The events of last week, wherein the most majestic hedge fund in all the land was implicated in the insider trading scandal du jour, were deeply distressing to us all. While SAC was reviewing the trades in question, and, thankfully, clearing itself of any wrongdoing, we went in search of a more visceral sign. Something that would say, “Nothing to see here.” Or: “Back it up, SEC. You don’t want a piece of this.” Or: “Take one step closer, and I’m not kidding, I’ll take this golf club, and I’ll bust open your skull.” Or, more simply: “Nobody fucks with the king.” This weekend in Southern Connecticut, we found it.
Archive for November 2009
The Europeans certainly take antitrust laws a good deal more seriously than the Americans. Oracle and Sun Microsystems are learning this the hard way, as Microsoft did before them.
Now, consider Thomson Reuters. Surely, the media and information giant has competitors, like the company named for the guy who just bought himself a third term as New York’s mayor. Still, the European Commission has opened an investigation into potentially anticompetitive practices on the part of the company.
It seems that the EC doesn’t much like that Thomson Reuters doesn’t allow its proprietary Reuters Instrument Codes–which identify securities for banking and trading software–to be mapped to other companies’ proprietary codes, which do the same thing. And, the EC says in a statement, “without the possibility of such mapping, customers may potentially be ‘locked’-in to working with Thomson Reuters because replacing RICs by reconfiguring or by rewriting their software applications can be a long and costly procedure.”
Yesterday Lloyd Blankfein finally came clean to us re: who he works for. And I bet a lot of you probably then made what you thought was the logical conclusion that LB and his people were set for life, what with the Big Guy on their side, and could sit back and take it easy. The BG’s got this money making thing covered, right? Wrong! Turn’s out God’s something of a slave driver and you want to know another thing? No matter how many clients his little worker-bees front run? It’s never enough.
“The market is still difficult and turbulent,” Blankfein said at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch banking and financial services conference. “We are not lounging around in our sunglasses basking in our certain future,” he said. “We stay very close to our clients.”
John Paulson for one, porn fund Horseman Global for another.
Hedge Fund Investor Relations Girl Sues Over Being Taken To Strip Clubs, Dumb Blonde Jokes
By Bess Levin
And more! Oh yes, Jordan Wimmer has a whole host of grievances to air in the direction of her former boss, Nomos Capital founder Mark Lowe, and she’s doing so in a lawsuit seeking £4 million. First off, Wimmer does not care much more Lowe’s Asian fetish, his lack of creativity when it came to nicknames, or his lax attitude about background checks in hiring personnel (which is sort of seems like a baseless claim, as I think you’ll see Lowe did plenty of “background” checking before coming to an informed decision about the hiree in question):
Miss Wimmer claimed Mr Lowe, a married father of two with a reputed £100million fortune, had a penchant for Asian women…Oxford-educated Mr Lowe, she said, once allegedly employed an Oriental member of staff ‘because he had taken a fancy to her in the airport queue’. Miss Wimmer, who worked for Mr Lowe for five years, said she was part of a three-woman team at Mr Lowe’s firm Nomos Capital that he called ‘Mark’s Angels’. She said he took his inspiration from the film Charlie’s Angels – she was blonde, while her colleagues were brunette and of Chinese origin.
Would she have been more or less incensed by being dubbed the ‘Wet Bandits’? Unclear. Moving on, Wims says she also wasn’t too keen on the boss’s pick-up lines:
She claimed Mr Lowe…told her he did not find her attractive. However, she said he would still ‘invade her space’ and tried to kiss her at a hotel in Milan.
Or the blonde jokes:
She said that Mr Lowe made derogatory ‘dumb blonde’ comments and would email ‘a series of offensive jokes’ to the whole team at Nomos. ‘They portrayed women, particularly blonde women, as objects and having no intelligence.’
Or the prosties:
Miss Wimmer said her boss used the services of ‘high class prostitutes’ who he brought to business meetings. Describing one meeting in Hong Kong, she said: ‘Ling wore hot-pants that barely covered her buttocks, stilettos and no stockings.’
