000

Twitter desktop application TweetDeck raised several million dollars this past July and now according to SEC filings the company has just received an additional $1.5 million towards a debt raise of $1.8 million dollars.

The new funding comes after $300K round of seed funds that came in January from New York tech investor Betaworks. Betaworks is also responsible for part of the funding in this new round of cash.

Also contributing to the new round of funding is PRO Founders Capital, Danny Rimer, Index Ventures, Ron Conway and Tag Ventures. [via PaidContent]

Google Breaks Real-Time Stock Barrier

JR — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:46:43 +0000

Google is now offering real-time stock quotes on its Finance service.

The G-Team announced the launch of up-to-the-second updates on NASDAQ securities at its official blog this afternoon. Engineers say real-time data has historically been limited to subscription-based services and brokers, leaving outside sites with delays as long as 20 minutes.

Google has been working on making the information more widely accessible for months. Product managers first blogged about their efforts back in January of last year.