Sudden cancellations of speaking engagements by CEOs can often raise red or other kinds of flags for investors. In the good times it may mean there is a big deal in the offing, perhaps even a takeover of the company. In the bad times, it may mean that the executive is about to be canned. Last week’s decision by Chuck Prince to cancel a speech he was due to give to the U.S.-Japan Business Conference on Sunday was seen by many as additional confirmation that he was on the way out as Citigroup’s CEO.

Sometimes, it may be an indication that there is bad financial news about to hit. This may have been the case this week when we got several eleventh-hour cancellations from the  Reuters Finance Summit, which just wrapped up on Thursday.

The most prominent guest to withdraw was Washington Mutual CEO Kerry Killinger, who had been on the guest list until the week before the summit. The official reason for the pullout was that his priority for that day was talking to investors. Wednesday, the day he was scheduled to appear, was Wamu’s investor day and it wasn’t a pretty one for the No. 1 U.S. savings and loan. Wamu’s shares plunged 17 percent. They lost another 3 percent on Thursday.

Another high profile withdrawal was Jeff Peek, CEO of CIT, who suddenly discovered about a week before the summit that he had a business trip from which it was impossible to even call in from. The consumer and commercial lender also declined to provide its chief financial officer to replace Peek, either in person or by phone. CIT’s stock also took a pounding on Wednesday, losing 8.6 percent, though it made a comeback on Thursday and gained almost 6 percent.

Still, increased disclosure through a Reuters Summit appearance can be good news for companies. One star CEO who kept his commitment to appear at the summit was Deutsche Bank chief Joseph Ackermann, who, it turned out, actually had some good news to tell. Ackermann wasn’t all joy — after all he said global credit markets are deep in the worst crisis of his 30-year career — but importantly for the bank he predicted no further writedowns beyond the 2.2 billion euros ($3.2 billion) it took in the third quarter. The news actually sent Deutsche Bank shares, which had been trading almost 2 percent lower, briefly into positive territory.

Tanya Azarchs, managing director at Standard & Poor’s Financial Services Group, is mostly sanguine on U.S. banks and brokers from a credit standpoint. She told the Reuters Finance Summit that their ratings are expected to hold at current levels through the worsening downturn in the credit cycle.

But Azarchs also warns that the credit market climate, which had shown signs of improvement, seems to be worsening again, especially with regards to subprime mortgage related assets. (She argues that for  leveraged loans on the other hand, things actually are improving that that some banks could end up seeing some upside from the markdowns they made on their hung loans at the end of the third quarter.)

In particular, there are signs that both structured investment vehicles (SIVs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) are liquidating assets.

“Things seem to be heading the wrong way again,” Azarchs said. “they’d kind of improved for awhile and now they seem headed the wrong way.”

“It looks as if there’s some kind of liquidating going on and once again a gridlock in liquidity,” she said. “The concern is the good assets will get thrown out with the bad.”

Such panic selling could actually represent an opportunity for those with the liquidity to buy the assets at the right price, but for those who don’t, it could mean “a lot of pain.”

Sovereign Bancorp CEO Joseph Campanelli says he’s in no hurry to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor Jay Sidhu, who transformed what was once a $400 million Pennsylvania thrift into a regional bank with $82 billion in assets and branches stretching from Maryland to Boston. Sidhu’s acquisition binge did little for the bank’s share price and he was forced to resign in October 2006.

Since taking over the top job at Sovereign, Campanelli has taken a number of steps to revive the bank, but shareholders have yet to take notice as the credit crunch pressures shares of banks and thrifts industrywide. As Campanelli spoke at the Reuters Finance Summit shares slumped to a 5-year low.

“I’m a big believer that you have to earn the right to be an acquirer and by earning that right it means you’re growing faster than the market in general,” Campanelli says.

“We took our eye off the ball in the last couple of acquisitions,” he admits.

So for Sovereign, it’s back to basics for now, focusing on getting the value out of its 750 branches “and unleashing that potential,” he says.

