May 17
Enticed by the lowest bank pricing in decades, a team of retired banking legends forming a bank in Ponte Vedra Beach are among a growing number of groups trying to make bargain deals for failed banks.
“This is a situation that only occurs once every 20 to 40 years and a process in which only a few will be invited to participate,” said BSE Management LLC in an investor package from last May recently obtained by the Atlanta Business Chronicle, a sister paper.
BSE Management is the fund for the proposed bank in Ponte Vedra Beach, Bank of the Southeast, which filed its application with the Florida Office of Financial Regulation in February. The
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Tags: Banks, Failed Banks
May 17
A top credit-rating agency says some investors are unlikely to get all of their money back in a subprime mortgage deal put together by units of Fidelity Investments and Lehman Brothers at the height of the U.S. housing crisis.
In the summer of 2007, the structured finance units of Fidelity Investments and Lehman Brothers created a $517 million debt vehicle to bet on the rapidly developing subprime mortgage crisis that later unhinged the global economy.
Lehman bet on a collapse. Fidelity’s structured finance unit, meanwhile, issued bonds through a special purpose entity called Ballyrock ABS CDO 2007-1. Investors bet that they would receive principal and interest payments on bonds essentially backed by cash-strapped homeowners with sketchy credit.
In a complex transaction known as a credit default swap, a special finance unit at Lehman indirectly paid millions of dollars in premiums to Ballyrock. L
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Tags: Investors, Investors Take
May 17
It was a heck of a time to launch a new enterprise.
When the WESST Enterprise Center opened on April 17, 2009, the economy was in a tailspin, and it’s not much better now.
But at the end of 2009, the Enterprise Center at 609 Broadway NE had 10 member companies that created 55 new jobs and had total revenue of $5.5 million and a total payroll of $2.6 million.
One company has since left the incubator, and another was purchased, said Doug Lee, director of the nonprofit WESST Enterprise Center. The remaining eight clients are in technology, health care and biotechnology. The $10 million facility is about 70 percent occupied, and Lee, who ran an incubator in Baton Rouge, La., is more than pleased.
Tags: Wesst, Wesst Incubator