Rachel Maddow: Do you think prostitution should be legal?
Eliot Spitzer: No. I, umm…these are…not victimless crimes, I know there is that argument. Right now we’re going through it in other contexts…marijuana…other areas sort of where they’ve been at the boundary of criminal conduct from a prosecutorial perspective…I…umm…perhaps I’m not the right one to pass judgment at this point.
Related: Ball Park It. Are We Talkin’ Like Calling Up Prosties Once In A Blue Moon To Blow Off Steam Or Were You Bangin’ Hooks On The Reg-U-Lar For The Past Decade?
Any number of interests have been screaming bloody murder over Porsche’s little Volkswagen adventure, many with the idea that Porsche should be investigated for market manipulation. An early inquiry was generally felt lacking (by smarting hedge funds for instance). Well, took a while, but the second investigation is here:
Porsche shares fell sharply on Tuesday after the German financial watchdog launched a new market manipulation probe into its attempted takeover of Volkswagen and VW’s chairman publicly attacked the sports carmaker’s management.
Bafin, the regulator, launched the second such investigation in seven months after a German magazine report alleged that Porsche had informed the state of Lower Saxony, VW’s second largest shareholder, in February 2008 about its intention to lift its stake in Europe’s largest carmaker to 75 per cent. The report said this occurred long before Porsche made these plans public.
Porsche faces fresh probe over VW deal [The Financial Times]
Zumbach, 28, who gets his MBA in June, got hit with a harsh economic reality. “The pay scales just aren’t there and even the jobs aren’t there, especially in the financial services sector,” he laments.
Steve Gellert, who will be graduating with an MBA from Cornell University’s Johnson School, found campus recruiting to be a bust. Many recruiters weren’t looking for full time hires, so he had to turn to sites like Monster.com and Hotjobs.com.
“I’ve applied to 15 or so jobs and haven’t heard back,” he says.
“I was fortunate enough to have three full-time job offers, one with a major consulting firm, one with the Secret Service and one with the National Park Service,” says Patty Foglesong, who is graduating from the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia on May 17. She’ll be taking a job at the park service as a business management specialist in the Intermountain Region Office in Denver.
“When I signed up for this thing to years ago I figured it’d be two years of jerking off that would culminate in landing sweet gig with a bloated salary, the only drawbacks of which would be fitting in the hours in my schedule to make stops at p-town,” Bob Cobb, who will graduate from Harvard Business School this June said. “Now I’ll be lucky if I can find work S’ing D for money.”
“What recession?” Vincent D’onofrio asked. “I finish up my online courses at the University of Phoenix next week and start at Citi Sept 1. C-suite style. Plenty of time to max and relax.”
MBAs See Bleak Landscape In Recession [MSNBC]
Here at Dealbreaker we’ve been taking careful note of the various ways in which the wives of formerly successful financial services hacks have been forced to demean themselves due to unprecedented market volatility. Flying commercial over private. Wearing J. Crew. Performing A2M without even the possibility of it resulting in a trip to the ATM. Now Cityfile reports the disease has spread to these ladies’ mode of transport. The wife of Gary Reback, the ex-Bear trader suing JPMorgan for the $2 million bonus and $1.1 million severance package he believes is owed to him has reportedly been spotted around town not in her old Mercedes G-class SUV, but the Honda Pilot the essentially destitute couple traded it in for.* And she’s not alone. “They’re not the only ones,” a tipster told Cityfile. “For the wives of unemployed bankers in Westchester, the Honda Pilot is the new ‘It’ car.”
*As if being married to a gay dog toting husband wasn’t punishment enough.
Bank of America Corp is telling fired employees that they cannot accept job offers from competitors for three months unless they give up either deferred compensation or their right to sue the bank, according to documents reviewed by employment lawyers.
Employees who get the pink slip at the nation’s largest bank are told that under a federal law they will be paid for a notice period, allowing them time to find a new job.
But if they go to work for a competitor during that period, they must either sign a waiver effectively giving up their right to sue for discrimination, or give up uncollected deferred compensation, according to a lawyer who has represented these clients, a former employee and lawyers who have reviewed documents obtained by Reuters.
[...]
“What Bank of America is doing is warping the statute to their advantage,” said David Wechsler, a lawyer at Wechsler & Cohen in New York who has represented Bank of America employees in this situation.
“I find this unusually offensive,” he said.
BofA Pressures Fired Staff To Give Up Right To Sue [Reuters]
One count of conspiracy, one count of obstruction for the Stanford CFO CIO. Ow.
Or keeps his team waiting, or so much as suggests they submit to such pedestrian measures as the signing of a nondisclosure agreement prior to rifling around another firm’s underwear drawer. I’m not going to go so far as to say rookie moves like this are why Bear Stearns no longer exists but I’m not not going to say it. And a future note to those of you who may find yourselves in the throes of a weekend bailout at some point in the near future– if you should so much as dare not have bagels and lox waiting upon the Goldman guys’ arrival, along with your entire prop desk book on scented paper, you’ll be looking at the business end of a hissy fit to end all hissy fits. I am not fucking around on this point. I swear to god you people sicken me. Buy a vowel.
From Kate Kelly’s Street Fighters:
Continue reading »
I hope when the days comes (and mark my words, for the CEOs in the audience, it will) that one of you finds your position in jeopardy on account of some harmless topless photos (though in Lewis’s case they’ll be crotch shots), someone in power (Tim Geithner) will be so kind as to do the same.
“Carrie will remain Miss California,” Donald Trump – the Miss USA owner – said in a press conference on Tuesday [Access Hollywood]
We here at Dealbreaker strive to bring you cutting edge finance gossip, news(ish) articles, original features and content you can’t really find anywhere else (until tomorrow or the next day when it often appears elsewhere warmed over but served as fresh). Of course, the Obama Portfolio is just one example. We’re pleased to see Bloomberg carrying on the tradition we started when the First Analyst first made The First Call.
Of course, the Obama Portfolio was lose-lose for us in comments. Keep it up, it’s annoying. Take it down, it’s because we resent the First Picker’s success. (Just for the record, we don’t. You can color us impressed- hope his blind trust bought in a timely fashion). But, love it or hate it, it inspires imitation.
The Obama Portfolio: +27.61% (And counting, since inception).
President Barack Obama is proving to be a better judge of the stock market than Warren Buffett, the world’s second-richest person.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index began its biggest rally since the 1930s after Obama said on March 3 that equities offered bargains for investors with a “long-term perspective.” While the measure fell 3.5 percent over the next week, reaching a 12-year low on March 9, it went on to surge as much as 37 percent.
Obama Beats Buffett With Stock Market Advice: Chart of the Day [Bloomberg]
Furthering the U.S. Euro divide on financial crisis (non)response, the ECB is not having any more of this private asset buying crap. And, you will be happy to know, the incident many refer to as a “credit crunch” or “credit crisis” is absolutely, positively over. Got it? Over. Done. Finished. Ceased to be.
European Central Bank Governing Council member Axel Weber said he sees “no need” for the ECB to buy further private assets to support lending.
“I currently don’t see the need for outright purchases of further private debt obligations,” Weber said in a speech in Munich today. “There is no credit crunch in the euro area; therefore, there is no reason why we should surpass the banking system with our monetary-policy instruments.”
Well, since that’s over….
ECB’s Weber Sees ‘No Need’ for More Purchases of Private Debt [Bloomberg]