Jeffrey Werbalowsky, co-CEO of middle market investment bank Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin, admits to indulging in a touch of schadenfreude at the recent woes of his much larger rivals who coined money during the M&A boom. But the gains from the credit crunch for Houlihan are more than psychological.

Simply put, talent is getting cheaper now as the private equity firms and investment banks who used to compete with Houlihan sharply curtail hiring of the “best and brightest” graduating from the nation’s top universities .

“Those people now do not have as many opportunities as they did 6 or 8 months ago,” he told the Reuters Finance Summit.

Werbalowsky said he has learned about the hiring slowdown first hand by talking to graduating students at schools like Wharton, Columbia and University of Virginia.

“People are talking to me about the offers that have been rescinded from the structured finance groups at some of the banks who were minting money just 6 months ago,” he said.

Houlihan clearly hopes it will be easier to hire some of those graduates on the cheap.

Bank of New York Mellon CEO Robert Kelly is guardedly optimistic about the credit crunch which big banks like Citigroup and Merrill Lynch have been struggling with in recent weeks. But he admits that the markets are going through a tense moment.

“It’s fear versus greed and fear is winning right now,” Kelly told the Reuters Finance Summit.

Still, he predicts that Merrill, Citi and other brokerages and banks that have taken a thumping on concern about subprime-related writedowns will represent an opportunity — at the right time.

“At some point they’re going to be a wonderful buy and people are going to make a lot of money on those stocks,” Kelly says.

(Photo. Bank of New York Mellon CEO Robert Kelly. Reuters file)

When Todd Thomson, Citigroup’s former head of wealth management, lost his job earlier this year, there were reports that he was being punished for lavish spending. Offered as evidence by his detractors was an office — which some wags dubbed the Todd Mahal – reportedly featuring a wood-burning fireplace and a fishtank.

Thomson, who now runs private equity fund Headwaters Capital, told the Reuters Finance Summit that the wood burning fireplace story was flat-out wrong.

He pleads guilty to having what he describes as a fish BOWL, but argues that more than paid for itself in snaring wealthy Asian clients.

“I couldn’t ever visit a Chinese client and not have him have a goldfish pool somewhere in his office and his building always with eight red goldfish and one black goldfish because that’s good feng shui,” he says.

“If that gives me a little bit of leg up with 3 or 4 Chinese billionaires, I think I’ve paid for the goldfish bowl.”

Is Todd Thomson, former head of global wealth management at Citigroup, angling to return to his former employer as CEO?

Thomson was forced out of his job in January after an incident in which he was reported to have returned from a business trip to China on a Citi corporate jet accompanied only by CNBC TV journalist Maria Bartiromo, and amid allegations of lavish spending.

But others, including Thomson, have said the main issue was tension with Citi’s then CEO Chuck Prince, who quit over the weekend.

So now that Prince is gone, could Thomson, who also previously served as the bank’s chief financial officer be a candidate for the job?

“My own view is that my background is pretty good for that, given what I’ve done and what I’ve accomplished,” Thomson said at the Reuters Finance Summit, while making clear that he hasn’t been contacted about returning to his old employer. At least, not yet.

James Dunne, chief executive of Sandler O’Neill, a boutique brokerage which specializes in advising banks and other financial services companies on mergers and takeovers, expects foreign buyers to become increasingly active players in financial institutions M&A in the U.S. He says they will be drawn by the weakness of the U.S. dollar and as many domestic players retreat from making takeovers amid the current credit markets turbulence.

European and Canadian banks are already leading the takeover wave as shown by Royal Bank of Canada’s recent deal to buy Alabama National BanCorporation and Toronto-Dominion Bank’s planned takeover of Commerce Bancorp.  

On the European side, Dunne pointed to Madrid-based BBVA’s recently closed $9.1 billion takeover of Compass Bancshares, BBVA’s biggest-ever investment. Compass was advised on that deal by none other than Sandler O’Neill.