Yet Another Rushed Transaction Makes Paulson $50 Million Richer

Showing just how stupid the rushed deals to acquire pre-bankrupt companies are turning out to be (see BOA-Merrill Lynch), Lloyds dropped 30% in London trading after announcing it expects recently taken over lender HBOS to post a $14.5 billion loss.

“The impairments are, principally as a result of applying a more conservative provisioning methodology consistent with that used by Lloyds TSB,” the bank said in statement.

Lloyds Chief Executive Officer Eric Daniels said this week the bank would have done “three to five times” more due diligence on the takeover had it not been for time pressures. Lloyds agreed to buy HBOS, formerly the U.K.’s biggest mortgage lender, in a government-brokered deal in September just days after HBOS came close to collapse when credit markets froze.

So basically i) stuff was marked to the moon and now that it is marked fairly, it is killing the acquiring company and ii) the acquiring company totally would not have bought the POS had it actually done some homework. However the precedent set by JPM when it "purchased" Bear after 24 hours of hard diligence is the new benchmark for blowing shareholder capital on worthless garbage. Anyone doing more work than that in multi billion acquisitions is a total tool.

At least one man is happy, and not surprisingly, it is John Paulson (as always): a $48 million profit for one position (in which he has a 130 million share short) on Friday 13th is not too shabby.