640.Chapter 640 The Final Tranquility

Amanda's worries were soon proved to be unnecessary. After Zhou Ziye learned of his request, she soon arranged for staff to hire Amanda and her law firm as the law firm of Houghton Real Estate. This also made Amanda quickly become an elite class among lawyers.

The news that Zhou Ziye accompanied Bush to watch the Olympic games immediately became a hot topic. Now Zhou Ziye, even if it is a fart, will become the news of the media's attention.

What he didn't know was that about him, various countries and organizations in the world organized various research groups to conduct detailed analysis and research on everything about him. Any little behavior has been magnified countless times, studying everything about him from a deep level.

Some are well-intentioned, some are malicious, but Zhou Ziye is currently safe and has not exposed any fatal weaknesses. This also makes many people drag a turtle like a mouse, unable to start.

On August 14, the British side passed the review for nearly a year and finally approved Zhou Ziye's strategic investment plan for British power. This investment plan immediately became the world's largest investment case, with a total investment of 47.3 billion pounds, nearly 100 billion U.S. dollars, shocking the world.

This investment plan included a number of single cases of cooperation, mergers and acquisitions, shareholdings, and acquisitions, involving seven countries and eleven large consortia negotiations. In the end, Zhou Ziye controlled more than half of the British power and energy market. More than half of the electricity is supplied to the end market.

Through the comprehensive integration of small power generation companies, all enterprises in wind power, hydropower, coal power, and nuclear power have been comprehensively sorted out, and all of the UK's grid distribution has been integrated, and it has become one of the world's largest power suppliers in one fell swoop.

On August 15th, Zhou Ziye led a negotiating team of more than two hundred people and started formal negotiations with the British government, major British companies, and major European power suppliers. This news also excited the people in the UK, because by integrating these companies, the local electricity supply in the UK will also increase the supply and reduce the electricity price on the existing basis.

But while the British side was making a big splash, the US side fell into a standstill. The United States has established a new review committee to review all Zhou Ziye's investment projects. With so many investment projects, relying on only eleven members of Congress and less than one hundred staff members, the workload is too great. txt download 80txt

However, Congress did not approve more budgetary funds. People like them can only rely on existing manpower to work, which also slows down all work. However, Zhou Ziye was even more secretly happy in the face of this situation. Everyone thought that the subprime mortgage crisis had passed and the current market had reached a bottom. But he knew that the moment Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, it would completely detonate the upcoming financial crisis.

Goldman Sachs has made up its mind to make Lehman completely bankrupt. No matter how Lehman begged, the U.S. Treasury Secretary and Paulson, who was born in Goldman Sachs, remained unmoved and insisted on letting Lehman save himself. Of course, Paulson's reasons are very good. The US government does not want one after another Wall Street investment bank that is on the brink of trouble to pass on their operating risks to the US government.

But the US government saved Bear Stearns, saved Freddie Mac, saved Fannie Mae, and saved aig, except that it was indifferent to Lehman.

After a month of dealings, Lehman's case against Nathan was settled out of court. Nathan returned the exchanged bonds to Lehman and accepted a fine of up to 230 million U.S. dollars to wipe out the matter. flat.

Lehman's loss of the swapped bonds was less than 1.8 billion U.S. dollars, but Nathan's book loss reached 16 billion U.S. dollars. For Nathan, the loss of 14 billion U.S. dollars is nothing short of it. Unbearable weight in life.

However, this 14 billion U.S. dollars is of no avail to Lehman. At most, it makes their reduced assets look a little better, but their liabilities are still as high as 600 billion U.S. dollars.

Their deep participation in the synthetic cdo (secured debt certificate) and cds (credit default swap contract) markets is one of the direct reasons that they are on the verge of collapse. The reason why they have suffered a large loss is not in their traditional business, but in their excessive participation in the new and exciting financial derivatives cds. The cds market is 48 times larger than the secondary mortgage market, which is equivalent to 4 times that of the US GDP! CDs is a type of contract, which means a credit default swap contract. The cds contract is a fairly common financial derivative tool in the United States, which was first created in 1995. The emergence of cds, a product, made lenders feel that they could lend desperately without knowing whether the loan could be recovered. This was the driving force behind the Lehman crisis. Unfortunately, in the year since the subprime mortgage crisis broke out, the credit performance rate of the society has dropped drastically and in a large area. Those merchants who used to provide credit insurance for the whole society have been exposed to risks in the cds market that are large enough to reduce the risk. The entire business of his hundred-year-old shop has been dragged down.

