$$$ Yahoo Annual Meeting Delayed; Preliminary Proxy Filed [PaidContent]
$$$ Currency for the Blind [TheBigPicture]
$$$ I’m a 28 year old hedge fund guy, living in Greenwich. I was supposed to be going to Paris with my girlfriend for memorial day weekend, but I caught her cheating on me and now the trip’s obviously off. I’m still going, and am looking for some company. [craigslist]
Archive for May 22nd, 2008
Reporters and editors at The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Marketwatch and Dow Jones Newswires received an email this afternoon telling them that they’ll likely be moving up to the News Corp headquarters in midtown next year.
While some media watchers will no doubt bemoan the move as further endangering the independence of the Journal, our informal survey says the newsroom is divided on the move. The so-called “Park Slope lefty” contingent dreads the move, partly because it will lengthen the commute from Brooklyn. The “Westchester family” contingent welcomes it as it brings them closer to Grand Central Station.
WSJ, Dow Jones, Marketwatch, Barron’s to move to Manhattan in 2009 [Talking Biz News]
Bill Miller, the Legg Mason fund manager who controls 5.4 percent of Yahoo, wants to see Microsoft buy the company. Halfway measures–such as a joint venture –don’t interest him.
That would seem to put him squarely in Icahn’s camp. But Miller’s still being coy, saying he’s undecided on how he’ll vote in the proxy fight.
Legg’s Miller undecided on Icahn’s Yahoo slate [Retuers]
Some of you may recall that several weeks ago, after hearing about a stunning feat accomplished by Ian Roncoroni, an energy OTC options broker with Power Merchants Group (Oyster Boy ate 244 Oysters in 1 hour at Ulysses), we rewarded the boy with a very special delivery: a Delmonico’s cheesesteak, on us. Despite some minor bumps in the road early on (Ronco took nearly twelve hours to thank us for the treat), overall, we enjoyed the tingly good feeling derived from sending roasted animal carcass slathered with processed cheesestuff to a random financial services hack we’d never met. It conveniently assuaged the guilt we sometimes feel for our unrelenting mockery of you people.
To recapture that feeling and to demonstrate that, despite anecdotal evidence to the contrary, we love you idiots, we decided to send a delicious sandwich to randomly selected analysts/associates/traders/CEOs/fund managers of our choosing each week, starting in mid-May. We called it The Sandwich Fairy (TSF). So far, it’s gone quite well, and the lucky recipients seem to enjoy the free food. That is not to say the initiative has gone off hitch-free. Some of you, it seems, are unfamiliar with the concept of how one receives food that has been sent to them. Just so that we don’t have another unfortunate incident like the one that took place earlier this week at Sredit Cuisse, here are some helpful tips to keep in mind moving forward.
– If you get a call that there’s a cheesesteak delivery for you in the lobby from a place called Shorty’s, it’s not a bomb
– Or a practical joke
– It’s, how to put this, a cheesesteak. A CHEESESTEAK. And not a synthetic, half-assed NYC simulacrum of a cheesesteak. But a real, honest-to-Rocky Philly cheesesteak. Wiz/wit. So good it’s worth JO’ing while crying over because you miss it when it’s gone. (The proprietor of said establishment, a Philly guy and former Wall Streeter named Evan, is awesome enough to foot the bill for DB’s TSF needs, as the cost of three months’ worth of sammie deliveries runs higher than you-know-who’s annual take-home.)
– Now, here’s the thing with cheesesteaks: though they are magically delicious, they don’t yet have the ability to walk themselves up to your desk. You will have to go downstairs and pick them (yes, them: we have been sending several, so you can share with your friends) up
– Another thing about cheesesteaks: they don’t have the best shelf life. GO GET THEM NOW.
– Nominating a friend for one and want it to be a surprise? Maybe hint that at some point in the week they’ll be getting a delivery around lunchtime, so that we don’t have then get in touch with another DealBreakerette who happens to work in the same building to pick up the delivery, and your friend is left cheesesteak-less.
Consequences for failing to follow the above will result in the following: the next time you go down to get your Seamless order, there’ll be enough food to feed all of the Bear Stearns employees who can no longer afford to feed themselves, and it’ll be on you.
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Posted in:
Citigroup
Citigroup’s Last Roman: The Short and Ugly Lifespan Of A Sneaky Financial Product
By John CarneyBloomberg new has gone especially gloomy lately. On Tuesday it was the really, really long expose on counterparty risk in credit default swaps. Today Mark Pittman follows up on variable interest entities, the ugly step child of the off-balance sheet special purpose vehicles that Enron made infamous.
We wrote about these way back in February, when people were first waking up to the fact that banks had undisclosed exposure to mortgage backed securities held by VIEs. Now lawmakers, regulators and accounting standards people are considering rules that would prevent off-balance-sheet treatment for VIEs.
