How are we tentatively going to celebrate this joyous news? And more importantly, what are Steve Liesman’s plans?
Archive for September 2009
While King Ponz’s scheme will likely stand alone atop the fraud tables, Milowe Brost and Gary Sorenson allegedly did their best to keep pace with the likes of Sir Allen. Adjusting for the fact Canada’s population is roughly one-tenth of the US’s, the duo’s Ponzi scheme, which estimates place as high as C$400 million, is a credible showing. Leveraging Alberta’s commodity boom, Brost and Sorenson utilized names like Syndicated Gold Depository S.A., Merendon Mining Corporation, and Strategic Metals Corp. to lend credibility to the boxes and arrows gymnastics which promised investors annual returns of 40%. However, while Bernie relied on word-of-mouth to sucker people, a Brost controlled outfit called The Institute Financial Learning was literally preaching Ponzinomics to the masses.
The institute’s instructors – called “structurists” – offered educational sessions that bad-mouthed mainstream investing tools such as stocks and bonds. Once potential investors had paid a membership initiation of about $1,700, it offered an alternative: Members were given the ability to make offshore investments with promised annual returns of between 35 and 40 per cent.
But now there are up to 3,000 people who, like Bernie and Sir Allen’s hit list, are left to wonder how they got duped and who is to blame. For the Americans who fell victim, the answer is simple: blame Canada.
Charlie Gasparino went on record to predict that the President’s speech yesterday wasn’t going to live up the Gasparino Standard and CG is pleased to report that Charlie Gasparino was right. The whole thing was just a bunch of words that had no meaning behind them, that didn’t really tell us anything (where were the deep dark secrets about what’s really going on between Tim Geithner and Larry Summers? The shout out to a certain on-air CNBC editor? The mention of his upcoming book, The Sell-Out?). But Gaspo’s biggest problem with the whole thing? It lacked balls. Whereas BHO should’ve said “If you dare to take on the sort of reckless risk that got us into this mess, I know a guy who will break your fuckin’ knee-caps if you’re lucky,” the President practically, in CG’s mind, invited all the financiers assembled to go hog wild and promised to be there in a French Maid’s costume and a mop to clean up their messes yet again. When Barack is ready to strap on a pair, he should give Chaz a call.
Citigroup Explores Bid To Pare US Stake (WSJ)
Vikram and friends, “eager to shed the stigma of being a ward of the state,” are trying to come up with a plan to get the government out of their hair. Nothing formal has been mentioned to Tim Geithner yet, though Citi did call a Treasury official over the weekend to mention they’re working on something good.
A Tough Crowd On Wall Street (NYT)
None of the CEOs or senior execs or hedge fund managers assembled at Obama’s speech yesterday ripped off their bras and threw them at BHO, or whipped out lighters, or tried to get backstage afterwards. Furthermore, Andrew Ross Sorkin reports: “There was no cheering section. The audience offered up only one round of applause, and a scan of the faces as the president spoke — grimacing, staring at the floor, nervously glancing at BlackBerrys — spoke volumes about how they felt as they listened to the president’s words…They came, they listened, they left. There was little sense that the country was any closer to reforming Wall Street.”
SEC: protecting long-term investors a priority (Reuters)
Mary Schapiro cares about you deeply. “I firmly agree that the commission’s focus must be on the protection of long-term investors,” Schapiro said in a Sept 10 letter to Senator Ted Kaufman, who has apparently not heard of the regulator’s newly founded Fraud College.
Swine Flu Boosts Charter Operators as Airlines Lose Top Fliers (Bloomberg)
CEOs! Use this excuse!
Tax Cheats Face IRS Deadline (NYP)
US citizens with undeclared assets in tax havens such as, for instance, let’s just say Switzerland have until Sept. 23 to reveal their holdings, pay a fine and probably avoid criminal prosecution, otherwise the gov is coming after you.
Living wills ‘to be forced on UK banks’ (FT)
Just, you know, in case they need to be dismantled in the near future. Might as well have a plan of action.
DE Shaw Opening Office In Dubai (Reuters)
“We wanted to be here because the region is home to many investors with deep regional knowledge and global reach,” said managing director Trey Beck.
Jim Cramer: Boohoo Obama Needs to Cheer Up (CNBC)
$$$ Andrew Cuomo considering filing charges on Ken Lewis and Co’s asses. [WSJ]
$$$ Dylan Ratigan: Americans Have Been Taken Hostage [HuffPo]
$$$ For sale: The Lehman Anniversary Bundle [Cityfile]
$$$ Matthew Goldstein: UBS’ days of wine and CDOs [Reuters]
$$$ “Oh my God, if those [Wall Street] institutions don’t get what they want, we’re all going to be fighting for rat meat in the streets.” Has anyone ever actually thought this? [The Hill]
$$$ How to get a loan if you’re a prostitute or her “banker boyfriend/pimp”
This is not the way to go about winning over CEOs. The city of Dallas is sending 400 iPhones out to CEOs in New York and California as a little head’s up that Big D would be oh-so-happy if they would pick up and relocate their businesses down south. So now would be Texan CEOs will have the opportunity to download The Weather Channel app to see how Dallas summers compare to their current home bases and utilize the Google Maps feature to calculate the number of hours they’ll be driving to the coast instead of being on one. Sending cases of Shiner Bock would have likely yielded better results.
