Nobody else wants the gig and, as you’re aware, JSC has come into some time on his hands. He wouldn’t have to move to Charlotte and abandon his Hoboken palace, which is nice, and he’s got some experience running a bank. Still, I don’t really like the idea of Papa Bear lowering his standards and just taking the job because he couldn’t find work elsewhere (also: Ken Lewis’s sloppy seconds? I don’t think so). Plus, there are so many other things he could do. While the original Beard sleeps off the hangover (and his successor wakes up atop a mountain of empty Hostess cupcake wrappers), let’s get some brainstorming going on what JC should do next:
* Bank of America Chief
* Treasury Secretary (Geithner’s practically begging for someone to put him out of his misery at this point, and he’s got the most important pre-req, employment at GS, covered)
* Race car driver
* Write his memoirs, and finally stick it to the Christian Scientist snake who stole Corzine’s job while he was on vacay with the fam
Archive for November 2009
Little more than a year after losing its high-profile proxy battle with Japan’s largest electric utility, The Children’s Investment Fund Management is getting out of Asia entirely.
The Japanese government pulled out all the stops to keep the activist hedge fund from getting its hands on a bigger chunk of Electric Power Development Co., better known as J-Power. But it could hardly imagine that its stand against the “national security threat” presented by TCI would drive the hedge fund off the continent entirely.
Its Japanese defeat–which cost TCI $130 million–was followed earlier this year by the departure of John Ho, the hedge fund’s top executive in Asia and the pointman for its J-Power bid. Last month, TCI closed its Hong Kong office, and the London firm has sold off most of its investments in Asia and has approached other hedge funds in the region about buying what’s left of its portfolios there.
BofA’s Legal Counsel Had No Legal Authority In Merrill Deal (NYP)
Brian Moynihan was named general counsel on Dec. 10, 2008, but was not technically allowed to offer crucial legal advice until more than a week later, when he re-activated his status with the Massachusetts Bar Association. Oops! “This is another fact that leads me to believe there could be something rotten in the cotton,” Representative Edolphus Towns told The Post.
Societe Generale Q3 profit more than doubles (Forbes)
SocGen said in a statement Wednesday that it made a net profit of euro426 million ($627 million) in the July to September period, compared with euro183 million a year earlier.
In Tax Case, 4 Days Saves Robertson $27 Million (WSJ)
Apparently this an important issue for the billionaire, which is troubling: “The stakes were high for Mr. Robertson. If he could prove he spent half of that 366-day year outside of New York City, often at his estate in the wealthy Long Island suburb of Locust Valley, he wouldn’t have to pay the tax. And it was an all-or-nothing case, worth $27 million, an amount important enough to the hedge-fund manager that he and his staff spent hours and developed a complicated calendar system to track his whereabouts.”
Raj Rajaratnam Said to Keep Personal Investments in Sri Lanka (Bloomberg)
Raj-Raj’s direct interests and stakes on the island held through Galleon won’t be affected by the liquidation of the hedge-fund firm following criminal and civil probes.
‘Osama’ Funding Appeals as U.S. Independent Filmmakers Hurt (Bloomberg)
“Look, I mean if Osama bin Laden gave me money to film I’d take it,” he said in a phone interview from Singapore. “It’s always difficult for a filmmaker and particularly in these economically troubled times.”
Hedge Fund Counsel to Lead SEC’s New York Examinations Group (WSJ)
Norm Champ ran the compliance office for Chilton Investment Co. for the last decade. Also, he’s a professor and a “thinker”: “Norm brings to our inspection program an unusual diversity of experience — as general counsel of a multibillion-dollar hedge fund complex, as a university lecturer, and as a policy thinker,” said George S. Canellos, director of the SEC’s New York office.
Barney Frank is putting together one hell of a Christmas present for the financial-services industry.
The head of the House Financial Services Committee said he plans to push through a whole sack full of new regulations changing the way Wall Street does business, or at the very least trying to change the way Wall Street does business, by next month. Committee debate on the proposals begins tomorrow.
While Congress and the administration have done basically nothing this year to respond to the alleged systemic problems underlying the financial crisis, Frank aims to fix everything in a holiday flurry of activity. Among the measures the man from Massachusetts expects to pass are:
Tickets are sold out for tonight’s annual Corporate Boxing Challenge, which is lucky for you, as it’s not really the sort of thing you’d actually want to pay to watch (but failing to do so, given that it’s for charity, would make you look like a dick), especially given that a certain Golden Gloves contender who-never-was won’t be able to make it like usual. So now you can sneak in, guilt free, and watch people like this guy get in the ring.
Name: Khuong B. Chau
Nickname: Silent Thunder
Age: 33
Height: 5’8
Weight: 165 LBS
Employer: Tactical Wealth Advisors, LLC
What was one of the most challenging parts about training for the fight? And the most rewarding?
Wearing a cup. The most rewarding part was meeting my boo.
What do you hope to take away from all of this by the end of training and fight night?
I can defend myself against Nijas in the Greenwich Village.
What do you predict for the outcome of your fight?
A knockout during warm-ups.
