America's Road to Fame

Chapter 206 The dead friend is not dead

After attending Musk's wedding, Chen William accompanied Fan Bingbing in Scotland for two days.

During the period, they discussed the next investment object that Fan Bingbing's studio would come forward to invest.

Huace Film and Television, founded by Zhao Yifang in October 2005, is headquartered in Hangzhou. This company still has a lot of pursuit. When it was just established and its size was not big, it dared to invest 10 million yuan to keep improving its shooting. Wrote a TV series - "The Past of Huaguo".

When William Chen saw the collected information on the current Huaguo film and television company, he noticed this familiar name. The reason for this was because he remembered that this company seemed to be called Huaguo's No. [-] TV drama company later. shares, and this name is very familiar later, it should develop very well.

From the data, it can be seen that Huace Film and Television had A round of financing last year. Zheshang Venture Capital invested 3400 million Chinese currency and held 10% of Huace Film and Television. Liuhe Capital invested 1700 million and held 5 % of shares.

In this way, the post-investment valuation of Huace Film and Television was 3.4 million Chinese dollars at that time. Whether it is the current size of the company or its future development, it is a good investment target.

Therefore, William Chen discussed with Fan Bingbing that after she returned to Huaguo, she would cooperate with Li Ying to talk to Zhao Yifang of Huace Film and Television. By purchasing the shares of previous investors, or investing in shares, she would occupy the company. At least 30% of the shares guarantee a certain right to speak in the company.

I believe that with Fan Bingbing's reputation at this time, and more importantly, the resources owned by William Chen, it is not very difficult for such a small company to agree to raise funds.

After Fan Bingbing left England for France, Chen William also returned to the United States, because an expected thing happened.

Instead of returning directly to New York, he went to Washington first.

It was already seven o'clock in the evening when William Chen arrived at the house of his uncle John Dray near Capitol Hill.

After entering the living room, seeing that John Drey was still in a suit and leather shoes, he couldn't help asking in surprise:
"Are you going out later? Uncle."

John Drey sighed and said, "I just came back from Capitol Hill too, and there are too many things to discuss recently."

While talking, John Drey brought William Chen to the study, and after closing the door, he suddenly said:
"Recently, the leadership has been under a lot of pressure. The Elephant Party has been very active, constantly criticizing our response to the crisis, especially the Ministry of Finance and the Federal Reserve, which have accepted several hearings."

It seems that John Drey has also accumulated a lot of complaints recently, and he couldn't help saying: "No matter what they do now, they are opposed to it. The subprime mortgage crisis is hard enough to deal with, and it has to be restrained by the elephant party. Inject Funds to save those banks and companies, they said it was the culprit who abused the country's tax revenue to save the crisis; now that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, they turned around and blamed the government for not helping Lehman Brothers, and they didn't help Lehman Brothers. watch them fall..."

Yes, just this morning, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy.

Once the news was announced, the stock market, which had been slowly recovering before, was hit hard again. The three major U.S. stock indexes fell sharply that day, generally falling by more than 5%. Affected by this, after the plane landed just now, he received the news. The stock markets in China and Asia also all rose after the opening bell.

Under John Drey's narration, William Chen heard the inside story.

On February 2, that is, last Friday, a meeting was held in the conference room of the New York Fed to discuss how to save Lehman Brothers.

The convener of the meeting was the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In addition to the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States and the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, there were also representatives of major banks, including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and Bank of New York Mellon. , Credit Suisse, BNP Paribas, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS.

It can be said that the chairman of the New York Fed, Gate, recruited almost all the consortiums that were capable of saving Lehman Brothers.

After he introduced the current situation of Lehman Brothers, he hopes to find a way to save Lehman Brothers this weekend through everyone's discussions.

However, after his speech, US Treasury Secretary Paulson immediately set the tone for this meeting:

"Don't expect the government to take action. You are the ones to solve the problem!"

He said bluntly: "If Lehman doesn't exist, our life will be even more difficult. You should take action."

