WSJ: T Minus Four Months Until Stuyvesant Town DefaultsSources tell the paper that, at maximum, the investment group headed by Tishman Speyer and BlackRock has until February before they run out of cash to service their debt on the massive property.
ByChris Rovzar
company town
Michael Phelps Is Gold for NBCPlus, lawyers make criminals sing (to ‘Don Giovanni’), another spectacular apartment you can’t afford hits the market, and more, in our daily industry roundup.
Wall Street’s Golden Idols All Have Feet of ClayFINANCE
• The struggle to find a successor at Merrill and Citi demonstrates another big flaw in the current culture of Wall Street: Do-or-die standards, and growing demands on public executives, have left firms with no succession plan and few capable of stepping in to take over. Both firms have been forced to turn outside for help: Laurence Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, has been approached about O’Neal’s old job, while Robert Willumstad and John Thain are in the lead to take Prince’s place. [WSJ]
• Why did Chuck Prince and Stan O’Neal fail? They took Gordon Gecko’s favorite maxim—”I create nothing, I own”—a little too seriously, and forgot the other part of banking is to sell, sell, sell. [NYT]
• Andrew Ross Sorkin dons his Miss Manners cap to explain the rules of corporate courting—and why Stan O’Neal’s worrywart parents, the Merrill Lynch board, were only looking for an excuse when they grounded him for asking Wachovia to “merge.” [NYT]
