Many of you have long been under the assumption that the origin of one of our nickname’s for Charlie Gasparino– “No Sleeves”– was merely my deeply disturbed brain. That it had no basis in reality, etc. Untrue. For years Chaz has worked out in Champion sweatshirts and tee’s with the sleeves cut off. Late last Friday, Fast Money backed me up on this one.
Archive for November 2009
By now you’ve likely heard the news: you can no longer say that Goldman Sachs is evil, because Lloyd Blankfein and Co. are merely doing the big guy’s bidding. Actually, that’s not true: you can call the Masters of the Universe sinners all you want but do so at your own peril, knowing full well that you’re fucking with The BG. Take this latest profile from the Times Online. You can see God’s hand in the whole thing. Obviously not just in the insistence that Goldman is basically a charitable organization whose first and foremost interest is to serve society but also in the jokes. It’s clear that God and Blankfein were discussing the upcoming story and the BG suggested going with the self-deprecation. “Be overly sarcastic. Take the shit they’ve been saying about us and then advance the joke,” Blankfein’s boss counseled. “Hide what we’re doing in plain sight; make them seem like the crazy ones and you’ll have them up against a wall. There’ll be no arguing.” For example:
The talk that inside 85 Broad, the MoTU plot to bring modern society to its knees.
“Aha! You catch us plotting in real time,” says Lloyd Blankfein, breaking away from a cabal of senior executives discussing his trip to Washington the previous day. Blankfein, 55, Goldman’s chairman and chief executive, is wearing a grey suit with a jaunty Hermès tie with little red bicycles on it. In his hand, he’s carrying one of those cups of coffee that look bigger than the human stomach. Maybe it’s the caffeine, maybe it’s the tie — a birthday present from his daughter — but he’s in a remarkably jolly mood for a man everyone seems to hate. “It’s like a safari here,” he jokes. “You’ve come in to look at the animals.”
And that stuff about killing adorable animals, endangered or otherwise, sucking out their essence and using it as a source of power.
Goldman is the biggest user of voicemail in the world. The “mind bullets” consist of anything from the latest profit and loss figures, to reports of what the chief executives of key clients have told Blankfein and his top team over lunch, to instructions to “switch off on holiday, for goodness sake.” No calls to meet in the basement to club baby seals to death first thing in the morning to get in the mood for a hard day’s banking? “God, no,” one staffer says wryly. “We don’t club baby seals. We club babies.”
And the most hilarious “urban legend” of them all.
The banks that stayed afloat with billions in government bailout money are laughing, well, all the way to the bank. And Britain’s top financial services regulator says that’s got to change.
“There remains, I believe, an absence of the acceptance of collective responsibility for what has happened,” Hector Sants of the Financial Services Authority opines today. “I personally remain unconvinced that all senior management have taken on board the need to change and operate in a genuinely different manner.”
Well, why would they? Governments on both sides of the Atlantic have handed out the billions with nary a string attached. And they’ve continued to do so even as banks continue to behave badly.
The big New York profile on Times Boy Andrew Ross Sorkin is out today. Gabe Sherman tells us all about the jealousy the DealBook editor has inspired among his colleagues, what with his big (for a journalist) paycheck, his fame, and, most especially, his Rolodex of BSD sources. There’s been a lot of alleged trash talk in the newsroom, most recently on account of Don Van Natta and Gretchen Morgenson claiming he stole material from them for his book. Before that (and still) the complaints have been that the reason Sorkin counts many a chief executive as a source is because he goes far too easy on them in print. Whether or not that’s true, not being “adversarial or coming to the table with an ax to grind” isn’t the only way ARS has managed to get people like Mack and Buffett and Dimon and Schwarzman on speed-dial (and at his party). According to Graydon Carter, it’s by 1) His “boyish”-ness and 2) something else that we would never suggest but that I think we’re supposed to guess by way of nonsensical euphemism.
Sorkin has another crucial advantage in the world he’s traveling in: He gives good son. “There’s something about his boyish, Jimmy Stewart charm that the older men he deals with find incredibly winning,” Graydon Carter says.
The Information Broker [NYM]
Per a firm-wide email from John Donnelly (global head of HR): “Last year…We put a salary freeze in place for all employees earning above $60,000…We now plan to lift that salary freeze globally as part of our year end performance and compensation review process, with raises effective early next year.” (And 401k matching is back.)
Earlier: Jamie Dimon: Heady Days Are Here Again, Come Get Some Money
As we’ve seen, it’s become pretty clear that no one wants the Worst Job on Wall Street. This morning, The Wall Street Journal explains precisely why.
Kenneth D. Lewis never imagined his eight-year run as chief executive of Bank of America Corp. would end this way.
He had faced a year of headaches big and small. His mother nudged him about paying back the $45 billion of aid his bank got from the federal government. As he pondered his future during a Colorado vacation in August, a bear rummaged through the refrigerator in his mountain home. But what drove the banker out the door was his inability to get along with Uncle Sam.
It gets worse.
First off, he’s a Wharton grad. Given. We don’t know that much else about Taek Jho Low, other than he’s from Malaysia and is a “group adviser” at UBG Berhad. And that he spent $160,000 at Avenue one night during Fashion Week. And that sometimes, for a second, because of the money and the entourage, people think he’s black:
A fleet of black Cadillac Escalades hums outside Chelsea hot spot Avenue — the A-list watering hole of such celebrities as Justin Timberlake and Lindsay Lohan. As the car doors open, a dozen men emerge and a bouncer whisks them over the club’s threshold, past a group of shivering models behind the velvet rope. “Who is it?” one of them wonders out loud. “Is it P. Diddy?”
