When one of L.A.’s hot media startups announced in August that it was preparing for an initial public offering, analysts widely assumed it would have happened by now. But questions about Demand Media Inc.’s accounting have pushed its public debut back to an undetermined date. Now, analysts are saying that if the Securities and Exchange [...]

With more investors looking to capitalize on the recovering banking sector, Lovell Minnick Partners LLC, an El Segundo private equity firm focused on the financial services industry, has invested in a beleaguered Denver savings and loan. Lovell Minnick partnered with private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Management LLC and financial professional Henry Duques to put [...]

There’s a small airline in Florida planning a $300 million initial public offering. In Luxembourg, a beverage company is eyeing its own IPO, worth perhaps 1 billion euros. A German packaging firm already has issued $341 million in bonds to repay debt owed to its owner. The firm behind each of these maneuverings? L.A.’s own [...]

Grandpoint Bank, downtown L.A.’s newest banking outfit, made yet another acquisition this month to bolster its rapidly expanding franchise that, by any measure, is unusual. After the closure Nov. 5 of First Vietnamese American Bank in Westminster, Grandpoint scooped up the assets of the failed ethnic institution in a move observers called rare and potentially [...]

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, firms with fewer than 500 employees represent 99.9 percent of total businesses in the United States and employ about half of U.S. workers. Small businesses are the backbone of the California economy and the speed in which we emerge from the current recession hinges on [...]

Leonard Green & Partners LP has become the latest local private equity firm to invest in the recovering financial sector. The West L.A. firm last week joined private equity firms W.L. Ross & Co. and Lightyear Capital, along with a private investor, in agreeing to buy $177 million of stock in Cascade Bancorp, a Bend, [...]

In light of the rampant xenophobia in this country, I reflect on the lessons that I learned as a tween day laborer many years ago. Working alongside Latino immigrant men during a hot summer in Malibu, I learned firsthand the trials and tribulations of manual labor. This grueling experience became the impetus for my academic [...]

After its high-profile acquisitions of mortgage giant Countrywide Financial Corp. and investment bank Merrill Lynch, Bank of America Corp. is looking to establish itself as a one-stop financial superstore. In a pilot program being rolled out in the L.A. and Washington, D.C., markets, the bank will place financial advisers, mortgage specialists and small-business consultants in [...]