Wells Fargo

NEW YORK -- U.S. stocks rose yesterday for a third day, as a brighter outlook for profits lured investors back into the market after a six-week slump.Financial shares gained after a $34 billion merger agreement between Wells Fargo & Co. and Norwest Corp.Friday's report on the U.S. labor market, which showed a growing economy with no inflation, reassured investors that profits would grow fast enough to keep stocks moving higher.The Dow Jones industrial average rose 31.89 to 9,069.60, adding to Friday's 167-point gain.

NEW YORK -- U.S. stocks were mixed yesterday, as Citicorp and other bank shares rallied on optimism that the Asian economic crisis won't saddle them with bad loans, and Intel Corp. led a decline in semiconductor stocks on expectations that demand for computers will fall.Stocks retreated late in the day as traders sold bonds in advance of today's government report on jobs growth. Equity investors said the declines are likely to be short-lived.The Dow Jones industrial average rose 18.15 to 8,050.

Baltimore's housing authority has kicked out the company responsible for security at the city's public high-rises and is seeking repayment for graffiti and other damage that happened during the company's watch.Wells Fargo Guard Services, which will cease guarding all seven public housing high-rises Thursday, is accused of allowing visitors to enter without checking their identification, security cameras to be stolen and buildings' interior to be defaced."I am appalled and dismayed at the deterioration of our family high-rise buildings," Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III said in a written statement released yesterday.

NEW YORK -- U.S. stocks fell from records yesterday, yanking the Dow Jones industrial average back from its closest pass yet at 8,000. Wells Fargo & Co. and Exxon Corp. led the drop.Investors attributed the decline to concern that many companies' shares have overshot their earnings potential, after rising 23 percent so far this year."We've been net sellers of stocks for the last few weeks," said Bruce Sherman, chairman and president of Private Capital Management in Naples, Fla., which manages $1.6 billion in stocks.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The merger between Wells Fargo & Co. and First Interstate Bancorp, the richest in banking history, will produce one of the most generous severance packages in American business.The estimated 750 senior managers expected to be laid off after Wells' $11.6 billion acquisition of First Interstate will get two years' pay -- probably at least $200,000 apiece, according to bank officials.The 3,400 or so middle managers who probably will lose their jobs will be offered at least one year's pay and up to two years' compensation, depending on how long they have been with either of the banks.

NEW YORK -- U.S. stocks were mixed yesterday as rallies in Microsoft Corp. and First Interstate Bancorp sent the Standard & Poor's 500 index to a record, balancing a drop in many companies whose businesses are closely tied to the economy.Microsoft surged after the world's largest producer of personal-computer software posted unexpectedly strong fiscal first-quarter earnings. First Interstate climbed 33 percent after Wells Fargo & Co. offered to buy the Los Angeles bank, attempting to form the nation's seventh largest.

Five of the nation's 10 largest banks reported higher tha expected earnings yesterday, leading banking experts to say that the end is in sight for the banking industry's troubles with real estate loans.The billions of dollars of loans, most of them made in the late 1980s for office buildings and other projects,had seemed so shaky just two years ago that government officials, bank executives and industry analysts had issued dire warnings.They said the banking industry might be in danger of a rash of failures similar to those that had earlier plagued savings and loans, forcing a costly federal bailout.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Wells Fargo & Co., once a leader in the high-speed communications system known as the Pony Express, has more experience than most companies in managing technological change.But nothing could have prepared it for the onslaught of technology that has transformed the financial services industry over the past two decades. Automated teller machines are now the centerpiece of Wells' retail banking operation. Checks that were once verified and logged by hand now whir through giant "reader-sorters" at the rate of several thousand per minute.

Q. All I hear about is airline bankruptcies. What should I do about my shares of Delta Air Lines? I am happy with the stock, but a little nervousL A. This carrier's stock price may have flown a bit too high.Sell and take profits from your shares of Delta Air Lines (around $72 a share, New York Stock Exchange) even though it is a fine company in a strong financial position, advised Mark Daugherty, analyst with Dean Witter Reynolds Inc.Many investors seeking airline stocks turned to Delta because of its quality and the likelihood that it will benefit from overall industry consolidation.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Warren E. Buffett has won approval from the Federal Reserve Board to dramatically boost his stake in Wells Fargo & Co., the banking company said yesterday.

Baltimore was used as the nexus of Leslie and Andrew Cockburn's we-should-have-known-better documentary, "American Casino," not because the city has been a hotbed of subprime mortgage suffering, even though the film lays out a pretty convincing argument that such is the case. In fact, the Cockburns say, Baltimore's experience is pretty typical of the pain being felt throughout the country, as hard-working people are being forced from their homes and municipalities are faced with declining tax revenue and an increase in the need for services.

