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Merrill Lynch & Co., the venerable Wall Street brokerage firm that agreed to a hasty marriage of convenience last month amid fears about its survival, said Thursday that it lost more than $5 billion. Issuing its final financial results as an independent company, Merrill Lynch reported a loss of $5.15 billion, or $5.58 a share, in the third quarter, compared to a loss of $2.24 billion, or $2.82 a share, a year ago. Merrill's net loss for the latest quarter excluded payments of $3.34 billion on preferred stock dividends, compared to $73 million of preferred dividends in the year-ago period....

Three of the biggest names on Wall Street - Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG - poised to buckle under the seismatic credit crunch pressure. The global financial system faced its biggest test in at least half a century this morning after some of the world’s leading firms took drastic emergency action in America in the face of a worsening international economic crisis. Lehman Brothers, one of the world’s biggest investment banks, was on the verge of collapse after a weekend of talks to find a willing buyer ended without success. Hank Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, led the efforts...

WSJ: Bank of America to Buy Merrill Lynch for $29/Share Ken Sweet FOXBusiness Bank of America will purchase the iconic brokerage house Merrill Lynch for $29 per share, The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site Sunday. The report comes on the heels of Bank of America (BAC: 33.74, +0.68, +2.05%) walking away from a purchase of barely-breathing Lehman Brothers (LEH: 3.65, -0.57, -13.50%) this weekend. The Journal reported that BofA would pay $44 billion, or $29 a share, for Merrill Lynch (MER: 17.05, -2.38, -12.24%). Both company's board of directors approved the deal. However, the merger is still...

Bank of America is in advanced talks to buy Merrill Lynch for at least $38.25 billion in stock, people briefed on the negotiations said on Sunday, as a means to preserve that investment bank while Lehman Brothers looks likely to collapse. A deal, at between $25 a share to $30 a share, could be announced as soon as Sunday night, these people said. Merrill shares closed at $17.05 on Friday.

Bank of America and Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. are in merger discussions, according to people familiar with the ...

Investment bank Merrill Lynch may not have to pay UK tax for decades. The Wall Street giant, which employs 5,500 in the City of London, could be eligible for a tax holiday of more than 50 years after making billions of pounds of losses on 'exotic investments.' The possibility of such a business escaping tax will astonish households struggling with their personal finances. The collapse of profits among all the banks have led to a dramatic fall in their tax burden --which means a big hole in the Treasury's books. Merrill Lynch racked up losses of £15.5billion because of the...

DAVID WEIDNER'S WRITING ON THE WALL Whoops, there goes our profit Commentary: Merrill and J.P. Morgan hint at the scale of coming damage By David Weidner, MarketWatch Last update: 12:01 a.m. EDT Aug. 14, 2008NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Big deal: the other day, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. filed its quarterly report with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Nothing unusual in that. The bank had already done the dirty work by announcing its second-quarter results on July 17. And in that report, everything was looking up. J.P. Morgan had a $2 billion profit to show. The only apparent downer was...

" NEW YORK (Reuters) - Merrill Lynch & Co posted a much larger-than-expected $4.89 billion quarterly loss on Thursday after writing down soured debt, and unveiled plans to sell billions of dollars of assets -- including a part of its lucrative brokerage business -- to shore up capital. The loss was the fourth straight for Wall Street's third-largest investment bank, and was more than twice as big as analysts expected. Chief Executive John Thain called the quarter "difficult and disappointing." Thain joined Merrill in November to turn around a company that had been rocked by massive write-downs of complex debt...

Merrill Lynch has warned that the United States could face a foreign "financing crisis" within months as the full consequences of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage debacle spread through the world. The country depends on Asian, Russian and Middle Eastern investors to fund much of its $700bn (£350bn) current account deficit, leaving it far more vulnerable to a collapse of confidence than Japan in the early 1990s after the Nikkei bubble burst. Britain and other Anglo-Saxon deficit states could face a similar retreat by foreign investors. "Japan was able to cut its interest rates to zero," said Alex...

Merrill may write down $5.4 billion in Q2: Lehman By Elinor Comlay and Tenzin Pema Fri Jun 27, 9:45 AM ET Merrill Lynch & Co (MER.N) will likely incur $5.4 billion of write-downs in the second quarter, mainly from its exposure to bond insurers, said an analyst at Lehman Brothers. The report, coupled with a discussion of the write-downs on CNBC, prompted Merrill stock to fall 2.5 percent to $32.23 and highlighted concerns the broker may need to raise capital. Lehman analyst Roger Freeman raised his write-down view by $3 billion for Merrill, making his estimate the highest among Wall...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- A network of lenders, brokers and opaque financing vehicles outside traditional banking that ballooned during the bull market now is under siege as regulators threaten a crackdown on the so-called shadow banking system.Big brokerage firms like Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers , Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch, which some say are the biggest players in this non-bank financial network, may have the most to lose from stricter regulation. The shadow banking system grew rapidly during the past decade, accumulating more than $10 trillion in assets by early 2007. That made it roughly the same size as the...