Negative! The naked models are momentarily upset by this but get over it quickly. He’s not P. Diddy, but the Asian George Costanza is still going to make it rain.
The nightlife scene is abuzz with tales of this international man of mystery — who goes by the name Jho Low and whose chubby, bespectacled appearance hardly meets the image of a wealthy gadabout. In September, during Fashion Week, sources said, Low helped rack up a $160,000 bar tab at Avenue, including several $900 bottles of Cristal champagne. One month later, Lindsay Lohan was belatedly celebrating her 23rd birthday at downtown drinking den 1OAK when 23 bottles of Cristal suddenly appeared. They were reportedly paid for by a “mystery Malaysian,” who, sources claim, was Low.
At chic 27th Street hangout Pink Elephant, Low routinely spends $50,000 to $60,000, according to the club’s owner, David Sarner.
Or does he?
In an e-mail, Low’s friend Hamad Alwazzan claims it is he, not Low, who’s the big spender in town.
Lloyd Blankfein: “I’m Doing God’s Work” (Times Online)
An impish grin spreads across Blankfein’s face. Call him a fat cat who mocks the public. Call him wicked. Call him what you will. He is, he says, just a banker “doing God’s work.” [...] “I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer,” Blankfein says. But then, he slowly begins to argue the case for modern banking. “We’re very important,” he says, abandoning self-flagellation. “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle.” To drive home his point, he makes a remarkably bold claim. “We have a social purpose.”
Wall Street Record Bonuses Return As Big 3 May Pay $30 Billion (Bloomberg)
More than 2007′s $26.8 billion and up 60 percent from last year. Some people feel the need to harsh on the good time: “Wall Street is beginning to resemble Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in the film ‘Gone With the Wind’: ‘Quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,’” Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate on compensation at the Portland, Maine-based Corporate Library, said in an e-mail. “It doesn’t seem as if even political threat, disastrous PR, envy, rising unemployment rates and home repossessions is enough to get any of these people to refuse the bonuses they have ‘earned.’”
Executives Wary After Arrests (NYT)
Apparently hedge fund managers have been calling their lawyers to check out what’s legal and what is grounds for a perp walk in the wake of recent arrests. For now, they’re going to try really hard to be good. “Right now we’re still at Defcon 2,” said Anthony L. Perricone, a lawyer at Jones Day who advises hedge funds. “They’re going to err on the side of conservatism.”
JPMorgan’s Dimon Hires Father For Bear Stearns Brokerage (Bloomberg)
Theodore “Ted” Dimon, the 78-year-old father of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s chief executive officer, quit Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch unit Friday to join his son’s firm, according to a person familiar with the matter. The elder Dimon and his five-member broker team will join Bear Stearns Private Client Services, a unit acquired by his son in the March 2008 takeover of the failed investment bank. He will report to Michael Lee, head of the unit’s New York office.
Robot Hamsters Hottest Toys This Christmas (FT)
“It’s not just hamsters,” Mr Hornsby said. “We are bringing out the clans: chipmunks, squirrels, hedgehogs, rabbits … We have all sorts of cute things coming.”
Some people aren’t pleased to see Goldman employees vaccinated for H1N1 (NBC)
$$$ As previously mentioned, Choo Beng Lee has admitted to insider trading while at SAC. Now the WSJ has more today. [WSJ]
$$$ Want a bailout? There’s an app for that. [The Deal]
$$$ Stamford police seize $1 million in cash, 37 kilos of cocaine [TA]
$$$ Harvard Derivatives Whistleblower: Larry Summers Got Me Fired [BI]
$$$ The Reading Habits Of Wall Street CEOs [NYM]
$$$ Will an ex-Bear guy win the World Series of Poker? Will Jimmy Cayne be named “Most Improved” at bridge camp? Stay tuned.
Having already made his millions on credit-default swaps, David Einhorn wants to see a last call on the controversial derivates.
In his recent speech to the Value Investing Conference, the Greenlight Capital founder lambasted CDS, blaming them for a whole array of social problems and calling them a slippery slope toward Stalinism. What to do with such a social virus? Stamp it out.
“I think that trying to make safer credit-default swaps is like trying to make safer asbestos,” Einhorn said. Quite a statement from one of the hedge fund chieftans who earned the ire of many a Wall Street CEO during the height of the financial crisis, in effect agreeing that CDS are un-American.
Yesterday was apparently not the first time Emanual Goffer has been accused of wrongdoing in conducting his biz. In 2003 Boston.com outted Emanuel as the owner-operator of a cheat-sheet note system for coeds at Boston University. Goffer’s firm, which he called Beantown Notes, operated out of Boston on Beacon Street. The University’s lawyer sent a cease and desist order to Goffer’s firm, threatening to sue if they didn’t shut it down. Goffer conceded, and moved on to bigger and better things, like (allegedly) trading on material non-public information with his brother, Zvi. Speaking of: Dealbreaker, in an attempt to learn more about Team Goffer, reached out to Dalia Goffer, the boy’s mother yesterday, and asked if she thought the FBI had arrested the wrong guys. In an email sent late last night she responded:
