Steve Schwarzman, the head of private equity giant Blackstone, has found himself in hot water after he made some remarks at his firm’s boondoggle at Florida’s Boca Raton Resort & Club. In an early morning session, Schwarzman was noodling over Blackstone’s failed attempt to buy the mortgage company PHH, a deal that collapsed when Blackstone discovered no one was willing to lend it money for the acquisition, Peter Lattman explains on DealJournal. To illustrate just how radioactive the mortgage industry has become to financial players, Schwarzman decided to exercise his well known penchant for world history.
“Trying to buy a mortgage bank in the midst of the subprime crisis was the equivalent of being a noodle salesman in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb went off. Not a lot of noodles left, or even a person, and that’s what happened to us on this deal,” Schwarzman said.
Some are now speculating that this remark could have some serious fallout with Blackstone’s business efforts in Japan. If it does mushroom into a major issue, it could cast a cloud over Blackstone’s many important Japanese connections. Apparently, some of those Japanese types don’t find noodle salesmen appropriate material for homey, jokey anecdotes.
Steve Schwarzman’s Take on the Subprime Mess [DealJournal]
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Augustus(?) Schwarzman.
Steve Schwartzman is a dick with ears; he’s not all that smart either. Maybe, instead of causing some business fallout for BX, those gooks may get so pissed at that obnoxious slug, that they might target his ass for real termination.
Well there’s no need to send him to the gas ovens over this one remark.
Ah, c’mon, so he tells a flat joke.What’s the big deal? It’s not like Uncle Sam didn’t rebuild their country and protect them from the big bad bear all these years.It could have been much worse, like Enola getting blown off course and nailing the Imperial Palace…
Better analogy: like being a kreplach salesman at Auschwitz.
Literary Devices!
Some people need to lighten up. If I was of Japanese ancestry I wouldn’t give a damn about a comment like this. This whole PC movement has gone way to far.
Love the title, simple, yet so quality
If you want to do business with people of another nationality, you should respect their history and their shared experiences. It’s called being diplomatic. It’s also called being smart.
If you don’t want to do business with people of another nationality, you can blurt out anything at all that enters your mind, and then go and have a beer with your equally clueless buddies, never understanding why your business isn’t expanding internationally.
Obviously, Schwarzman has to find a way to apologize to his Japanese clients. Some may know him well enough to excuse the remark, but the Japanese have extremely deep-rooted feelings about the use of the atomic bomb.
Smarten up, some of you commenters. You can’t carry your one-dimensional resentment of the “PC movement” into dealings with people in different nations. Do you think the U.S. Army and the State Department advise people representing the U.S. abroad to adopt that kind of attitude?
a stupid and offensive comment like that from someone at his position is pretty pathetic. not to mention, he should know better, being a jew. or maybe he gets a kick out of concentration camp jokes. hope it costs him some $$$, which is the only way to hurt him.
Hilarious! And a rare opportunity to use all those puns that would otherwise just be corny rather than cheeky. Bravo, Levin. Brav-O!
-Langston Hughes
shortly before they exited the M&A advisory business in favor of private equity, he was quoted in the wsj as saying he was very good at explaining things to stupid ceo’s. class act.
Funny comment @10:20pm. Thank you for posting it.
seems as though the MOB has gone very quiet… where is the indignant 100 response banter.
The guys at LOS are right.. it will take a long time before it is safe to go long an asian dude…
http://longorshortcapital.com/when-will-it-be-safe-to-be-long-asian-dudes.htm
my2cents
Writing from Tokyo, here. Don’t care and don’t think any of the Japanese around me care either. Except the other guest here who called Japanese people ‘gooks’ which is both wrong and frankly wrong as well.
Writing from Korea here. To confirm, the Japanese are “nips,” not gooks. The nips raped and colonized Korea for 45 years and they still haven’t apologized for it. They deserved to be nuked.
It’s like being a hot dog salesman at Ground Zero
or a crepe cart vendor at Ypres
or a weiner shnitzel salesman in Dresden
or …..
.
… or a kimchi vendor at Inchon
…or a CDO salesman at Citi
@9:07
That’s the best one.
The biggest problem with his “joke” is that it was forced and unfunny. If you’re going to mock victims of a nuclear holocaust at least get a laugh. As for him being a Jew, we don’t need or want him. We’ve already met our quota of smug, self-satisfied “Jewish” wall street assholes with no real connection to Judaism.
Agree, “gooks” is awful. I don’t think “nips” is appreciated either.
What about geek? or Fat? (or Stevie… just saying- i hope the hit men dont come for me..)
Political correctness gone mad…. this is wall street not nursery school
Must, . . . Resist, . . . Peurile, . . .Pun-making, . .must, . resist, . aaaarrgghh, ok f*ck it, Shwartzman is like a crab-claw salesman at Pearl Harbor.
The picture of SS on the BX website under “The Team” tab doesn’t look too much like him these days, does it? The photo tries to hide the fact that he’s a lard ass. His jowls are much bigger today, and maybe his crab claws weren’t fully developed when the photo was taken.
He’s the Picture of Dorian Gray in reverse: He shows all the excess, and the picture stays the same.
By the way, I like calling him “SS”. Reminds me of that whole Nazi thing. You know, Heinrich Himmler et al.
Not saying nips is appropriate, but at least it comes from Nipponese.
Reminds me of the time I was playing a hockey game at Chelsea Piers against a team that had 4 or 5 asians on it. There was a brouhaha, and as the refs were discussing what penalties to hand out, one of the zebras kept saying ‘that guy japped him’. I think the guy would have used that expression regardless of the teams racial composition, but he’s probably lucky none of them heard it.
I used to know some crude oil brkers who were heavy into cocaine use and they were the first persons I ever heard use the word “jap” as a verb in the past tense.
One of the brokers was a worthless slacker who snorted pounds of cocaine and had clever nicknames for people. I was flying to NY one day out of Houston and the guy next to me and I started talking about oil company clients. He asked me if I knew the famous slacker and I said, “Yes I do…he calls me “The Vested Bass” and the guy looks at me and says “I’m a The Bluegill”!! Hilarious …but I guess you’d have to know the slacker and I’m pretty sure some of you here do.
arent all brokers slackers?
isn’t a slacker by def someone who can’t afford cocaine?
Let’s get back to “Gooks”, “Nips”, “Japped”, and Jews. “SS” Schwartzman is more interesting than some coked-out, obscure & forgotten trader.
His board ought to be outraged by his insensitive arrogrance or else they will be painted with the same brush if they do not publically rebuke him
@25 – continuing this thread -
or SS selling financial advice during the times of the SS.