Christmas is coming a little early this year to shareholders in title insurance giant, Fidelity NationalFinancial. The company is paying a special $10-a-share cash dividend. Yes, that's not a type-o: $10 bucks ashare. Just how is Fidelity doing this? It's recapitalizing its subsidiary, Fidelity National Information Services,which is securing a $2.8 billion senior secured credit facility from a consortium of bankers. FIS will repay allof its outstanding debt using the credit line and then distribute $2.7 billion to parent Fidelity National. Fidelitywill then take $1.8 billion of the $2.7 billion and give it to shareholders. Talk about a sweet deal. If you own1,000 shares in FNF stock, that's a cash windfall of $10,000...
Meanwhile, FNF has struck a deal to sell a 25% stake in FIS (which includes the old Alltel servicingbureau) to Thomas H. Lee Partners LP and Texas Pacific Group for $500 million. (The FNF dividendpayment is not contingent on the FIS sale to THLP/TPG.) THLP also owns a stake in subprime lender, ResMae,Jack Mayesh's shop...
A housing bubble? Banish the thought. The National Association of Realtors has boosted its home salesforecasts for 2004 and 2005, predicting record existing home sales of 6.58 million for 2004 and 6.38 million in2005...
Genworth Financial, which operates a top ranked mortgage insurance company, says it will be "thelead company featured" in the final two episodes of the reality TV show, "The Apprentice." Thatwould be Donald "The Donald" Trump's show. He's in the real estate business. One show wasabout to air as this column went to press. The final episode is Dec. 16. Genworth is owned, in part, by GeneralElectric, which owns NBC, the network the show is on...
You've heard of outsourcing. But what about "in-sourcing"? That's what Countrywide says ithas done with its custodial business, which until recently was managed for Countrywide by outside commercial banks.(I'd hate to be the bank that lost that account.) The nation's largest lender and servicer has brought that functionin-house...
Homestar Mortgage Services of Paramus, N.J., has changed its name to Opteum Financial Services...
Washington Mutual CEO Kerry Killinger recently donated 50,000 WaMu shares to a charitable foundationestablished by him and his wife. And in a separate transaction, he purchased 50,000 shares of WaMu stock in theopen market...
The yield on the 10-year Treasury is back down to 4.17% after breaking through 4.4% last week. With short-termrates rising that means the yield curve is starting to bend flat...
WASHINGTON NEWS: The House Committee on Financial Services will hold a hearing on "Banks,Mergers and the Affected Communities," on Tuesday, Dec. 14 at 10 a.m. at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.The field hearing was requested by the committee's ranking minority member, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. Itwill examine the economic impact that large bank mergers have on local communities and review developments on thesespecific transactions in the context of other examples of bank consolidation in the Northeast. Commercial banks,of course, control the residential mortgage market, that is, with the help of loan brokers.
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