Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Where The Money Has Gone

With many of you, between January and April of this year, there was an ongoing discussion regarding, "Where will the money go?." The answer, appears to be nowhere. Losses have been generated and write-downs taken and money printed by the government to fill in gaps.

We, however, know that this is not the only place money has gone. As discussed earlier this year, a lot of the money has gone to the European banks. The United States no longer has investment banks, and the strongly regulated depository institutions with investment banking arms based in Europe have done well. From Bloomberg:

``Those are definitely winners of the financial crisis,'' said Lutz Roehmeyer, who helps manage about $21 billion at Landesbank Berlin Investment, including shares of BNP, Barclays and Deutsche Bank.

Shares of the three European banks outperformed their U.S. competitors during the turmoil last week.

Barclays has risen 13 percent, BNP is up 6.2 percent and Deutsche Bank is little changed since Sept. 12, the last trading day before Lehman's bankruptcy. By comparison, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, both based in New York, dropped 20 percent and 18 percent, respectively.

So, the question remains, where will money go from here?

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