SAC Said To Tell Investors A Review Found No Suspicious Trading (Bloomberg)
Despite what this Choo Beng Lee character may claim, it is all good at 72 Cummings Point Road. SAC has conducted its own investigation of the situation and cleared itself of any wrongdoing: “SAC Capital reviewed its buying and selling of stocks cited in the Galleon Group LLC insider-trading cases and found nothing suspicious, according to one of its investors. ”
Barclays Remarkable Bargain (NYT)
According to creditors, Barclays bought Lehman for $5 billion less than it was worth.
Spherix Sought Money, ‘Edge’ From Silicon Valley Executives (Bloomberg)
Which makes sense, since the founder of the tech fund, Choo Beng Lee, has admitted to insider trading.
Lazard Eying New Leadership Structure (NYP)
The firm may split the chairman and CEO role, the former going to interim CEO Steve Golub, the latter Ken Jacobs. Gary Parr might have some responsibilities thrown his way, as well.
Loan Star Cuts Fees To Seed Up New Funds (WSJ)
Distressing news of the morning: John Grayken, the head of Lone Star Funds, wants to raise $20 billion to buy pools of troubled mortgages and other kinds of distressed debt. To get the money, Mr. Grayken is doing what once would have seemed outlandish for a brand-name deal maker like Lone Star: He is cutting some of his fees by more than 50%.
$$$ More Madoff Memorabilia Up For Sale [Cityfile]
$$$ Experts in erotic spreadsheets wanted [craigslist]
$$$ Charlie Gasparino: “My brother is a doctor who works in the intensive care unit of an inner city hospital; he could have a cushy lucrative practice here in New York, but he likes helping people, and yet he has never once told me he’s doing God’s work even after he explained one afternoon how he had just saved a homeless man’s life by massaging his heart.” [HuffPo]
$$$ French Bank Heist Suspect Becomes Internet Star [Breitbart]
The Church of Federal Reservology today proclaimed all but one of the country’s biggest banks clear of all the engrams caused by the late economic crisis.
It took $77 billion–slightly more than the $74.6 billion the Church predicted–worth of auditing sessions, but nine of the 10 biggest banks waylaid in the subway by Church volunteers for complimentary stress tests, and can now begin working towards Operating Thetan status.
The nine are now ready to handle anything (beneath a 10.3% unemployment rate next year*) with a properly analytic mind.
By the transitive property, yes:
The prospect of Goldman Sachs benefiting from Fannie Mae’s tax credits was politically unpalatable, said Paul Miller, a bank analyst with FBR Capital Markets in Arlington, Virginia
“Every politician on Capitol Hill right now hates Goldman,” Miller said in an interview Nov. 6. “Politically, this would look really bad.”
The most oft-heard description of the current economic recovery is “slow.” (Nonexistent is a distant second.) And hot on the heels of another disappointing jobs report, which put unemployment about 10% for the first time in 26 years, here’s some more evidence that the economy may eventually recover fully at some point in the next decade.
The Fed went around and talked to a bunch of banks, and found that only some of them are still tightening credit standards. Which I guess means that the credit crisis is only getting slightly worse more than two years on.
To its credit, the Fed didn’t exactly try to sugarcoat the news that only 15% of lenders–be they commercial, industrial or credit-card–were making it tougher to get their money. The central bank said the “tight credit” market is keeping the economy down, and is likely to do so for an “extended period.”
What? O-Stones can’t help it if he has fans all over the Street. A show of hands please: for those of you working at “a major hedge fund or a boiler room” (or both), do you count the man responsible for unleashing this CFA candidate on the world as a hero?
Oliver Stone, on the other hand, has been receiving a decidedly different reception [than the Gordon Gekko character] while researching the film around town. “When Oliver has walked into a major hedge fund or boiler room, they break out in applause,” Pressman said. “He’s a hero to them. Wall Street is going to love the new film even more.”
“Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps” Dish From Producer Ed Pressman [Speakeasy]
