Deals of the Day: Goldman’s PR Team Keeps Earning Their Pay

Deals of the Day gathers all the biggest news of the morning related to mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies, financing and private equity. Deal Journal’s homepage is http://blogs.wsj.com/deals. You can see real-time updates of our posts and our favorite deal-related articles on other Web sites through our Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/wsjdealjournal.

Goldman Sachs

Hitting Goldman Where It Hurts: U.S. proposals to ban banks from using their capital to acquire stakes in companies would have the biggest impact on Goldman Sachs, which has the world’s largest private-equity operation. [WSJ]
Related: Goldman Sachs and Canada’s Onex Partners paid $3.3 billion for airplane maker Hawker Beechcraft Corp., betting the wealthy would splurge on a new generation of private jets. Since then, the Wichita, Kan., company has come crashing down to earth. [WSJ]
Goldman-AIG: Goldman responds to the New York Times article. [Huffington Post]

Financial Institutions

Wall Street’s Race to the Bottom: Elizabeth Warren writes: “This generation of Wall Street CEOs could be the ones to forfeit America’s trust. When the history of the Great Recession is written, they can be singled out as the bonus babies who were so short-sighted that they put the economy at risk and contributed to the destruction of their own companies. Or they can acknowledge how Americans’ trust has been lost and take the first steps to earn it back.” [WSJ]

Sen. Robert Menendez wrote to the Fed last July asking it to approve a bank takeover that would have kept two of his campaign contributors from losing their investments in the ailing bank. [WSJ]

Rakoff on BofA-SEC Pact: A federal judge said he hopes to rule by Feb. 19 on whether to approve a $150 million settlement between Bank of America and the SEC over the bank’s disclosures before its acquisition of Merrill Lynch. [WSJ]

UBS: The Swiss bank reported its first quarterly profit in more than a year, but its key private-banking business continued to hemorrhage wealthy clients. [WSJ]

Fannie and Freddie: With no blueprints for the future and no clear exit strategy for the government, the two companies are focusing for now on the U.S. loan-modification program. [WSJ]

Getting out from under the government thumb: A panel of lawmakers said the U.K. may sell its stakes in RBS and Lloyds in five years. [Bloomberg]

PNC: The bank’s warrants held by the U.S. bailout program may raise $253.3 million for taxpayers. [Bloomberg]

Regulators

FSA: Hector Sants resigned as chief executive of the Financial Services Authority, the financial regulator that he helmed through the credit crisis but which faces an uncertain future. [WSJ]

Buyside

CIC: China’s massive national investment fund provided the closest look yet at its politically sensitive holdings, in a securities filing that revealed that it has accumulated small stakes in more than 60 U.S. companies but has apparently focused its biggest bets disproportionately outside the U.S. [WSJ]

Pay-to-play: Markstone Capital will return $18 million and Wetherly Capital will return $1 million to the New York state public pension fund. [WSJ]

DE Shaw: The hedge fund has established an in-house team to look at buying portfolios of distressed assets. [FT.com]

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