But these liabilities are not real debts, because these liabilities are only book liabilities, or put another way, as long as Lehman can afford the guarantee, they don't have to go bankrupt. But no one wants to save them now, so they have to face bankruptcy. It only needs 50 billion U.S. dollars, or even 20 billion U.S. dollars. As long as the market recovers, Lehman can tide over the difficulties.

Merrill Lynch, who has the same fate as Lehman, has less junk bonds than Lehman. Therefore, they have found a successor. Bank of America has reached an agreement with them to take over the United States at a price of 50 billion US dollars. Forest.

Lehman also found his own straw, and they pinned all their hopes on the Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of America. Throughout August, they were actively seeking help from these two banks. They even hoped that the US government could rescue them. Only Zhou Ziye knew that this was just an extravagant hope.

Since the beginning of September, Zhou Ziye has been busy signing various contracts with the British government, and his financing of GM and Ford has also officially begun to be implemented. Except for Lehman's still struggling, the market seems to have entered a period of plateau.

Zhou Ziye came to the United States at this time. In addition to participating in the five-party signing ceremony with the US government and the three major automobile companies, he also promoted the mass production of Tesla Motors' first batch of cars. But he still has a mu of land in his heart, and that is to participate in the operation to carve up Lehman.

In the previous life, Barclays Bank purchased Lehman Brothers' New York headquarters, two data centers and some trading assets for US$1.7 billion. For Zhou Ziye, this was nothing but a waste of money, and of course he wanted to get a share of it.

Zhou Ziye took the time to meet with Fuld. Although he did not always agree to Fuld's rescue plan, he expressed deep sympathy for Lehman's situation. Now he can only pull in a little relationship with Ferd in this way to prepare for the future.

Fuld rejected the offer from the Korea Development Bank to Lehman ten days ago. He believed that the United States would definitely rescue them as it did for the two rooms and Bear Stearns. But now, he is getting less and less sure.

Zhou Ziye knew very well that Lehman had become a negative example, and they had nowhere to go. In the beginning, the US government may have thought about saving Lehman, but the two housing companies, aig, wamu and other super-large companies have problems one after another, and the Fed's assistance responsibility has increased several times in an instant, but in fact the Fed is unable to take care of it. On the other hand, the Fed's invisible bailout agreement for financial institutions has stimulated moral hazard. Like Lehman, even though it has already made huge losses on cdo, it is still increasing its long cdo position according to the 2008 second quarter report. Behind such arrogant behavior is a bet that the Fed will help anyway. Since the market expects that the Federal Reserve will provide assistance very much, creditors still dare to continue to give money to institutions that invest in high-risk products. Therefore, after a lot of deliberation, the Fed decided to choose a reckless institution with sufficient influence to deter the market, and voluntarily abandon all potential promises to it, and let it go bankrupt completely, in order to warn all market participants not to have any illusions, and completely Cut off the source of risk.

Lehman unfortunately became a negative example. The reason why Lehman was selected was first of all because of its large scale and sufficient shock; but it was not as large as the two rooms or aig. At that time, the Fed judged that even the collapse of Lehman would not cause the financial system to collapse. More importantly, among the many institutions that have been hit hard, Lehman has the highest proportion of venture capital investment and the worst loss. Relatively speaking, among investment banks of the same size, Merrill Lynch's brokerage business and asset management business have a high proportion and are therefore relatively safe. Although Morgan Stanley has also suffered a lot of losses in derivatives, its assets are relative to Lehman's The structure is obviously better, and Goldman Sachs is still profitable even until the third quarter.

On September 12, as far away as the midnight of the week when participating in the Tesla Motors off-line celebration in Los Angeles, on the TV in the hotel, Paulson officially announced that the U.S. government will no longer support Lehman and Lehman can only rely on Get out of the predicament with your own strength. He immediately arranged to fly back to New York from Los Angeles, preparing for a historic moment.

Although it is a weekend, Wall Street seems to have no weekends, everyone dare not think about vacation at this time. Ivanka arranged numerous programs in her manor in New Jersey, preparing to share the weekend with Zhou Midnight to celebrate the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. But the manor was crowded with the heads of major financial institutions, and this tension made her aware of the seriousness of the situation.

During the two days of the weekend, she accompanied Zhou Ziye to meet a group of visitors and watched Zhou Ziye arrange countless staff to work intensely. She couldn't help asking: "Is the situation really as serious as they said? We will face a more serious crisis?"

"No, it is a crisis for others, but an opportunity for me!"