CNBC - The head of Morgan Stanley’s prime brokerage arm in Asia, Kurt Baker, has left the firm amid the slump in Asia’s hedge fund industry, a source with direct knowledge of the situation said on Wednesday. A spokesman for the U.S. bank declined to comment. […]

Bloomberg - During the height of the financial crisis in late September, some of Barack Obama’s campaign advisers pushed him in a conference call to distance himself from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief executive officer, they warned, was too close to President George W. Bush and Wall Street.
Obama, 47, […]

Philip Falcone
The Phantom
Falcone, 46, has been dubbed the "Midas of misery" for taking lucrative short positions in the shares of struggling banks including HBOS and Wachovia. He lives in a 27-room townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side bought for $49m. The youngest of nine children, he grew up in Minnesota and was a young […]

CNBC - A Goldman Sachs hedge fund that launched in January with over $6 billion under management lost close to $1 billion by September, according to the Financial Times.
The fund, known as Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, has told investors it lost $989 million by September, the newspaper said on Monday.

Most of the fund’s losses stemmed […]

Reuters - Goldman Sachs could post its first ever quarterly loss as a public company in December, as market turmoil weighs on revenue for investment banking businesses and forces asset writedowns.
One Wall Street analyst, Glenn Schorr at UBS, predicted a loss for the bank on Friday. The potential for a quarterly loss, combined with the […]

Bloomberg - Five straight quarters of losses and a 70 percent slide in its stock this year haven’t stopped Merrill Lynch & Co. from allocating about $6.7 billion to pay bonuses.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, both still on track for profitable years, have set aside about $13 billion for bonuses after three quarters, […]

Guardian Unlimited - The threat of further redundancies hung over the City last night as it emerged that the investment bank Goldman Sachs is expected to cut at least 600 jobs in London. A wide-ranging cull of hedge funds in the capital was also predicted as the fallout from the banking crisis spread to vulnerable […]

Los Angeles Times - Traders and investment bankers might have more to worry about than dwindling bonus pools this year as mass firings on Wall Street are set to hit a record.
The fallout from this year’s global credit crisis has claimed jobs throughout Wall Street, from hedge fund managers to floor traders and beyond. More […]

Minneapolis Star Tribune - Hedge fund manager Whitebox Advisors won’t let customers cash out, according to a national publication that follows the lightly regulated industry that manages money for affluent individuals and institutions.
The Minneapolis firm, which runs about $4 billion in investor assets through several funds and strategies, is drafting a letter to investors that […]

guardian.co.uk - Morgan Stanley survived the recent panic in financial markets, but its prime brokerage business may never fully recover.
More than a third of Morgan’s prime brokerage assets went out the door during the past month — some rivals said attrition could be as large as one-half — as investors unnerved by the credit crunch […]

Bloomberg - The Bush administration will invest about $125 billion in nine of the biggest U.S. banks, including Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., in the government’s latest attempt to shore up confidence in the financial system.
The proposed cash injections in exchange for preferred shares are part of a $700 billion rescue approved by […]

Vindicator - A bankruptcy judge said Wednesday he may let Delphi pursue wider fraud claims against the Appaloosa Management hedge fund, which backed out of a deal to invest $2.55 billion in the auto supplier.
Appaloosa had led a group of investors to inject as much as $2.55 billion into Delphi in exchange for stock once […]