Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein sees end near in credit crunch; Soros sees credit crisis worsening before getting fixed; Cerberus looking to bag cheap leveraged loans

• Goldman's Blankfein Says Credit Crisis Close to End
• Soros Says Credit Crisis Will Worsen Before Improving
• Vulture Firms Swoop in On Banks' Debt

Goldman's Blankfein Says Credit Crisis Close to End - Bloomberg 

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein said the credit crisis that's forced almost $250 billion in losses and writedowns at the world's biggest finance companies may be approaching an end.
 
  ``We're closer to the end than the beginning,'' Blankfein, 53, said today at the company's annual shareholder meeting in New York. ``We're maybe at the end of the third quarter, or the beginning of the fourth.''
 
  Blankfein's comments follow similar remarks by Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer John Mack, who said earlier this week that the end of the credit-market contraction that began with subprime mortgages may be in sight. Mack said it would probably last ``a couple of quarters'' longer.
 
  After the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the past year, losses spread to leveraged loans, commercial real estate and municipal bonds. Goldman, the biggest securities firm by market value, posted record profit last year, avoiding writedowns that caused historic losses at Merrill Lynch & Co. and Citigroup Inc....

Soros Says Credit Crisis Will Worsen Before Improving - Bloomberg

Billionaire George Soros said the seizure in global credit markets caused by the subprime collapse will get worse before it gets better.

Lack of oversight is partly responsible for problems in the financial markets, Soros told reporters on a teleconference today. He said regulators and the U.S. administration ``failed to perform their job'' in a crisis that began in the U.S. housing market and which the International Monetary Fund estimates will cost global financial institutions almost $1 trillion.

``This is a man-made crisis and it's made by this false belief that markets correct their own excesses,'' Soros, 77, said. ``It will take much longer for the full effect of the decline in the housing market to be felt.''

``The credit market is on a very vulnerable cusp at the moment,'' said Tim Barker, head of credit research at Morley Fund Management in London, which oversees 160 billion pounds ($317 billion) of assets. ``The market's road to recovery will be bumpy because we still have major economic headwinds. Even if the U.S. is not in a recession, it certainly feels like it is.''....

Vulture Firms Swoop in On Banks' Debt - New York Post

As banks big and small continue to reel from the pain of the credit crunch, private-equity firms are circling with an eye toward taking advantage of the financial sector's pain and gobbling up assets on the cheap.

According to people familiar with the matter, Cerberus Capital Management has been marshalling resources to take a run at bank assets. The hedge-fund-cum-private-equity firm has been poring over loan and property portfolios of some regional banks.

The fund has been cautious about making a deal because it believes investment asset values in certain sectors being offered for sale by troubled financials may still have further to fall.

Despite being scarred by the Chrysler deal, Cerberus, a $21 billion fund run by financier Steven Feinberg, has some $7 billion in free cash to invest opportunistically, sources tell The Post.....