Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Dillon Read - DONE!?!

Can't post much now, but the word is that Dillon Read Capital, a subsidiary of UBS, apparently gathered their employees in the ballroom this afternoon and shut everything down at 5:00 pm... Told everyone not to come to work in the morning. Would be HUGE news in the morning.

Rumor goes that they lost a billion dollars plus in the last couple of weeks. I'm sure more info will slowly leak out if proven out, but this is definitely the biggest news in a week that's been full of news (that I haven't had time to post about).

Update Thursday, 9:35 AM: It sounds like the amount lost noted above was overblown by *just a bit* but the media caught wind of this around 4:30 AM this morning. Click for stories from Forbes and Bloomberg.

Update Thursday, 5:10 PM: Although not reported anywhere (that I have been able to find), today's rumor is that Dillon Read was a significant financial backer of New Century, the now-defunct subprime group. This was supposedly responsible for a large chunk of DR's losses.

According to CRE/IPG, Brian Harris, the BSD of the commercial real estate group will take a similar position with UBS.

** ThreeCap's site traffic/visitor count has exploded today due to the news and this post being the first to post anything about it on the web yesterday evening (even though no one wants to leave comments). Welcome to all the new readers - now, don't you all have work you should be doing??

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