Finance Roundtable

Dick Fuld’s Attorney Patricia Hynes of the law firm Allen & Overy LLP released the following statement:

The examiner believes the Lehman estate has a “colorable” claim against Dick Fuld because Lehman did not provide enhanced disclosures about certain financing arrangements called Repo 105 transactions. Mr. Fuld did not know what ...

“Balance Sheet Manipulation”

“Accounting Gimmick”

Those are some of the words that court examiner Anton Valukas used to describe an alleged practice at Lehman Brothers Holdings in the first and second quarters of 2008 to make it appear that the securities firm had fewer risky assets on its books.

That conclusion could have ...

Lehman Examiner Anton Valukas is naming names.

He blames the securities firm’s failure on “a series of business decisions” that left it with “heavy concentrations of illiquid assets with deteriorating values such as residential and commercial real estate.”

And while the decisions might have been honest mistakes, Valukas says the ...

Deal Journal colleague Jenny Strasburg reports:

Adam Sackett, the co-head of trading at New York hedge-fund firm Third Point, died unexpectedly last night, shortly after contracting a bacterial infection.

In a letter to Third Point investors today, Daniel Loeb called Sackett a “brilliant, kind, funny, and endlessly giving colleague and friend.” ...

If there is one hero in the Lehman examiner’s report, it may be Matthew Lee. He’s the Lehman senior vice president who warned the firm’s auditors about an accounting device, known as “Repo 105,’’ that allegedly made Lehman’s balance sheet look smaller than it really was.

Here’s the examiner’s description of ...

Deals of the Day gathers all the biggest news of the morning related to mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies, financing and private equity. Deal Journal’s homepage is http://blogs.wsj.com/deals. You can see real-time updates of our posts and our favorite deal-related articles on other Web sites through our Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/wsjdealjournal.

Note to Steve Case, Jerry Levin and the small army of Wall Street bankers who concocted the AOL-Time Warner merger: get ready to give up the crown. ObamaCare will soon be the worst deal of all time.

Nothing else will ever come close.

In fact, you ...

It is fashionable to look at the relative dearth in recent bankruptcy activity and declare an end to the financial crisis’s restructuring wave.

Not so fast, if ...

By Alistair MacDonald and Sara Schaefer Muñoz

The U.S. bankruptcy-court examiner’s report into the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings may have kicked off a Transatlantic kerfuffle over whether an attempt to buy Lehman Brothers by Britain’s Barclays was torpedoed by U.K. regulators.

Buried within the report is a submission ...

Dow Industrials, up 58.49 points this week, or 0.55% to 10624.69.

Nasdaq Composite, up 41.31 points this week, or 1.78% to 2367.66.

Investors await a key statement from the Federal Reserve next week, when the Federal Open Market Committee will provide a description of the economy and any change in its policy of buying Treasurys.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) is expected to introduce his sweeping plan to overhaul financial ...

By Alistair MacDonald and Sara Schaefer Muñoz

The U.S. bankruptcy-court examiner’s report into the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings may have kicked off a Transatlantic kerfuffle over whether an attempt to buy Lehman Brothers by Britain’s Barclays was torpedoed by U.K. regulators.

Buried within the report is a submission ...

There was good news from Japan on Friday with industrial production growth for January being revised higher. Reuters reports:

Japan's industrial output rose 2.7 percent in January, revised data showed on Friday, boosted by a sharp rise in production of cars and chemical products.

The figure compared with an initial reading ...

Nymex crude for April delivery fell $0.26 per barrel this week, or 0.32% to $81.24.

Nymex natural gas for April delivery fell 19.3 cents per million BTU’s this week, or ...

Note to Steve Case, Jerry Levin and the small army of Wall Street bankers who concocted the AOL-Time Warner merger: get ready to give up the crown. ObamaCare will soon be the worst deal of all time.

Nothing else will ever come close.

In fact, you ...

If you ever needed proof of the greater fool theory, here it is.

Trading in Lehman Brothers Holdings on the Pink Sheets electronic over-the-counter exchange surged ahead of the ...

Traders who sell stock short became political footballs during the financial panic that peaked with the implosion of Lehman Brothers. They were persistently pointed to as the source of the problems for financial firms. And in one of the most traumatic moments of the financial crisis, the SEC temporarily ...

FTSE 100, up 25.89 points this week, or 0.46% to 5625.65.

Stoxx Europe 600, up 1.31 points this week, or 0.51% to 258.40.

Investors in a mortgage-backed security called White Tower 2006-3 bought £1.15 billion of securities linked to a £1.45 billion loan used by U.K. entrepreneur Simon Halabi to buy 9 premium office buildings in London.

How much of that £1.15 billion they will ultimately get back will soon be determined ...

It is fashionable to look at the relative dearth in recent bankruptcy activity and declare an end to the financial crisis’s restructuring wave.

Not so fast, if ...

Analysts now expect an average of 13.2% in year-over-year growth for top-line sales for the Dow industrials during the first quarter of 2010.

That is up from what they were forecasting back in September, when they thought the first quarter would produce 6.1% increase in sales, according to numbers crunched by ...

Snowstorms be damned. Americans are still shopping. That’s good news for the markets, ...

Deals of the Day gathers all the biggest news of the morning related to mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies, financing and private equity. Deal Journal’s homepage is http://blogs.wsj.com/deals. You can see real-time updates of our posts and our favorite deal-related articles on other Web sites through our Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/wsjdealjournal.

I was in Chicago earlier this week working on some integration issues with the folks at Morningstar, but found time to tape this video on proxy season which is going on right now. Here’s a link.

It’s a rare day when corporate America cites the Internal Revenue Service as a bastion of restraint and sober perspective — especially when it comes to personal income.

Yet there on page 35 of the

This week I will be giving away five “extreme finance packages” containing Quicken, TurboTax, and QuickBooks. Each winner will be able to choose their flavor of each piece of software.

Today is the last day to enter to win this giveaway. Response has been much slower than I expected, so your ...

British Sky Broadcasting shares are trading 2.3% higher at 584 pence on market speculation that majority shareholder News Corp. is considering bidding for the U.K. pay-TV group, Numis Securities analyst Paul Richards said.

“I certainly think its plausible on the grounds that BSkyB has invested heavily and it’s just at the ...