Facebook Worth $50b After Goldman Deal While everyone was working up clever holiday status updates on Facebook, the company was working up a deal with Goldman Sachs that places its value at $50b. NYT Dealbook’s report on the topic also previews the year’s hottest tech companies, and StockTwits $FBOOK feed will keep you up to [...]

This video is an entertaining take on quantitative easing. Will be funny to most because of its populist take, and hilarious to those who buy this week’s GOP talking points on QE2. (thanks to Brian M for sending)

MBS Reactions To BofA & GMAC Resuming Foreclosures Bank of America and GMAC are the home foreclosure processes that were frozen by documentation concerns. The WSJ reported that “Bank of America Corp. reopened 100,000 foreclosure actions, declaring that it had found no significant problems in its procedures for seizing homes. GMAC Mortgage, a lender and [...]

Finreg Summary For Lenders The Financial Reform Bill passed the Senate, and will no doubt be signed by President Obama. It is 2,300 pages. From my limited view, there are hundreds of thousands of questions for regulators and investors to answer in the next several months (at least), and most large mortgage companies are doing [...]

The first of three 1Q2010 GDP readings came in today at +3.2%, lower than 4Q’s +5.6% reading but still seen as a positive economic growth number, especially since consumer spending was +3.6% vs. +1.6% in 4Q. Last quarter, it became official that we’ve had two consecutive quarters of GDP growth—following four consecutive quarters of economic [...]

This guest post from a hedge fund exec does a good job of explaining Goldman’s regulatory/legal issues in terms we can all understand…

Bloomberg scores high marks for simply reporting and not editorializing. Which is why this picture of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein they’ve been running repeatedly all over their site for the past 1.5 weeks raises an eyebrow (or causes one to furrow). Sure you could argue this is editorializing, especially when they used it in [...]

Anyone who’s got hardline opinions on the SEC’s case against Goldman Sachs should read The Big Picture’s “10 Things You Don’t Know (or were misinformed) About The GS Case.” As usual, Barry Ritholtz’s hardline opinions are better supported than most of the other chatter out there.

Michael Lewis just published his take on the SEC suit against Goldman. Normally Lewis’ unique ability is to discuss complex market topics in a way that presents both sides of the story even when it’s clear which side he’s taking. This piece feels like more of a populist take, and that was the same impression [...]

Goldman, US Bank Earnings Goldman announced its 1st quarter earnings today. Earnings rose 91% in the quarter, to $3.46 billion, up from $1.81 billion in the same period last year, while revenues increased 36 percent to $12.78 billion, up from $9.42 billion in the quarter a year ago. The bank’s bond, commodities and currency trading [...]