Wells Fargo strikes back - buys Wachovia - clearly insiders bought the stock and options??

I could climb up the walls - at $1 Wachovia stock price my guts told me 'buy' - only for the fact that the remaing brokerage and asset management should be woth more plus the $1 billion Citi was about to pay. Did not get the numbers to calculate the intrinsic - sometimes just go with your guts. Now it's worth $7 and someone knew it (as always) and bought the stocks agressively up to $4. I was tempted but never imagined for a complete takeover and could not figure out the intrinsic for what was left but anything above $3 did not make sense to me - now I know better. Anyway, this should be investigated for insider trading since massive buying of 5 dollar calls the last days do not make sense other than you know a counterbid is due.

Wells Fargo buys now the whole operation for nominal $15 bil. Nominal because they pay in stocks and without any help from the FDİC. That puts the world back into perspective since Citi should not buy anyone. I absolutely agree with Christoph Whalen. Their balance sheet is so challenged but they needed desperately the trippling of the deposit accounts but now once in a while its not again the stockholders getting srewed on the expense of a gain for a bank like BSC for JP Morgan was.

Now Warren Buffett gets really more exposure, he has a big stake in Wells and they will make a secondary (selling new stocks) of up to $20 bil. in stocks although they pay in stocks. They had a close look into the books and are betting now the bailout plan will be approved by the House. It's a total tax and bailout play of Wells - which is not a good sign for taxpayers. Everybody wants to buy toxic assets cheap and sell them at '65' cent (just a symbolic number).

One should not get the trannsactions of Warren Buffett wrong. He bought preferred shares with 3 year warrants on Goldman and GE, which is in its character closer to a bond than an equity. He gets paid handsomely for that 10% over 3 years and he does it only with the best of their breed and a warrant at a very low strike for current market prices. Typically, a convertible bond would not give such conditiıons - but he got the special W.B. pricing, since that atrackted other real stock buyers. That is pretty smart for him and I like the addition that in the case of Goldman, the top executives have to hold on for the same period to their stocks (90%).

Excerpt fom Bloomberg:

Goldman Executives Restrained From Stock Sales in Buffett Deal

By Christine Harper

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s top four executives agreed to hold on to 90 percent of the stock they own in the company as part of Goldman's agreement to raise money from Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein, Chief Financial Officer David Viniar and Co-Presidents Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried are named in the ``material definitive agreement'' disclosed yesterday by New York-based Goldman in a regulatory filing.