LATICONOMICS (Free subscription) | yesterday
Goldman Sachs: the case for the defence By William Cohan Let us now praise Goldman Sachs , for the sole reason that it and it alone among the major, capital-intensive Wall Street institutions – both recently deceased and still living – actually understands something about risk and risk-taking. By his own admission, Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s chief executive, ranks risk management...
DealBreaker (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
The Koz has a new appeal pending before a federal judge in Manhattan, re: whether or not he was denied a fair trial because he "didn't have access to prosecutorial evidence that might have helped his defense." He's four years into his sentence, a pretty vague 8 to 25 years and honestly? He doesn't like prison life that much. "Horrible," is how the Koz describes it. It's not really...
DealBreaker (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
Were you a member of an elite group of individuals taken before their time known as the Lehman Brothers associate class of 2008? Were you robbed of the chance to toil under the Gorilla for more than a few weeks because oops the firm went out of business? (And speaking of that: do you blame yourself? Dick Fuld certainly does.) Those $40k signing bonuses you got and probably already spent are going...
DealBreaker (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
Jamie Dimon would probably make a great cop because he's a badass who doesn't take shit or prisoners from anyone. And I can see Vikram Pandit patrolling the streets on horseback. Ken Lewis obviously how to administer a sobriety test on a possibly drunk driver. Despite protests the contrary, Jimmy Cayne knows his way around a nightstick. Dick Fuld has spent the last year showing up to industry parties...
Silicon Alley Insider (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
Rupert Murdoch's son, Lachlan, has won the bidding for an Australian mansion, Le Manoir, paying $21 million for the home. It's a record for Australia in 2009, and Murdoch beat out 9 other bidders including Aussie actors Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe. Here's what he gets for his money: Read the rest of this story » See Also: Twitter CEO Ev Williams's New $2.4 Million Mini-Mansion Buy A Multimillion...
Daily Intelligencer - New York Magazine (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
When the inimitable CNBC reporter Charlie Gasparino announced the title of his new crisis epic, The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System , to his friend Teddy Forstmann, the financier was skeptical. "So what you're saying," Ted said, "is that somewhere along the line, Wall Street as an institution had some...
DealBreaker (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
You would think that a guy who once put someone in a chokehold during a boardroom meeting, told a trader who asked him a question he didn't like, "I ought to break your legs for that," got into physical altercations with other parents at his son's hockey games, ate without utensils, and threatened to smash an iron through the face of everyone shorting his company and then bite of each and...
DealBreaker (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
Or so alleges country reporter Charlie Gasparino, in his new book ( out tomorrow !), When Mooks Fail . According to CG, given that "both of these broads" had "a great pair of legs and an ass just begging for a pinch," the comparisons were inevitable, but were nevertheless troubling to JT. The upcoming second-quarter earnings--or, to be more precise, losses--were much higher than...
National Review Online (Free subscription) | 10/23/2009
T hree things about the Obama administration’s publicity-seeking move to curb executives’ pay at bailed-out companies: It is inevitable, it is stupid, and it is inevitably stupid. Even as President Obama was stumping to provide a bit of job security to former Goldman Sachs boss Jon Corzine, the president’s minion, Kenneth Feinberg, was preparing to “collect scalps,” as...
felixsalmon.com (Free subscription) | 10/21/2009
The secret Paulson-Goldman meeting wasn't the only time that Hank Paulson treated his buddies at Goldman Sachs especially well while at Treasury. In fact, it wasn't the only time he did so before he got the now-famous waiver . A bit further on in the Sorkin book, while Paulson is trying to work out what should be done with an imploding Lehman Brothers, we find this: If all that weren't enough to deal...
Daily Intelligencer - New York Magazine (Free subscription) | 10/21/2009
This week marks the official publication of the longest, most comprehensive, and highest-priced ($32.95!) work of Crisis Lit yet, New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin's epic Too Big to Fail , which clocks in at a whopping 539 pages (minus the index). "Too Big to Read," you say? Not for Moe Tkacik, one of 7.6 million Americans left unemployed by the current recession , who has compiled...
DealBreaker (Free subscription) | 10/20/2009
So Hank Paulson held secret meetings with Goldman in a hotel room in Russia and now we also find out , from Andrew Ross Sorkin's new book , that matchmakers Paulson and Geither arranged a midnight meeting between Dick Fuld and Ken Lewis on Monday, July 21, 2008 to discuss the possibility of something going down between the two men's firms. The rendez-vous took place after a dinner honoring the then...
The Curious Capitalist (Free subscription) | 10/20/2009
Sorry, been working on my column this morning. Now I can't figure out how to embed this week-old Bird & Fortune video from FT.com. It's long, but highly entertaining, and while it's already been making the rounds for a while I want to make sure nobody misses it. A sample: There is a rule that property [...]
naked capitalism (Free subscription) | 10/20/2009
The New York Times published an edited extract from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big Too Fail (man, that book is so large, they can release a ton in advance and still have a book and a half of reading left over). This section is on some of Dick Fuld’s efforts to save Lehman. The Japanese [...]
The Reasoned Sceptic (Free subscription) | 10/16/2009
Another wacky segment which I caught yesterday afternoon featured a woman from Barclays named Michelle Meyer. Apparently she was a rising star at...ah..... Lehman. Now she's chief economist at Barclays Capital, having been absorbed along with some other remnants of Dick Fuld's failed investment bank. The topic of interest to me was one on which I'm planning another post, as well- a return to poor lending...
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