Eleazar David Meléndez

The deputy chief executive of French banking giant Société Générale (Paris:GLE) said during a conference in Paris Wednesday that the global banking industry is going through a "paradigm shift," according to the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.

To hear it from one side, private equity and hedge fund managers are under a veritable siege: under attack from politicians, regulators, an ornery market and uneasy clients. But the hedge fund managers themselves seem to be saying all is good in Greenwich.

UBS announced Tuesday it will be adding five recently-public Web 3.0 companies, including Groupon Inc. (NASDAQ:GRPN) to its benchmark index of young public Internet companies, officially called the UBS Next Generation Internet Index.

Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) shares continued rallying today, the fifth day the stock seems poised to close higher, as trading was boosted by a widely-anticipated speech from its CEO. The wider market for large financial companies was mixed.

A strange and winding day for the shares of major U.S. financial companies ended as oddly as it began, as shares of major U.S. banks seemed to brush off bad news on sovereign debt ratings that rattled the wider market and shares of five of the biggest financial institutions traded on the New York Stock Exchange ended the session on a sell imbalance.

Over the past few days, Lehman Brothers has announced several actions one might not expect from what is arguably the most notorious bankrupt company of the last decade. It is looking to name a new board of directors and is engaging in a bidding war for another company.

In a research note, banking industry analyst Matthew Burnell reduced fourth-quarter earnings estimates for JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM), Citigroup (NYSE:C), Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS). Burnell reduced the earning estimates for JPMorgan and Citi by about 4 percent, but sounded a much more pessimistic note on Goldman and Morgan Stanley.

As macroeconomic developments helped boost stock prices on the one hand, comments from central bankers, politicians and others, on the other hand, dampened the party in the equities market.

Bank stocks finished up one of the best-performing weeks of the year Friday, as a global coordinated stimulus by the world's top central bankers announced Wednesday injected some badly needed liquidity into the credit markets and signaled a willingness for future intervention if the going gets tougher.

As banks around the world race to satisfy international capital requirements, they are going through a veritable fire sale, getting rid of non-core businesses no matter how much they will fetch. Beyond that, they are engaging in some odd transactions, including a substantial amount of balance sheet engineering.

It seemed like it was only yesterday (perhaps because it actually was only three days ago, on Tuesday), when the shares of the banking giant teetered precariously above the $5 mark, a few cents off the dreaded "4 handle." Many were predicting a catastrophic sell-off. Fast-forward to today and Bank of America is trading at $5.74 per share, a jump of 13.66 percent in slightly over 60 hours.

From the time when a statement by Massachusetts' attorney-general announcing a lawsuit against five major banks began appearing on the newswires, shares of the financial institutions being sued actually went up slightly.

Suit targets nation's largest lenders

Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) says it is betting the situation in Europe will deteriorate next year, eventually affecting the still-strong German economic engine and prompting a new wave of fears that European companies will default on their bonds.

In an interview with the Dow Jones Newswires, the chief executive at the Irish low-cost airline said he had just returned from touring the Shanghai factory where the Commercial Airline Corporation of China, a government entity, is building a 199-seat competitor to the single-aisle Boeing A320. He was impressed.

This week’s bankruptcy of American Airlines parent AMR Corp. (NYSE:AMR), in which the company stated it would be seeking to renegotiate or cancel some of its current aircraft leases, is only one of the latest headwinds to buffet the aircraft financing industry that underpins the air transport industry as we know it today.

Small banks are facing some of the largest personnel costs in the banking industry, while large institutions are tepidly adding jobs, an analysis by the Wall Street Journal published Wednesday has found.

What happens to the wire, chip and sensor makers working for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) when the company gives them the boot? The answer to that question might be found in the dismal quarterly results released Tuesday by OmniVision Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:OVTI), a company that makes imaging sensors used in smartphone, tablet and notebook cameras.

Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) and Citigroup (NYSE:C) are among a group of 37 large financial institutions that were downgraded today by Standard & Poor's, according to Bloomberg News. The downgrades were somewhat expected, as S&P had announced earlier in the year it would be revising its methodology for rating banks in order to give more weight to those institutions' capital ratios.

At mid-day Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 65.47 points to 11,588.48, up 0.57 percent from the previous session's close. The benchmark S&P 500 Index was at 1,198.66 points, up 6.11, or 0.51 percent. The NASDAQ index was down 0.28 percent, or 7.10 points, to 2,520.24.

As news continue to trickle down as to what the bankruptcy of the third-largest airline in the U.S. (NYSE:AMR) will look like, there are three groups of stakeholders in the company that should have already realized they're in for a rough landing.

The Austrian banking system is on fire: getting singed not only by the heat of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, but also by the immolation of an Eastern European asset bubble the banks had been underwriting for a decade. Stumbling, contradictory guidance from the management of several banks has not helped either. And a stalling Austrian economy is only likely to make things worse

The collapse in Netflix's valuation is part of a wider wave of grievous losses being felt by shares of companies focused on virtual commerce. After riding a surge of investor enthusiasm to valuation peaks in mid-summer,companies like Netflix and Travelzoo had nowhere to go but down. Short-sellers, chomping at the bit to make bets against the stocks' heady fundamentals, are not exactly helping.

More than $1.2 billion is missing from MF Global's customer accounts, possibly more than twice as much as originally calculated. The amount of assets, likely stolen by the broker-dealer in a last-minute bid to survive, could continue to grow, some suggest.

Twenty-five percent of respondents to a survey by Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE:WFC) said they expect to work until they are 80 in order to be able to retire comfortably. The current life expectancy in the United States is 78.1 years on average, meaning those respondents expect to work full-time two years longer than most people live.

In what appears to be a rapidly developing trend, Chinese visitors to the United States are being noticed more for the flash of their newly-bought designer bags than that of their Nikons. Tiffany & Co. (NYSE:TIF), Coach, Inc. (NYSE:COH) and Ralph Lauren (NYSE:RL) are just a few of the companies in the luxury retail sector that have recently noted how higher revenue at their North American operations has largely been boosted by Chinese shoppers on vacation.

As equity investors play the ups and down of the stock market, fixed income money managers that provide day-to-day financing to the banks, investors in medium-term bonds and the peer banks themselves are scrambling for cover. The result: a dollar financing crunch that could deeply affect the banks and how they do business.

Upscale apparel and accessories retailers have been consistently outperforming the rest of the retail market, as they've been able to simultaneously roll back discounts and increase sales. A spike in sales for the most expensive of offerings, and at branded outlets, belies a more sinister reason for the surge: growing income inequality.

The decision to lay off 1,066 people who worked for MF Global -- effective immediately and without severance -- will give people pause. But it is only the beginning of the nastiness in the MF Global saga