April 13, 2008 US banks Citigroup and Merrill Lynch reveal fresh $15bn loss Iain Dey CITIGROUP and Merrill Lynch will heap further pain on Wall Street this week as they reveal additional sub-prime write-downs totalling $15 billion (£7.6 billion) or more. In another sign of the intense pressure on leading banks, Deutsche Bank is attempting to offload some of its €35 billion (£28 billion) of toxic debt to a consortium of private-equity firms. Huge exposure to American mortgages is expected to result in Citi taking a $10 billion hit to its accounts, dragging the bank to a first-quarter loss of...

Merrill Lynch sues bond insurer over deal terminations Stephanie Baum 20 Mar 2008 Merrill Lynch has filed a lawsuit over a bond insurer in the latest sign of tensions in the structured credit markets. Merrill contends that XL Capital Assurance, a monoline insurer owned by Security Capital Assurance, improperly terminated seven credit default swap contracts insuring collateralized debt obligations, according to its suit filed in the US District Court in the Southern District of Manhattan. Credit default swaps are contracts that offer insurance against default. Collateralized debt obligations pool together bonds or asset-backed securities and slice them up into tranches...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The fat compensation packages of three U.S. CEOs whose companies are being hammered by the widening mortgage crisis came under harsh criticism on Friday at a congressional hearing on executive pay. In the last two quarters of 2007 alone, the three executives' firms lost more than $20 billion on investments in subprime and other risky mortgages, said the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Operations Committee. Yet the three took home fortunes in 2007 -- $120 million for Countrywide Financial Corp CEO Angelo Mozilo; a $161 million retirement package for ex-Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O'Neal; and $39.5...

Federal criminal prosecutors are stepping up their interest in Wall Street's mortgage-securities activities. The Justice Department's U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, based near Wall Street, has notified the Securities and Exchange Commission that it wants to see information the agency is gathering in its investigation of Merrill Lynch & Co., according to people familiar with the matter. The SEC is examining, among other things, whether the securities firm booked inflated prices of mortgage bonds it held despite knowledge that the valuations had dropped, the people say.

The recession in housing has spilled over to the rest of the economy, in our view. We now expect an outright contraction in economic activity in the first three quarters of 2008. This downturn should be led by consumer spending. GDP is expected to average 0.8% in 2008 (was 1.6% before) and only pick up to 1.0% in 2009, in spite of $175bn in fiscal stimulus and aggressive easing of monetary policy by the Federal Reserve. As we saw in prior post-bubble de-leveraging episodes, the healing process takes time as the bad debts get extinguished and balance sheets repaired. Home...

US recession is already here, warns Merrill By James Quinn, Wall Street Correspondent Last Updated: 12:05am GMT 08/01/2008 The US has entered its first full-blown economic recession in 16 years, according to investment bank Merrill Lynch. Merrill, itself one of Wall Street's biggest casualties of the sub-prime crisis, is the first major bank to declare that a recession in the world's biggest economy is now underway. David Rosenberg, the bank's chief North American economist, argues that a weakening employment picture and declining retail sales signal the economy has tipped into its first month of recession. Mr Rosenberg, who is well-respected...

Merrill Lynch & Co., in a bid to slash its exposure to risky mortgage-backed securities, has engaged in deals with hedge funds that may have been designed to delay the day of reckoning on losses, people close to the situation said. The transactions are among the issues likely to be examined by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC is looking into how the Wall Street firm has been valuing, or "marking," its mortgage securities and how it has disclosed its positions to investors, a person familiar with the probe said. Regulators are scrutinizing whether Merrill knew its mortgage-related problem...

A former junior banker at Merrill Lynch yesterday confessed to of a brazen insider-trading scheme that also enlisted an exotic dancer, a retired Croatian seamstress, a New Jersey mailman and moles inside a BusinessWeek print shop..........the Trans-Atlantic stock fraud scam that racked up $6.7 million in ill-gotten gains....... Trading on tips from the young banker on six big mergers netted $6.4 million of the illicit profits, making it by far the most lucrative scheme concocted by the insider-trading ring's masterminds, Eugene Plotkin, 27, and David Pajcin, 29. The pair, who met while they both worked at Goldman Sachs, recruited Shpigelman...

GREENSBORO -- As executor of his parents' estate, former Greensboro resident Steve Israel had the only checkbook to the Israel Family Partnership Account with the Merrill Lynch office here. Only he could write checks on the account, which his parents, Archie and Adelaide Israel, of Greensboro, opened in 1998, six years before their deaths in late 2004. Steve Israel received an e-mail in January from a Greensboro accountant working on the account's taxes. The accountant wondered about a multitude of transactions -- totaling $26,345 -- on the Merrill Lynch account statement.