Rather than commending her for bringing a little outside the box thinking to the table, Wells Fargo has apparently canned Cheronda Guyton, a senior vice president previously responsible for foreclosed commercial properties. Her “crime” was that rather than let an uninhabited Malibu home, and a pretty sweet one at that, sit around and not be partied in while it “was withheld from the market for an agreed-upon period of time,” Guyton had some friends over and threw some ragers, one of which had guests ferried to the beach house by yacht. The Journal is of the opinion that this sort of creativity is shameful, and Wells, not feeling a pat on the back and raise would be appropriate with everyone looking, had this to say: “We deeply regret the activities that have taken place as they do not reflect the conduct we expect of our team members.” Guyton has not discussed the issue with the press though if she’s smart she’ll plead ignorance on this thing. Technically, no one told her when she first started that this sort of thing is frowned up.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again change the rules. Undoubtedly a bit frustrated with his country’s performance in the GDP league table, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has leveraged a report by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Armatya Sen, to call for a global revolution in how economic progress is calculated. In the proposed new world order, which so far lacks a statistical index to track progress, factors such as household income, consumption and wealth would replace national production as an indicator of living standards. But while Sarkozy is ready to preach the economic virtues of house cleaning to the masses, some aren’t quite as convinced about the GDP overhaul proposal.
“There has been growing interest in trying to measure human well-being in other ways” than GDP, (Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Center for European Reform in London) said. But for understanding an economy’s prospects, he said, “GDP is still a far superior measure to a type of softer, happiness or well-being index. That’s not to say they’re not useful, but it’s hard to see how they could replace GDP.”
This type of explanation must be getting pretty familiar to Sarkozy. Three weeks ago he was calling for an end to the dollar as the world’s chief reserve currency and reigniting the debate for a supranational competitor to the US dollar. Some easy substitution work on Tilford’s take on GDP can shed some light on the currency issues as well: GDP the dollar is still a far superior measure to a type of softer, happiness or well-being index. That’s not to say they’re not useful, but it’s hard to see how they could replace GDP the dollar.
Because the money will go to a pawn shop, and not in Nails’ pocket, as was previously assumed. Street walking it is. (He’ll get back on that private plane yet.) In other LD news, Twizzlers and “anyone representing him” have been banned from entering the gated community where his two foreclosed homes are located because the court-appointed trustee in charge of Dykstra non-bankruptcy case thinks he was the one who ripped out the toilets and did unspeakable things to the walls and floors, which is just insulting.
Three months ago Citigroup Chairman Dick Parsons said his fingers were crossed that the bank would be able to pay back its $45 billion TARP tab. However, at the time he hesitated from giving any sort of a timetable for repayment because “so much of it will depend on the cooperation of the markets”. After seeing a roughly 15% gain in the S&P 500, 45% gain in C, and continued improvement in the credit markets over the past 90 days. surely there must be some sort of guidance the chairman of the firm that “never sleeps” could issue by now.
“I have every confidence that Citi will be able to exit the TARP program, and actually be able to give the American taxpayer a decent return,” Parsons said today in an interview in New York with Bloomberg Television. “I can’t put a time frame on it, but I’m very confident we’ll get there.”
While stopping short of a Broadway Joe-like guarantee that Citi will, unequivocally, exit TARP on an infinite time horizon, fans of the second derivative can take heart in Parson’s less bad prognosis from ‘hope to exit TARP’ to ‘every confidence to exit TARP’.
Many of you– Dick, Jimmy, the Thain-meister– have been out of work for a year or more now. Some of you are going to stay that way! Others may have a small prayer. In the spirit of true sisterhood, Duff McDonald called up some financial services recruiters and asked them to give it to us straight re: who has a chance at one day making it into the big boy office again and who will be shuffling down the sidewalk in his bathrobe. Hank Paulson, in their professional opinion, will definitely land a new gig, possibly as a CEO, because his “reputation as a manager is strong” and he could brush off any objections people had to his work with the gov as a blip. Worst comes to worst he could threaten to put Ken Lewis in a body bag again and take over at Bank of America. Dick Fuld has “no shot at another job, ever” because he was mean to people and eats with his hands. Jimmy Cayne, they believe, “should and will stay retired,” but that’s not because he couldn’t get a job, it’s because he prefers the Big Daddy JC version of fantasy camp (little bridge, little weed, lotsa Funyions) to the 9-5 thing. John Thain “was an attractive candidate to be a CEO of a significant company until about a year ago,” i.e. ToiletGate so Citi it is! And if you thought “head of AIG-FP” was a dealbreaker, ladies, think again! While it will be a challenging for Joe Cassano to land a deal, it’s not out the question.
