The United States may be hurtling headlong into a debt disaster, but that didn’t seem to bother creditors today.
Sure, the national debt now exceeds $12 trillion, and simply servicing that mountain of IOUs is going to cost almost $1 trillion a year in a decade. Still, bidders today drove down the yield on two-year Treasury notes to an all-time low, as though the U.S. isn’t facing a fiscal reckoning of seriously unpleasant proportions.
Archive for November 2009
Someone is not happy at the House of Pandito.
To: DealBreaker
From: [redacted]
Subject: Citi Overpaying for Research Analysts w/ TARP Money
Count Vikula, drunk on TARP funds, just kicked off week three of a research department hiring binge that has unemployed sell-side analysts partying like its 1999. One stunning example of their recent largesse: signing a mid-cap software analyst (formerly of a Piper-Jaffrayesqe boutique) to a groin-grabbing multi-year, multi-million dollar guaranteed package.Is expanding their coverage universe to industry juggernauts like CVLT really the best use of taxpayer money? At least Andrew Hall (castle aside) was accretive to Citi’s EBIT.
Update: According to a spokesman for Citi:
1) We do not give multi-year guarantees.
2) We don’t cover CVLT.
3) In the US, we have hired only one analyst since September–hardly a binge. (We did hire one Latin America equity analyst who is based outside US and hired a head of Latin America research based in NYC. But he is a manager, not an analyst.)
Back in April, Billy Ackman put his UWS co-op at the Majestic on the market for $10 million, after his mother-in-law convinced him it wasn’t worth the $12 million he wanted. Curbed reports Ack-boy has sold the pad, and is headed up the block to the Beresford at 211 Central Park West. Due to building rules, Ackman is not allowed to keep his “guest” apartment when he goes, so he’s putting the place– which he bought for $450,000 in 2007 and then put $250,000 into renovating– up for sale, and asking for $950,000. If somebody doesn’t buy this thing– and everything inside, including flat screens and that little Target dog, which Bill has grown seriously fond of–, ASAP, Ackman is auctioning it off December 8th. Ackman has told residents he’ll be the auctioneer (and has been practicing getting the voice just right with a friend), and will be providing “some excellent wines for participants” in case anyone’s looking for free drinks.
The Post reported today that Jamie Dimon’s name has continued to come up in Washington as a possible replacement for Tim Geithner. This isn’t very shocking, as Jamie Dimon was considered a candidate for the job before TG was nominated, and consistently over the course of the year. Plus, he’s Obama’s favorite banker and so and and so forth. If asked to take the job, JD, who’s said he’d “love to serve his country,” probably would, and even Dick Bové is supporting the nom. Still, Bové is likely only doing so because she’s under the impression that Ken Lewis is going to get the Bank of America CEO gig. When reality sets in that KL is going to be escorted from the BAC building come Dec. 31, crazy lady Divé will obviously then declare Lewis the only one fit to be Treasury Secretary. Plus, Dimon has expressed that he’s planning on staying at JPMorgan for five to seven more years and after that, fingers crossed, will open a bar. But someone is going to have to take over for TG, whether it’s Dimon or whoever, and the question is when. Lately it seems as though the stress of acting as everyone’s fire hydrant is getting to the li’l fella. And now, he’s shouldering some of the blame for why AIG employees aren’t getting paid, which mean it’s very likely that, like Cuomo, Benmosche’s going to put Geithner in a room and do “unspeakable things” to the Secretary, that will leave him in too damaged a state to do his job. So let’s make this interesting. Two questions:
It turns out that the next best thing to running a successful bank may well be running a catastrophically unsuccessful one.
At the very least, Dicky Fuld and Jimmy Cayne did very, very well for themselves according to a new report from a bunch of Harvard Law School eggheads. So did their buddies: Executives at the late Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers took home some $2.5 billion in cash over the last nine years of the banks’ all-too-short lives.
The report shows that the top five executives at each firm walked away with $250 million apiece on average from 2000 until last year when both firms ceased to be able to pay huge bonuses or to, you know, function. Everyone’s favorite pothead cashed out a comfortable $388 million, which should keep him well-supplied for some time. Wall Street’s cutest primate, for his part, banked $541 million.
Hedge Fund Manager Was Just Messing Around When He Said He Was Going To “Face-F*ck” Someone
By Bess Levin
Once again, Mark Lowe, the Nomos Capital founder being sued by IR Jordan Wimmer for, among other things, trying to kill her (several times), hiring hookers to work as investor relations girls, forcing Wimmer to be present while he received lap dances, having an Asian fetish, and making dumb blonde jokes, has once again been forced to defend his sense of humor. Last week it was over something he said about putting your girlfriend in the trunk of your car (he was just JK’ing! What’s the big deal? He’s never actually done that, yet). Today it’s over counseling a young job seeker to keep her enemies close, by allegedly saying that in his business dealings, he threatens to “face-fuck” and do something else that begins with a ‘b’ to people. Because he’s not just a comedian but also an Oxonian, Lowe put the advice in Latin. Unfortunately, he claims something was lost in translation and while, yeah, he did basically say his go-to tactic is to throw non-consensual sex in the direction of his business rivals, it was a “lighthearted joke” and not one worth getting anyone’s panties in a bunch over.
