W = wise. Photo: Getty Images
• President Bush breaks down the current economic situation: “Wall Street got drunk, and now it’s got a hangover.” [NYP]
• Is JPMorgan on the prowl? “I am pretty certain they are shopping,” one analyst says. “The fact they haven’t done anything yet suggests to me that they are not so sure we’ve seen the bottom.” [Reuters]
• Meanwhile, after Wachovia and Washington Mutual reported losses of more than $11 billion, their shares jumped 14 percent. Is this a sign that investors think the banks’ stocks have fallen as low as they can go? [WSJ]
• Paulson & Company’s John Paulson is starting a hedge fund to provide capital to firms hurt by mortgage write-downs. “Paulson has significant knowledge of the subprime market that has created earthquakes for the banks,” says one lawyer who works with hedge funds. “I expect that he understands their experiences, balance sheets, and financial exposure better than many.” [Bloomberg]
MEDIA
• Us Weekly is no longer up for grabs. Or maybe it wasn’t for sale to begin with. [NYP]
• Esquire’s 75th-anniversary issue, which will hit newsstands in October, will have the words “The 21st Century Begins Now” flashing across the cover. Could the magazine’s editors not have been a little bit more, er, flashy than that with their scrolling cover line? [Folio]
• Viacom’s Sumner Redstone has plans to live forever: “I’m gonna fight death as long as I can. I like it here. I don’t want to go anywhere else.” [MSNBC]
REAL ESTATE
• Donald Trump Jr., spawn of property magnet the Donald, is starting a real-estate fund that will invest in property in India. This is from the kid who started a mortgage company two years ago and watched it fail spectacularly. [Bloomberg via DealBreaker]
• The most recent addition to 15 Central Park West? Big surprise here: a Chase bank. [City Room/NYT]
• Tishman Speyer renovated and converted 560 rent-regulated apartments at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village to market-rate rentals, but the plan might have backfired: The company’s net income on the property dropped to $4.8 million, down to $108.3 million in 2007. Meanwhile, city councilman Dan Garodnick is calling on the company to pay the legal fees of the tenants who are legitimately occupying rent-stabilized Stuy Town apartments. [Curbed, NYO]
LAW
• There’s been no big summer-associate drama this year. What gives? [NYO]
• Attorney general Andrew Cuomo is preparing to file civil-securities-fraud charges against UBS over the auction-rate-securities market. [WSJ]
• Brendan Sullivan, a trial attorney with Williams & Connolly, will be working on the defense team of indicted former Bear Stearns hedge-fund manager Ralph Cioffi. Sullivan also represented former New York Stock Exchange chairman Richard Grasso in his fight with the New York attorney general’s office over his pay package. [DealBook/NYT]