After Paulson’s words fell, New York Fed Chairman Geithner also issued the same statement:
"The Fed will not provide special credit support in the process of solving Lehman Brothers. If you can't find a suitable solution, then by the time the market opens next Monday, panic will spread and a local problem will become A catastrophe and the entire financial system is at risk."

In the previous process of Morgan Stanley's acquisition of Bear Stearns, the Federal Reserve provided US$300 billion in credit support, and when it rescued Citibank, it also injected a total of US$450 billion into it, making the government a largest shareholder of Citibank.

The reason why the Secretary of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve are so tough to say that the government will not pay another penny to rescue Lehman Brothers is that they were criticized by members of Congress and the public in the previous rescue, and that they are against these consortiums. The behavior of not actively saving themselves and only waiting for government funding is very angry. I hope this time I can beat them well.

But the representatives of the consortium at the meeting were not stupid. Although they were surprised by the tough attitude of the government this time, they would not fail to see the other party's purpose. Therefore, at the beginning of this meeting, they have been caught in this kind of silence and game. middle.

After all, although the financial groups present here, except for Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, the other companies are in a better situation, but the subprime mortgage crisis is only the second stage, and it is not known how long it will last in the future, just like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, although Afterwards, they made some money, but in the short-selling harvest in Europe and Asia, this kind of operation was already in a vague area, and they themselves did not dare to spend too much money to take risks. The combined funds of the two companies were not as good as William Chen funds.

Moreover, the destructiveness of this crisis is systemic, and it cannot be filled by them temporarily earning billions of dollars. It can be said that after the liquidity shortage of the entire economic society, all their businesses have almost come to a standstill. It is also immeasurable.

If William Chen hadn't handed over a lot of business to Goldman Sachs this time, I'm afraid they would have suffered even worse.But don't forget that at the same time, the price for obtaining these businesses is that they have spent at least more than 100 billion US dollars to support William Chen's acquisitions, which also caused a shortage of funds, let alone helping Lehman Brothers at this time.

You must know that Lehman Brothers is no better than Bear Stearns, but its scale is much larger than Bear Stearns.Even if Bear Stearns is acquired, it will rely on the Federal Reserve to provide 300 billion US dollars of funds to prevent it from collapsing, which shows the difficulty of bailing them out at this time.

Yes, if it can swallow Lehman Brothers, it may make itself the largest investment bank, but it is more likely to be pulled into the abyss by this behemoth that has fallen into the quagmire.

Therefore, all the consortiums here will not take the initiative to rely solely on themselves to save Lehman Brothers. The game continues like this. They need to ensure financial support from the government before they can do it with confidence.

Another thing that happened during this meeting was that Bank of America, which was quite interested in acquiring Lehman Brothers at that time, did not participate in the meeting. At that time, they were negotiating with Lehman Brothers on the acquisition.

Just when their negotiations were almost finalized and the lawyers were preparing to draft the acquisition agreement, a representative of Bank of America went out to answer a phone call. After returning, he said to the representative of Lehman Brothers: Unfortunately, the board of directors asked them to Suspend negotiations.

The reason for such a dramatic change is Merrill Lynch.When the representative of Merrill Lynch attended the meeting on the 26th, on the first day, he found from the attitudes of the US Treasury Secretary and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve that this time the government would not provide funds to help them.

So in this case, Bank of America has become the most likely buyer. The key is that they are in contact with Lehman Brothers!

Representatives of Merrill Lynch contacted the board of directors urgently, and fully revealed the situation of the meeting and his analysis. As a result, Merrill Lynch showed a strong desire to survive. They decisively intercepted Bank of America and contacted the other party urgently, " The method of selling at a low price gave the Bank of America an "unable to refuse" condition.

The result was that Lehman Brothers, who were still haggling over every detail, was decisively abandoned by Bank of America, and thus reached an acquisition agreement with Bank of Merrill Lynch in the shortest possible time, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch thus saved itself.

(End of this chapter)