The recession may be over, but that doesn’t mean governments should stop pouring trillions into their economies.
A pair of policymakers from both sides of the Atlantic want to keep those stimulus dollars (and euros and pounds) rolling. James Bullard, the St. Louis Fed president who’s had an awful lot to say these days, wants to see the Fed’s ability to buy mortgage-backed securities and bonds continue. IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn agrees that it is way too early to give up on stimulus policies.
The Koz has a new appeal pending before a federal judge in Manhattan, re: whether or not he was denied a fair trial because he “didn’t have access to prosecutorial evidence that might have helped his defense.” He’s four years into his sentence, a pretty vague 8 to 25 years and honestly? He doesn’t like prison life that much. “Horrible,” is how the Koz describes it. It’s not really laundry duty that gets to him, or the lack of birthday party/shareholder meeting/Roman orgies that feature ice sculptures pissing Vodka. What really kills DK is the assholes who smoke during his allotted time in the yard. “It’s nice if you like standing around breathing second hand smoke for two hours,” he told Fortune. Also, he finds it “galling” that Dick Fuld et al aren’t behind bars and yet here he is, having not done that much wrong, sucking in carcinogens.
Danielle Chiesi who, as previously mentioned, was named Miss Southern Tier Teenager in 1981. Still waiting on some shots from her fishnet days.
Ever since Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam went down for insider trading, and one of his biggest accomplices, Danielle Chiesi went down with him, we’ve been using the picture at left of the latter (one of the few available). And every single time we’ve done so, we’ve immediately received a flurry of emails imploring us to find a better one, not simply because the photo in question hurts some people on a deep level but because, according to the senders, Danielle Chiesi was once super hot. “Like insanely hot,” more than a few told us, begging that we find a replacement because they’d already told their co-workers how good looking she was, and credibility was on the line. Regrettably, despite putting in a few minutes of hard work Google Image searching, we were unable to find find any evidence that these guys could bring to the table in an effort to prove they did not have a thing for the Bridget Nielsen (Flavor Flav Years) of the finance industry. Today, they are saved. Bloomberg reports that Danielle Chiesi was named Miss Southern Tier Teenager in 1981. Unfortunately, Bloomberg did not include a photo of DC at the time but no matter– apparently one of her wearing a tiara exists and while we wait for someone to find it and send it here, let’s get to know the beauty queen a bit better. (For those of you looking to make a splash, consider taking a page from Chiesi’s playabook.)
Starting with the fishnets.
Chiesi wore short skirts and low-cut tops, according to people who saw her over the years. When she worked at New York brokerage Furman Selz LLC in the early 1990s, she would show up in a tight red suit with red fishnet stockings, says a person who worked there at the time.
Which some people seem to have had a problem with.
Chiesi used her sexuality to build sources at male-dominated tech companies, says Deborah Stapleton, president of Stapleton Communications Inc., an investor relations company in Palo Alto, California. “It amazes me that grown, wealthy, successful, hardworking men fell for that,” Stapleton says. Chiesi was proud of her network, too. “She bragged about her contacts in public,” Stapleton says. “She was like a teenager who wanted everyone to know she knew some rock star.”
The knockers with a heart of gold.
“Danielle was really social, gregarious and popular,” says Stacey Maggio, a sorority sister. “She was a knockout with a big heart.”
Horizontal dancing.
Why Did Lloyd Blankfein Apologize? (NYT)
Goldman explains: “Lloyd has expressed regret…that the financial services industry collectively neglected to raise enough questions about whether some of the trends and practices that became commonplace really served the public’s long-term interests. In particular, the industry let the growth and complexity in some new instruments outstrip their economic and social utility as well as the operational capacity to manage them.”
Jamie Dimon Seen As Good Fit For Treasury (NYP)
According to unnamed sources, JD’s name has continued to come up among policymakers as a replacement for Tim Geithner. And guess who else would support this move? “It is critical to the standing of the United States in the global financial economy to have a Treasury secretary who has the full support of the president and Congress; a person who has earned respect on their own as a result of hard-won battles in finance to represent this nation,” said Dick Bove, who this week will publish a report on Dimon. “That is not Timothy Geithner. It is Jamie Dimon.”
BofA May Name Stopgap Chief If Board Needs More Time for Search (Bloomberg)
Surprise! The Bank of America board it still yet to find someone willing to take this dream gig. They’re now giving themselves through 2010 to find a replacement.
Show Me The Money (NYM)
Whether he stays or leaves, Benmosche understood that he had lost control. “It’s Feinberg’s company. That’s what he learned,” one director in the board meeting later told me. “We all thought there was an ability to run this company. We were wrong.”
Goldman Sachs’s Non-Apology (NYT)
So, here’s a thought: “Goldman should make a multibillion-dollar gift to the federal Bureau of the Public Debt, which accepts tax-deductible donations to reduce the national debt. The donation can come from the bonuses; that way, it would not harm shareholders, because they only get their cut after the bonuses are paid. Goldman’s tax savings from the donation could help finance the small-business initiative.”
