By Antony Currie
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Goldman Sachs’ Mr. 25 Standard Deviation was a Wall Street rarity. Despite an outlandish 2007 characterization of the crisis – “We were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation events, several days in a row” – that raised concerns he didn’t understand fat-tail risks, David Viniar played a big role saving his bank from the mortgage rout and was the blue-moon banker who succeeds as a chief financial officer. He’ll be a tough act to follow.

By Antony Currie
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

General Motors’ Dan Akerson deserves an A for effort. The automaker’s chief executive and his colleagues reckon the U.S. government’s 26.5 percent ownership hurts the Motown manufacturer’s image and its ability to hire people. But it’s not the millstone they make out.

By Antony Currie
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

It was a bittersweet Thursday for Goldman Sachs. The Wall Street powerhouse received a double dose of good news from Washington, a rare and welcome event for investors and Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein. First, the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped an investigation into a pre-crisis, Goldman-arranged $1.3 billion mortgage bond deal. Second, the U.S. Department of Justice decided it wouldn’t file criminal charges over the now-infamous Abacus deal. Yet Goldman was also forced to concede its legal worries are far from over. 

Reserves stockpiled for litigation expenses jumped by a quarter, from $2.7 billion to $3.4 billion, between March and June. That’s a big leap given that the last time the SEC pursued Goldman – over the Abacus transaction – the settlement stung the bank for a cool $550 million. 

By Antony Currie
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Jamie Dimon’s management shake-up doesn’t just send a message to the bank’s employees and shareholders. The timing of the move – and the language in the announcement – serves as the JPMorgan chief executive’s response to the reignited debate over the structure of big financial institutions like his. Dimon lauded the idea of knitting JPMorgan’s parts together more tightly just as his former mentor Sandy Weill converted to the breakup cause. 

The JPMorgan reorganization has almost certainly been plotted for some time. But it’s also impossible to see the bank’s statements about “further unifying businesses around customer needs” and its “integrated approach” without reading into them a riposte to Weill’s arguments on Wednesday to separate commercial and investment banking from one another. It sure sounds like a raspberry from Dimon, whose working relationship with the modern Citigroup architect ended bitterly. 

By Antony Currie
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Size used to matter in M&A. That’s no longer the case. Dealmaking Davids are walloping the Goliaths. 

By Antony Currie
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

It’s hard to imagine a worse advert for the worth of M&A valuation advice than Citigroup and Morgan Stanley’s battle to put a price on their wealth management joint venture. The two Wall Street firms are in negotiations for Morgan Stanley to boost its controlling stake by 14 percent to 65 percent. But their valuations for the business are a whopping $13.5 billion apart. 

The difference is some three-fifths of the $22 billion-plus Citi reckons the entire unit is worth. There are reasons for the gap, of course – and not just that buyers are always looking for a lower price and sellers for a higher one. 

By Antony Currie
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Goldman Sachs talks a good game about balancing short-term earnings with longer-term opportunities. In the current moribund environment, the moves by Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and his lieutenants to tweak the Wall Street firm’s capital structure and trim its costs look savvy. But they’re still treating pay as sacrosanct.

By Antony Currie
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

By Antony Currie
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

By Antony Currie

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

What should the 15 global banks do now that Moody’s has cut their credit ratings? Go out and borrow money as quickly as possible is what. In times past, that might have seemed rash. After all, a debt downgrade is supposed to mean borrowing costs go up. And most of the banks affected probably don’t need the cash. But jumping back into the markets quickly is the best way to show up Moody’s.