Yesterday we shared the joyous news that Jack Welch had made it home after a harrowing 92 days in the hospital spent battling a staph infection. Today he sat down with Fortune to discuss how he’s feeling and plans for the future. First off, he’s doing great and predicts he’ll be in “fighting shape” within three months. Second, for those of you wondering why your tuition check for the Jack Welch (Online) MBA Institute was cashed months back but you’ve yet to receive a log-in or confirmation of a seat in Professor Bartiromo’s tutorial “Suck it, Trebek,” remain calm. Jack says “there was a delay of game but the school is going to launch in January.” So that’s all nice to hear but what we really wanted to know was how J-Dubs landed in the hospital in the first place, with an infection so bad newspapers were preparing his obituary. What was the source of the staph? Welch has a theory.
Archive for October 2009
There is one in every crowd. That one person the rest of the herd thinks is completely nuts and needs their head checked. For the financial regulatory reform flock, SheBair seems to be the black sheep. Since there have been no complaints whatsoever about the utilization of EZPass to get the TARP and the stimulus package approved, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and Timmy G are simply chomping at the bit to put pen to paper and get legislation passed ASAP. Since writing sweeping reform law about complex products at 200 mph has a long and distinguished track record of success, the three amigos probably figure if ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But somewhere in the din, SheBair is voicing her dissension and offering a dangerous thought experiment.
Winters Shows JPMorgan Path to Safety, Dimon Shows Him the Door (Bloomberg)
Bill Winters is on the JPM payroll til January but he’s actively taking calls to discuss his future, if any potential employers are interested in this kid. Fun B-Dubs fact: he took a year off during college to work in a beer-bottling plant in Croatia.
Fed Frets About Commercial Real Estate (WSJ)
“Banks will be slow to recognize the severity of the loss — just as they were in residential,” according to a Federal Reserve presentation to banking regulators last month, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Fannie And Freddie To Aid Mortgage Banks (WSJ)
The goal being to “reduce risks faced by independent mortgage banks so they can obtain short-term credit.”
RBS Faced Risk of Full Seizure by Brown in Crisis, Gieve Says (Bloomberg)
Breaking: “If RBS, HBOS, Lloyds had gone down last year, that would have had huge contagious effects throughout the rest of the world.”
Back To Wall Street (Forbes)
Senior executives who quit their jobs last year due to the markets being “in the doldrums and regulation around the corner making it not worth their while to stay” are back in the office.
Hotel Feud Prompts Grand Jury Into Probe (WSJ)
What are thousands of pages of stolen documents between friends?
The financial crisis has taken its toll on a lot of people. Fortunes have been erased, companies lost, and careers ruined. The world of private banking has certainly not been immune to the phenomenon. With some of the ultra-rich taking enough of a hit to make them wonder if they’re still considered ultra, private banks are reaching out to the new normal’s definition of rich for clients. Once upon you needed at least $1 million in assets to walk in the door of a place like Julius Baer. But times have changed and changed dramatically.
Charlie Gasparino Knows If Lloyd Blankfein Were Ever Mad At Him It Must’ve Been For A Good Reason
By Bess Levin
So! As previously mentioned, Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in his new book that at one point last September, Lloyd Blankfein was so “disgusted with what he believed was CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino’s ‘rumor-mongering’” that he turned the TV off in his office out of protest. Obviously, we wanted to hear Charlie’s thoughts on this one and raced to get him on the phone before he was taken into custody for beating Sorkin with a baseball bat in the lobby of the Times building. According to Chaz, he doubts that LB ever referred to or thought of him as a monger of rumors. “Maybe he was upset and turned the TV off,” CG told us. “But he didn’t use the word rumor monger. I also know that Stan Druckenmiller is saying he was misquoted in the book. What does this all mean? Maybe the rest of the book is completely accurate– but I don’t know.” So: Gaspo seems to be keeping his cool for now, which is good for ARS. While CG (presumably) shot off a series of expletive emails to the Dealbook editor, all with the subject line: YOU’RE A DEAD MAN SORKIN!!! we called Goldman Sachs to see if they wanted to wanted to take sides with one journalist or another.
