Both the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times reported today that Robert Zoellick may jump from the goodship Bush Administration for a post at a Wall Street firm. He’s been spotted at Merrill and Goldman. Supposedly Zoellick is disapointed that he hasn’t been offered the job as Treasury Secretary.
This makes sense. But there might be a simpler answer. Look at the shape of this administration. Would you stick around until the bitter end?
Zoellick Would Leave State If Passed Over for Top Treasury Job [Bloomberg.com]
Archive for May 2006
A reader points us to this month’s “UrbanCougar of the Month“, which despite our daily if not hourly reading of UrbanCougar.com, we somehow missed. The UCOTM is “Molly” (left), who is described thusly:
Molly shares the floor everyday with some of the most vocal cougar lovers in the land: Wall Street traders. To succeed in that world, she’s had to learn to take what she wants. And what she wants right now is “to mold a younger man.”
GroovyStocks has the scoop on Pfizer’s new drug.
New Blockbuster Drug Approved for Pfizer (PFE)
Pfizer Inc (PFE) announced today that the FDA has approved a new drug, Trythinking, which will help hedge fund managers and other investors cope with a host of maladies.
One of the most common diseases among hedge fund managers is Monthitis which prevents those afflicted with it from thinking about consequences and events that stand to occur after the end of upcoming calendar month, which is when results are typically report to partners. In clinical trials, patients on Trythinking had a median holding period for their investments of 2 days vs. 42 minutes for those on the placebo.
We’ve heard Trythinking works even better than crushed adderall. And it doesn’t leave blue stains on your nose.
New Blockbuster Drug Approved for Pfizer (PFE) [Groovy Stocks]
This morning the jury in the trial of former Enron chiefs Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling deliberated for a fifth day on Wednesday asked the judge for transcripts of trial testimony. No one really knows what this means in terms of acquittal or conviction, except that it means the jury is still deliberating. Shares of “Lay Guilty” at Tradesports.com (who provided the chart above) continued a moderate decline that began in the early morning hours before the news broke.
Enron jury asks for trial transcripts [Reuters]
Enron Trial Page [TradeSports.com]
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Apollo
If KKR Jumped Off a Bridge, Would You?: LPs Less Screwed Than Public Shareholders
By DealbreakerWe suppose it was inevitable, but post-KKR-IPO, there’s a bit of bandwagoning, despite the fact that KKR performance has been less than stellar so far. From the WSJ:
Weeks after Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. raised $5 billion in a European public stock offering, Apollo Management LP is following suit, with a planned $1.5 billion offering, and other private-equity firms are making similar plans.
The Journal notes that investors in the public entity aren’t likely to get the returns limited partners get because LPs only write checks on capital calls:
Investors in the publicly listed fund will be earning far lower returns than those that private-equity firms generally promise their investors, because traditional investors write checks only when the firms are ready to invest the money in actual deals, while the public investors provide their cash at the time of the offering.
Apollo’s solution: invest the money faster!
To entice investors, though, Apollo’s fund promises to invest its money on a tight timetable.
We get the logic, but in our experience faster deals are sloppier deals. (But then we assume, perhaps wrongly, that many of the people putting money into the KKR IPO couldn’t get into the original funds or comparable funds as LPs and are less sophisticated investors anyway.)
But re: LP advantages: our favorite private equity anonyblogger, GoingPrivate (who is fending off extortion threats at the moment), pointed us to KKR’s offering memorandum (downloadable here) a few days ago. One counterintuitive risk disclosure: KKR warns prospective investors that they’ll be receiving less information than LPs (p. 34/35.) All the downside of investing in public equities and none of the reporting benefits, apparently.
Apollo Will List Fund in Europe [WSJ]
William P. Kucewicz, editor of GeoInvestor.com and former Former Wall Street Journal editorial board member, argues for the immigration liberalization being pushed by President George Bush in NationalReviewOnline today. The problem is that Americans aren’t having enough babies to replace our aging population and prop up the governments burgeoning entitlement programs, according to Kucewicz. The solution? The government needs to import more people.
While it’s too late to change the boomers’ baby-making habits, policymakers can do the next best thing: that is, import as adults via liberalized immigration policies the children who were never born. Working-aged immigrants would do just as nicely as native-born Americans in terms of maintaining a viable ratio of workers to retirees.
This makes sense because, as everyone knows, governments are very good at second-guessing the independent decisions of millions of independent actors. And it’s totally not surprising that a “conservative” magazine thinks that government totally knows how many Americans there should be. No really.
DealBook provides the goods on this weekds Citigroup analyst report on banks which might be ripe for the picking by larger buyers.
Inspired by the recent pickup in bank mergers, analysts at Citigroup issued a 21-page report this week handicapping which banks might be in play – and which might be the players.
The banks with the “highest potential upside in a sale” — as defined by the difference between the current share price and the expected takeover price — are SunTrust Banks, Washington Mutual, First Horizon National, City National, AmSouth Bancorp and Compass Bancshares, according to the report.
This, of course, has folks wondering if Citigroup is going to get back in the acquisition game. Meanwhile, it strikes us as an excellent excuse to provide you with our favorite WaMu advertisement. We’re totally using the “I got trapped in a truck disguised as a bar” the next time the missus asks where we’ve been all night.
Citi Analysts Pick Favorites in Banks’ Dating Game [DealBook]
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