Wells Fargo must turn over electronic data on its Baltimore loans and make company officials available for depositions, a federal judge ruled Thursday at a hearing on the city's lawsuit accusing the bank of targeting minority communities with unfair lending practices that led to costly foreclosures. Attorneys for Baltimore City said they will analyze the data for patterns of racial discrimination. They argue that bad loans by the bank led to scores of foreclosure-induced vacancies that drain millions from city coffers in lost property taxes and extra police and sanitation services.

Predatory lending in city just a conspiracy theory First, Wells Fargo is accused of redlining. Perhaps they wanted to stay away from high risk loans? Now it is predatory lending practices ("The suit must go on," June 30). Perhaps they were "encouraged" to do so by the Fed's policies? No one forced the folks receiving the loans to sign the documents. It was incumbent upon those receiving the loan to review the terms and conditions. Many chose the subprime loans because they didn't have to provide proof of income.

Wells Fargo loan officers guided minorities toward high-rate mortgages and joked that they were "riding the stagecoach to hell" for routinely steering prime-loan-qualified customers toward subprime loans, according to sworn declarations by two former employees, filed in federal court this week. The affidavits were offered as evidence in a lawsuit filed on behalf of Baltimore last year and amended Monday, alleging "tens of millions" of dollars in losses from racist, predatory lending, known as "reverse redlining"- the targeting of minority borrowers, regardless of credit history, for unfavorable subprime loans.

GM to sell Hummer to Chinese company NEW YORK - : Bankrupt automobile maker General Motors said Tuesday it has reached a tentative deal to sell Hummer, its military-style-vehicle brand, to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. Tengzhong, based in the Chinese province of Sichuan, is a privately owned company that makes road, construction and energy-industry equipment. Final terms of the deal, expected to close in the third quarter, are under negotiation, the companies said in a joint statement.

Not for the reasons he cites do I wish Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke proves correct - that small banks will have a big role in recharging the economy. "If community banks are prudent but opportunistic in extending credit to strong borrowers, they will help the economy recover while benefiting from that recovery themselves," Bernanke said. Community banks should be able to make loans that big institutions, ensnared in all those complex security thickets, are still avoiding, and they could come to the rescue when local businesses or families need help with credit.

PNC to cut 5,800 jobs after reporting 4Q loss PNC Financial Services Group Inc., which became a major banking competitor in the Baltimore region last year by acquiring Mercantile Bankshares, announced plans to cut 5,800 jobs as it disclosed a $248 million fourth-quarter loss. The job cuts announced by PNC cover about 9.7 percent of the combined banks' 59,595-person work force, PNC said. The company expects to complete the cuts by 2011 to help save $1.2 billion annually. AOL names new advertising chief AOL, struggling to remake itself as an advertising-based company, has named former Yahoo executive Gregory Coleman as head of its online advertising unit, making him the third person in that role in 17 months.

When taxpayers bailed out Chrysler Corp. in 1980, CEO Lee Iacocca acknowledged the extraordinary assistance with a sacrifice of his own. He cut his salary to a dollar a year and trimmed other executives' pay by up to a tenth. "Although my reduced salary didn't mean I had to skip any meals, it still made a big statement in Detroit," Iacocca wrote in his autobiography. "It showed that we were all in this together. It showed that we could survive only if each of us tightened his belt." Now, as the government launches a rescue a thousand times bigger, similar gestures are hard to find.

NEW YORK - Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup Inc.'s dispute over their competing agreements to acquire Wachovia Corp. became a battle of dueling state and federal judges yesterday. In a ruling Saturday, New York state Judge Charles Ramos put the Wells-Wachovia deal on hold until a hearing this Friday. He ruled over objections from Wachovia, which accepted Wells Fargo's $7-a-share offer Friday for the entire bank, brushing off Citigroup's agreement in principle earlier in the week to buy most of Wachovia's operations for $1 a share.

NEW YORK - Citigroup announced late last night that it had persuaded a New York judge to temporarily block Wells Fargo from acquiring Wachovia, firing the first shot in what could be a prolonged legal battle. Citigroup has accused Wells Fargo of wrecking its plan to acquire Wachovia's banking operations for $2.2 billion, or $1 a share, in a deal arranged by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Four days after that deal was struck, it fell apart when Wachovia agreed to Wells Fargo's offer to pay seven times as much for the entire company.