Oh, to be Vikram Pandit. Not only are you devastatingly handsome but you’re at the helm of the world’s most successful financial services company in the world to boot. You and your shop are the catch of Wall Street. Everyone– and I do mean everyone– wants a piece of your shit, even (especially) Grade A slabs of meat, like, for instance, Goldman Sachs and that adorable little Jew they’ve got running the place. Such great power over the poontang, however, is not without drawbacks. Because you get propositioned more times before lunch than most CEOs do in a lifetime, you inevitably have to turn some offers down (we can’t have that thing breaking off on us). But you’ve got to do it gently because 1) you do not want anyone keying your car and 2) you never know when you’re going to wanna put that piece of A in rotation.
It’s not just the secondary market for ABS CDOs that is seeing some activity these days. Another distressed asset, the St. Louis Rams, may soon have a new owner if the family of former Rams owner Georgia Frontiere gets the go-ahead from their advisor, the firm at 85 Broad Street. In a departure from the norm, the guy who once claimed Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s symptoms were all an act, Rush Limbaugh, will be playing the role of adversary along with St. Louis Blues Owner Dave Checketts in the sweepstakes for the winless club. While the prospect a Limbaugh-led organization may send a chill up the spine of some, GS should be terrified at the prospect of reaching an acceptable price tag. A year into the vilification campaign, the last headline the firm needs now is ‘Goldman Sachs and Rush Limbaugh Are In Complete Agreement’.
[via NYDN]
Maybe Oliver Stone was really on to something when he was out scouting the RBC trading floor for some potential Money Never Sleeps camera time. Our neighbor to the north has been quietly plundering both people and business from US institutions still waiting for the government to extinguish the flames from going down in a blaze of glory last year. While lending standards and mere recreational use of leverage may have prevented Canadian banks from being able to throw epic, 2007 vintage celebratory blowouts, chances are this year’s RBC holiday party will be a bit better than Bear’s. But not everybody is convinced that the Canadian offensive will have staying power. Some believe this is nothing more than a momentary disruption in the usual global order.
Was it:
A. Hank Paulson (“You think you can do what I do? You can’t do shit!”)
B. His realtor (“Good luck selling this hole without me”)
C. Phil Goldstein (He’ll tell anyone to fuck off)
D. Jamie Dimon (The maestro of tongue lashings; “I could have your job with one phone call.”)
E. Jimmy Cayne (TG screwed him in a game of bridge)
F. The Hooters Girl waiting on his party this morning (The Treasury Secretary was getting a bit too pawsy for her liking).
G. Charlie Gasparino (what he actually said was ‘va fungol!’)
H. The CEO of Turbo Tax (“You lying, denying, tax evading piece of shit. Don’t put your criminal activities on us.”)
I. Vikram Pandit (“Get your filthy hands off me– what does this look like, a tickle booth?”)
J. The elderly woman in the Buick this morning (you can’t cut people off like that and think there won’t be consequences)
K. His wife (“Learn how to make a cup of coffee, bitch”)
L. All of the above.
M. None of the above.
If John Mack Had Gotten His Way, He And Blankfein Would’ve Told Jimmy Chanos And His Friends Where They Could Go On National TV
By Bess Levin
Most of you will probably agree that when you want to get a serious message out the (financial services) masses, the best medium through which to send it is a place where your news is served with a dash of Kneale and a pinch of MMC’s tits. That’s why on September 17 of last year, John Mack called up Lloyd Blankfein and asked him to appear, hand in hand, on CNBC. The two men (believed) they were under attack by the shorts, and needed to go on the offensive. Unfortunately, such a broadcast never came to pass, due to the indirect influence of a certain Italian-American investigative journalist (more on that later), and they had to settle for a letter to the paradoxically named Chris Cox. But let’s backtrack for a sec, and examine the mental state the Knife was in when he came up with the idea to give it to the shorts live. Obviously he was under a lot of stress during those fateful days in September, and while he probably wasn’t ready to laugh at it at the time, will likely now join us as we review some of the sound bites that came out of his and his lieutenants mouth re: getting the Dick Fuld end of the stick.
Where is that little shit, David Einhorn, huh? When I find that pipqueak I’m gonna rip his urethra out through his throat. They can’t do this to us!
While Mack was beginning to believe that the hedge funds were conspiring against the firm–”This is what they did to Dick [Fuld, of Lehman Brothers]!” he roared, referring to the Monday implosion of Lehman–there was fresh evidence that some of them actually did need the cash. Funds that had accounts at Lehman’s London office couldn’t get at them and came begging to Morgan Stanley and Goldman.
Can’t we make citizen’s arrest or something?!?
“It’s outrageous what’s going on here,” Mack almost shouted, arguing that the raid on Morgan Stanley’s stock was “immoral if not illegal.”
