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A fad or the real deal? Let's not beat around the bush about Bitcoins, the digital currency that has stirred up the financial world the past year or so.     Bitcoins are a virtual currency, now accepted by some merchants and commercial enterprises as a form of payment for services or products. Because Bitcoins have a fluctuating market value, many try to exploit price volatility and treat Bitcoins as an investment--similar to investors who might purchase foreign currencies with hopes that volatile swings will result in handsome profits. However, most participants are still not sure how Bitcoins came to be, who or what oversees the marketplace, and where all this is headed.   Let's be real. Any purchase or investment in Bitcoins is a speculative investment.   Uncertainty, volatility and mysterious (or mystical?) origins offset confidence prudent investors or users for payment purposes might have in its legitimacy.   As we saw in late 2013 when the Chinese govern...

Volcker's rules: Any day now Three years have elapsed since regulators proposed new regulation to restrict proprietary trading at banks (more specifically, depositary financial institutions).   Three years of discussion, debate, rule-writing and re-writing, dissension, lobbying, and procrastination.  And now the new rule, better known as the Volcker Rule and named for former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, who first proposed limits on bank trading during the crisis, has reached a point of no return.   Regulators--the SEC, FDIC, OCC, CFTC and the Federal Reserve--have promised to sign off before mid-December. Banks aren't surprised. They aren't caught off guard. They knew an old era of gun-slinging, wild, volatile, frantic, but overwhelmingly profitable proprietary trading at the major banks was coming to an end.   While regulators and their lawyers sequestered themselves for years to write hundreds and hundreds of pages of rules, banks tried to push back and ...

Billions and billions in cash, still In corporate-finance circles,  Apple presented a delightful dilemma in much of 2012.  What should it do with its billions of cash, sitting on the balance sheet, earning paltry returns in safe markets, causing restlessness among shareholders who felt entitled to special dividends to get access to it? Should it use cash to repurchase some stock, a few shareholders pressed? Shareholder activists clamored for cash pay-outs and even devised ingenious financial maneuverings and new equity instruments to get to it.  The current generation of Apple managers, with Tim Cook at the helm as CEO, grew up with Steve Jobs' abhorrence of debt markets and his clinging to a security blanket of hoarded cash if only to endure tough times. Apple has often countered--in carefully worded ways--that much of the cash it maintains appears in foreign subsidiaries, cash that couldn't be efficiently repatriated back to the U.S. into the hands of shareholders with...

When the deal was announced, some surely gasped.  The fact that Verizon Communications decided to purchase all of Vodafone's stake in Verizon Wireless was not a surprise.  Vodafone had decided to sell its stake and units in mobile phones.  What likely caused market observers and headline writers to turn their heads in wonder was the size of the deal, the big numbers. They were huge. Deals and big numbers excite investment bankers and can spur them to pant and salivate. In the Verizon case, they certainly will, once Verizon gets around to handing out advisory and underwriting checks for fees. Deals and big numbers tend also to cause hiccups and coughs among some investors, research analysts and bank risk managers. This deal is big, one of the largest ever. Perhaps it sends too many hopeful signals that an era of super-size deal-making has returned.  Verizon Communications announced it will pay a whopping $130 billion for Vodafone's stake. To raise $130 billion to pay ...

Now it's Twitter's turn. It hesitated for the past year or so. This week (Oct., 2013) it bravely stepped into IPO waters, taking the first big step by sharing publicly its SEC filing and letting the financial world see its bottom line. Twitter's hesitation, like all companies contemplating issuing stock to the public for the first time, results from trying to determine the optimal moment to sell stock in equity markets. That's often tied to market interest in the stock issue, supply and demand for the stock, and general equity-market trends. Its hesitation may have also resulted from other factors: (a) its being shy about letting the world pore through its true financial performance and (b) its desires to avoid the IPO debacle Facebook experienced last year at Nasdaq with Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriter. Twitter through the years has had to wrestle, too, with management and organizational issues. Some of those problems have been resolved, and the company has move...

Market events mean no time for rest? If history repeats itself or if tradition rules, then the waning days of summer in finance and markets should be marked by doldrums, inactive markets and dreading Labor Day. But once again August has thrown a soft curve ball--with market volatility, big institutions confronting legal issues, and a band of activist shareholders causing havoc in boardrooms. Nothing that has caused market nightmare, but enough to cause a little upheaval in what should be dull days before mid-September.  The Augusts of 2011-12, recall, were upended by disgusting debates in U.S. Congress about government deficits and debt.  The tale of the "Whale" and the $6 billion in trading losses at JPMorgan from 2012, events we thought had faded from everybody's attention, plopped up again when government regulators and law-enforcement officials decided to place criminal charges against some banks officials for hiding information about the losses and acting ...