JPMorgan Chase & Company (JPM) is in discussions to take full control of its U.K. joint-venture partner, Cazenove Group, for about £1 billion ($1.7 billion).   JPMorgan entered into a partnership with Cazenove five years ago. At that time, JPMorgan paid about £100 million for a 50% ownership in Cazenove.   Now, JPMorgan intends to buy the remaining 50% of the investment-banking partnership for 500−525 pence per share.   Chief Executive Naguib Kheraj, the former finance chief of Barclays PLC (BCS) is running JPMorgan Cazenove since last year. Cazenove first became one of London's leading stockbrokers in the mid-1930s.   Deciding on the full acquisition of Cazenove has been crucial for Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan. Dimon organized a similar purchase of the bank’s remaining stake in Highbridge Capital Management this year.   In the last few years, JPMorgan has been able to maintain its top ...

This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Jennifer Hughes (Financial Times): Visibility improved but storms may lie ahead, November 13, 2008. The fog is beginning to lift. All year executives, analysts and investors have talked of a “lack of visibility” on the outlook for the economy, earnings and financial markets. By “visibility” they are in essence complaining about the uncertainty that clouds all forecasts all the time, but which we had increasingly managed to ignore during such a steady run of good times. Investors are becoming more confident that the fog is lifting, but that does not necessarily mean there is sunshine waiting just behind it.

• Doug Kass (TheStreet.com): Market ignorance is bliss, November 12, 2009. I do believe with some certainty that the market’s vulnerability

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U.S. stocks stayed above the threshold reached yesterday as a late-session buying helped offset weakness in banking and technology shares.  Financials dragged on stocks through the early afternoon even as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup reported better-than-expected profit reports.   However, the final fifteen minutes witnessed much of the activity as higher oil prices sent energy stocks higher and, in turn, helped the broader market.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed above the 10,000 level for the second-successive day, edging up 47 points, or 0.5%.  The S&P 500 index edged up 4 points, or 0.4% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite ended the day virtually flat.  The gains in the Dow average were led by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) whose shares jumped 2.9%.  The Windows 7 is slated for release on October 22.

Among energy stocks, Chevron (NYSE:CVX) and ExxonMobil (NYSE:XOM) shares climbed 1.6% and 1.5%, respectively, as crude prices jumped to their highest

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Kenneth D. Lewis There are many ways to view Kenneth Lewis’ eight-year reign as Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) chief executive, but two seem to hold the most landscape.

On one hand, the $130 billion he spent on acquisitions – FleetBoston Financial Corp., MBNA Corp., LaSalle Bank Corp., Countrywide Financial Corp., Charles Schwab Corp.’s (Nasdaq: SCHW) U.S. Trust private banking unit and Merrill Lynch – that more than tripled the size of Bank of America, making it the largest U.S. lender both by assets and deposits.

On the other, his open-wallet policy and the example it set forth almost perfectly encapsulates the boom, bust and nascent rebound of the U.S. housing and banking crisis – which later became the financial plague that devastated markets all over the world.

In the second half of 2007, the extent of the U.S. housing crisis began to crystallize when Countrywide’s freewheeling

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JPMorgan Chase & Company (JPM) said yesterday that it has shuffled the senior leadership of its investment banking and asset management businesses.  The bank said that Steve Black, 57, will become the executive chairman of the investment bank. Steve was previously co-CEO of the division along with Bill Winters, 48, who is leaving the company. Black will however stay on as executive chairman through the end of 2010.  Jes Staley, 53, is taking over as CEO of the investment bank after serving as head of asset management.  Mary Callahan Erdoes, 42, will replace Staley as head of asset management business after serving as CEO of the private banking operations.  According to Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan, the moves were intended to clarify the bank’s succession plans to the board and shareholders. But the timing of these changes and unexpected departure of Mr ...

The inflation/deflation debate is hot… It crackles and pops like a pine fire. But it gives off little helpful light. Abe Lincoln may have read by the light of an open fire. But when we tried it, we singed our eyebrows. It made us suspicious of Old Abe; maybe he wasn’t quite as truthful as he pretended to be. Later, we realized he was a mountebank. But that’s another story…

Today, we light a candle and try to interpret the shadows on the wall…

Yesterday, the Dow fell 81 points. Gold dropped $5 to $1009.

Will the feds succeed in causing inflation? Or will they fail? Will the dollar continue to go down? Or will it prove to be a safe haven currency in a time of deflationary trouble?

According to the papers, the feds have already done it. “Fed says recovery underway,” says a headline from yesterday’s press.

Another headline tells us that

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This post provides links to a number of thought-provoking articles I have read over the past few days that you may also find interesting.

• Richard Bernstein (Financial Times): America is for now still blowing bubbles, July 20, 2009. By preserving capacity to avoid taking pain today, the US is following the approach that led Japan into a lost decade.

• Kenneth Scott and John Taylor (The Wall Street Journal): Why toxic assets are so hard to clean up, July 21, 2009. Despite trillions of dollars of new government programs, one of the original causes of the financial crisis — the toxic assets on bank balance sheets — still persists and remains a serious impediment to economic recovery. Why are these toxic assets so difficult to deal with? We believe their sheer complexity is the core problem and that only increased transparency will

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This post provides links to a number of thought-provoking articles I have read over the past few days that you may also find of interest.

• Joseph Stiglitz (The Nation): A global recovery for a global recession, June 24, 2009. As developed countries struggle to ensure a quick recovery, they need to think of the effects of their actions on developing countries. It is time to begin the restructuring of our global economic and financial system in ways that ensure that the fruits of prosperity are more widely shared and that the system is more stable. This task will not be accomplished overnight. But it is a task that must be begun, now.

• Philip Stephens (Financial Times): Co-ordination falls away as the global crisis abates, June 26, 2009. There was a surprising degree of co-operation on the international response to

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Asian stock markets recorded sharp gains Wednesday, helped by a jump in commodity prices and hopes that the U.S. banking system is showing sings of buoyancy.  In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 stock average jumped 2.1% to 9,991.49 and the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong surged more than 4% to close at 18,785.66.  Japanese investors shrugged off a report that suggested core machinery orders, a closely watched indicator of corporate capital spending, plunged to a 22-year low in April. South Korea's benchmark Kospi jumped 3.1% and India's Sensex added 2.3%.   

Yesterday, Wall Street responded with a yawn to Obama Administration's announcement that 10 of the largest banks could repay $68 billion of government bailout cash.  Although Treasury Secretary Geithner, appearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, noted the repayment of the bailout money was a sign of "financial repair," stocks swung back and forth in a narrow range, signaling

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J.P. Morgan Chase [JPM: 32.78, 0.00 (0.00%)] was a beacon of light that the government had been waiting for this quarter. It reaffirmed its strength as a financial institution by crushing analysts projections of 32 cents, posting earnings of 40 cents a share. This news highlights a week where the banking system may have finally pulled out of its dismal performances. Goldman Sach’s [GS: 120.90, 0.00 (0.00%)], Bank of America [BAC: 8.92, 0.00 (0.00%)] and Citigroup [C: 3.07, 0.00 (0.00%)] have also produced solid earnings. However, numerous questions have arisen to the strength of these companies’ earnings. J.P Morgan, however, is not stopping at just its latest filing, and has declared that it will repay its TARP money and avoid future government subsidies.

The Earnings

The returns produced by

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