Bloomberg highlights one short-lived VIE with a particularly unfortunate name. Launched by Citigroup just as the mortgage market was collapsing, the $2.5 billion entity known as Bonifacius Ltd was loaded up with subprime mortgages. Six months later it was dead. Bonifacius, as our readers with classics degrees undoubtedly know, was named called “the last of the Romans” by historian Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. Bonifacius “fought and died for a fading empire.”
Citigroup’s `Last Roman’ CDO Shows Enron Accounting [Bloomberg]
In our more contrarian moods we like to point out to people that a real housing crisis would involve mass homelessness rather than a surplus of homes pushing down housing values. And when we get really cranky we go all generational war about it: “Well, this just means we’ll get to buy those baby boomers’ houses for less.”
We didn’t realize we were channeling a former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. After the jump, read William Isaac from today’s Wall Street Journal on why you should stop worrying and learn to love the housing crash.
Earlier today we were pointed in the direction of Dickipedia.org and our initial thought: fantastic. As its name would suggest, it’s a site based on the Wikipedia model, but confined to entries on people who are dicks. What fun! We’ve long kept running tallies of the various dicks we know in our mind, so to put it down on the internet was the next logical step we hadn’t yet had the initiative to take. There’s only one very glaring problem. Specifically, an omission that cannot be overlooked.
Self-styled shareholder superman Carl Icahn says Barack Obama would be a “terrible” president, Bloomberg reports. His election, backed by a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, would lead to runaway legislation, higher interest rates and accelerating inflation, Icahn told a conference of investors last night.
“I don’t normally get involved in politics, but this time I am,” Icahn said. “I don’t think Obama really understands economics.”
Does this mean Larry Kudlow was right?
Carl Icahn Says Obama Would Be a ‘Terrible’ President for U.S. [Bloomberg]
It seems like all we ever hear about is what a nice guy Jamie Dimon is, and how he’s a “giant among midgets” and his souvlaki is out of this world, but the direction he’s taking Bearpont Morgan Chase** is deeply disturbing and very much brings his judgment into question.
Not two weeks ago JPMorgan’s head of Latin American Credit, along with four MD’s and one ED were laid off for reasons related to “cost cutting and expenses.” Today we’re told that a JPM director paid a visit to 383 Madison this morning to fire all but two analysts from Bear’s Latam Research division, telling the peasants, “As you probably realize, we cannot take you on and as you may or may not be aware, JPMorgan decided to keep the headcount the same as before the merger. So now, you are free to look for other jobs.” Obviously we knew that there would be (severance-saddled) victims in this whole thing but the fact that Jamie Dimon can’t spare a few pesos to keep the group which inspired “Project Awesome” (the fictional Latam division of the fictional JS Spencer bank which spent most of its time chilling in Cabo with the odd Brazilian mention in Dana Vachon’s Mergers and Acquisitions) fully intact is a hard pill to swallow and quite nearly criminal. To Dimon’s credit, however, he apparently was instrumental in coming up with the line, “You are free to look for other jobs,” which was inspired. (Especially after he asked everyone to stay put for the last several months and requested that other banks hold off on hiring Bear employees until he could decide who would be getting fired.)
*It’s funnier than “vivan.”
**Not yet official, just in the hopper. Also under consideration: JPMorgan Cayne, the reasoning being that “this whole thing would never have happened without JC’s inspired management of Bear.”
Citigroup might want to rethink its insomniac slogan. Although the “Citi Never Sleeps” slogan is meant to convey a sense of never-ending vigilance, a new study shows that sleep deprivation leads to a loss of attentiveness and interferes with visual processing.
The study, which will be published in the Journal of Neuroscience, shows that losing only one night’s sleep has a dramatic effect on the brain, making it prone to short, sudden shutdowns. The study suggests that sleep-deprived people alternate between periods of near-normal brain function and dramatic lapses in attention and visual processing.
“It’s as though it is both asleep and awake and they are switching between each other very rapidly,” said David Dinges of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “Imagine you are sitting in a room watching a movie with the lights on. In a stable brain, the lights stay on all the time. In a sleepy brain, the lights suddenly go off.”
Losing just one night’s sleep makes brain prone to ‘sudden shutdowns’ [Evening Standard]
In Unrelated News, Charlie Gasparino Perfecting His Beer Can Crushing Skills In Midtown As We Speak
By Bess Levin
Please, God, for the love of watching Cody Willard pass out after one chug let the tip we just received be true. Supposedly, Bloomberg TV has challenged Fox Business to a “drink off.” One unnamed anchor who recently moved from BTV to FBN believes (and I dare you to read this line without peeing your pants), “We have some hard core mo’fos up in here–could be quite a challenge.” No idea who said that (though Sandra Smith and Brian Sullivan are among those who jumped ship), or where/when this thing is taking place but we will keep you abreast of the situation and be distributing Team Cavuto t-shirts (at cost), this much I promise you. (Don’t particularly like the guy, just have our money on the fact that he’s in it to win it and has no qualms about playing dirty.)