You probably didn’t know it but the Jabroni Pony isn’t the only one with a new book on the financial crisis coming out today. Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Zuckerman’s got one, too (though his does not include promotion that involves being shot out of a cannon, naked, at the closing bell). While CG’s tome, which chronicles the fuck-ups of many a CEO, serves as a helpful guide on what not to do if you’re looking to avoid blowing up Wall Street, Zuckerman’s book, The Greatest Trade Ever, chronicles the stories of a bunch of guys who actually made money off that can’t lose asset class, subprime. But it wasn’t all rolling around in sticky fifties from the get-go. Daily Intel runs through the book’s subjects, and the adversity they had to overcome, before doing stuff like making $15 billion in one year, and writing a fuck-off letter to the industry, lobbying for the legalizing of weed. Take heart: even if you lack the motor skills to properly shave yourself, you could be the next John Paulson:
At times, [pre-king of the world] Paulson didn’t seem completely put together. When Brad Balter, a young broker, came to visit, Paulson chain-smoked cigarettes and had spots of blood on his shirt collar from a shaving mishap. Paulson’s head of marketing was stretched out in agony on a nearby couch, moaning about his back.
“I didn’t know what to think. It was a little surreal,” Balter recalls.
At times, Paulson became discouraged. His early investment performance was good but uneven, and he continued to have few clients. He was sure of his abilities but questioned whether he could make the fund a success.
One especially glum day, Paulson asked his father, “Am I in the wrong business? Is something wrong with me? “It was hard to be rejected, it was a lonely period,” Paulson recalls.
Also featured: the guy with the glass eye (Michael Burry), the guy who was known for his “unusually thick sideburns” (Greg Lippman), and everyone’s favorite burnout (Andrew Ladhe).
Bad News Bears: The Guys Who Bet Against The Subprime Bubble And Won [Daily Intel]
Continuing our coverage of the search to fill the Worst Job on Wall Street, we have some bad news for the Charlotte tourist bureau.
Bank of America has decided not to force its next CEO to live and work in North Carolina, according to Bloomberg News, in a bid to attract better candidates.
The board, led by Chairman Walter Massey, is also concerned there may not be a deep enough pool of qualified candidates willing to move to Charlotte, 330 miles south of Washington, the people said, speaking anonymously because the search is private. CEO Kenneth Lewis, who is stepping down at year’s end, has said Charlotte will remain headquarters as long as he’s in charge.
“It does reflect well on the board that they’re not going to let the headquarters location limit their selection in terms of CEOs,” said Thomas Brown, CEO of New York-based hedge fund Second Curve Capital. “There aren’t too many people around the world who think that Charlotte is a major financial center.”
From the mailbag:
Spotted Andrew Ross Sorkin at a bookstore in Penn Station berating a young clerk for not carrying more copies of his book, “Too Big To Fail.”
He actually said quite loudly: “Dude, you need to carry like a 100 copies of that book. It’s gonna be huge!”
Sorkin has yet get back to us with a comment on the account, and while it doesn’t really seem very in character for the DealBook editor to be making such a spectacle (in public), you can’t deny that he’s right to fight for the guy who just wants to get a gripping account of the shit that went down last year over a few rounds at the Houlihan’s bar, or in the station’s lush new accomodations. One thing you can be sure of is this:
The British Treasury is pouring another £39.2 billion into the country’s two largest banks. And even though it may saddle the U.K. itself with another £13 billion in debt, Prime Minister Gordon Brown–in an electorally-suicidal game of three-card bailout monte–calls the deal with RBS and Lloyds Banking Group a boon for the taxpayer.
“At the end of the day, banks will be paying more to the British public, not the other way round,” Brown assured a country itching to toss him out of office at the first opportunity, one they’ll get by June.
According to Brown, the new bailout will reduce the Treasury’s risk exposure by as much as £300 billion and wean RBS and Lloyds from their newfound dependency on taxpayer pounds. It will certainly be interesting to hear him mumbling, stumbling and stuttering that on the campaign trail.
In case there was any doubt as to whether or not Shia LaBeouf is a big boy trader now, the Money Never Sleeps star has confirmed that he is indeed the market moving BSD you imagined. Also, he apparently knows “everything” there is to know about this shit, so if anyone’s looking for a little guidance, be it hot insider trading tips or which type of estrogen pills will get your tits looking just right, feel free to give him a buzz. (Once he passes the Level 1 CFA exam in December, which our sources at the institute tell us he’s hard at working studying for, it won’t even be fair. Potential investors: act quickly and he’ll trim his fees for the first $2bn in AUM with an 8-year lockup.)
The actor…says he knew nothing about the financial world when he was first cast by Oliver Stone, so he walked into a brokerage firm and asked for help — and soon got so hooked, it has become the biggest part of his life.
The actor says he used $20,000 to study the markets. “As of this morning, that’s $297,000,” he said.
“I manage my own portfolio. I check through the day, read the daily Wall Street Journal, trade personally on my cellphone, text people throughout the day, carry my laptop on the set, have Bloomberg on speed-dial. I now have lots of friends in lots of places.”
