Why does General Motors take it up the tailpipe? You could probably come up with at least handful of reasons, but at a breakfast hosted by Fortune this morning, Steve Rattner wanted to highlight one in particular. Over bagels and lox, the retired Car Czar, who last month was finally able to get it off his chest that automaker’s PowerPoint presentations were for shit, said that the higher-ups took no responsibility for their action and spent most of their time smack talking the “competition.”
On Rattner’s conversation with former GM CEO Rick Wagoner when he told him he was fired: “The most curious part of it was that after three to four minutes of chit chat he asked ‘Well are you going to fire Ron Gettelfinger too?’…And I said, ‘Look I’m not in charge of firing Ron Gettelfinger’… One of the problems with GM is that they blame everyone but themselves for their problems…But the fact is, Ford is doing OK and there is no reason why GM had to be in this position.”
Also, don’t talk to him about socialism.
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As you’re aware, Lloyd Blankfein apologized yesterday for “participating in things that were clearly wrong,” because Goldman is “very concerned” about its reputation, and who doesn’t love a good “Sorry, I was wrong,” particularly done in public to up the humiliation factor? Obviously LB and Co are hoping it’s enough to silence all the peasants and Matt Taibbis out there, though the early reviews don’t think Blankfein sufficiently proved he actually meant it. Really, though, it doesn’t much matter because who cares what the plebes and the marine biology smut writers of the world think? They’ve been given $500 million to quit the bitching and honestly? Lloyd may have bigger, more important apologies to make, on the inside. Forget the populist pitchforks. Those are idle threats, and LB can take them. This is the shit he should recoiling his gold-plated scrot over.
Everyone knows that according to a simplistic calculation of average compensation, the typical person at Goldman Sachs earns a lot more than the typical person at almost any other organization you might care to think of. Now, an equally simplistic calculation, and one used by Lloyd Blankfein himself, implies that Goldman’s London bankers are more handsomely rewarded than its bankers in New York.
[...]
Last week Blankfein claimed his people were “one of the most productive workforces in the world”, earning on average $196,000 in the years 2000 to 2008, more than double the figure at other American banks. Alas, some sharp-eyed observers have noticed that this is much less than the £181,000 that Blankfein had previously said was the average among the bank’s 5,500 workers in Britain. Has Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs chief executive, overstepped the mark — again?
Blankfein banks on no one noticing salary gap [Times Online]
Do Goldman staff really earn 55% more in London than NY? [eFC]
If the European Union isn’t regulating, it isn’t happy.
Stymied by fear and common sense, the EU seems likely to drop the most odious aspects of its proposed new rules on hedge funds and private equity firms. But the Europeans have simultaneously struck upon the only thing more likely to drive hedge funds out of Europe than strict oversight: draconian pay restrictions. And now it’s turned its sights on the insurance industry.
The president of the European Central Bank today backed plans to place new encumbrances on the continent’s economy by regulating big insurers the same way it regulates banks. After all, can’t those insurers be just as “systemically relevant,” á la AIG?
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Wells Fargo has become the latest firm to offer a belated “my bad” on auction-rate securities.
The bank’s Wells Fargo Investments today agreed to repay clients who bought the unfortunate securities some $1.3 billion. It’s also paying an additional “I’m sorry” penalty of $1.9 million, for allegedly promising clients that ARS were highly liquid and that nothing could possibly go wrong.
Of course, something did go wrong: The ARS market collapsed in February 2008 and all of those billions–Wells Fargo sold some $2.95 billion in ARS–were frozen.
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According to Paulson & Co internal documents John Paulson is thinking soon to be CEO-less BofA will be worth three times what he bought it for in two and a half years time. Yesterday, Bloomberg reported JP’s been telling his investors Bank of America still has considerable upside and room to double in value.
But according to documents we saw, JP started telling investors in July he got into this trade with the expectation the stock would more than triple by the end of 2011.
As first reported by Chris Gillick in the September issue of AR magazine, Paulson’s cost basis for his huge-ass BofA position was $9. Using a conservative P/E multiple of 10, and a 2011 earnings per share estimate of $3, Paulson’s analysis estimates $BAC should be worth $30 at the tail end of 2011. In other words, pay no attention to JP taking a mere 8.2 million shares off his 168 million position in the third quarter.
Given that some of you might make your own estimate off of JP $3 EPS prediction here’s how Team Paulson does the math via his marketing material:
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We’ve been saying for a while that John Thain is the ideal candidate to take over Bank of America, as a) he’s unemployed and b) he could use his power to equip every men’s room with the line of urinal cakes bearing Ken Lewis’s mug he’s been working on in his spare time. Yesterday at the Reuters Global Finance Summit, JT finally got on board. He didn’t specifically name-check the bank no one wants to run but obviously the admission that he’s looking for a job in private equity “or perhaps a public company” was wink-wink for the board to get in touch, as was the “call me” gesture. (Thain further hinted that BAC is at the top of his “dream gigs” list by elaborating for any headhunters in the audience that he’s looking for a “challenge.” Read between the lines Lewis and tell JT how his ass taste.) After making sure everyone in the audience had a copy of his resume, Thain moved on to address another issue that’s been weighing on him for a while now, which is the hideous suggestion by the Times that at one point during his time at Merrill “he halted a meeting with his chief financial officer and hurled a chair against the wall, shattering a nearby glass panel.”
“That was 100 percent made up,” he said. “Do I seem like a guy who throws chairs?” asked Thain. “That conference room doesn’t even have a glass wall,” he added.
Plus, HELLO? Who here doesn’t know by now that an enraged Thain slips into a onesie and horrifies onlookers by shadow wrestling on the mat, not by throwing furniture.
Citi Boosts Base Salaries Of Some Senior Employees (Reuters)
CFO John Gerspach’s annual base salary will increase to $500,000 effective November 1 from $400,000 prior to November, while James Forese is receiving $475,000, compared with $225,000. Gerspach is also receiving $2.92 million of stock salary for 2009, while Forese will get $5.4 million. And a sad trombone for Vikram, who will make $1 for the year, with no stock salary.
Blankfein Apologizes for Goldman Sachs Role in Crisis (Bloomberg)
In case you missed it, Blankfein and Co. are kinda sorry about some stuff they got peer-pressured into going along with. Also, fuck the haters: The firm is “very concerned” about the criticism because “our reputation is very important to us,” said Blankfein. “I don’t love it, we kind of sigh,” he said of the criticism. Instead of responding directly to critics, the company instead had tried provide “the kind of constructive suggestions that people would think a Goldman Sachs would be able to come up with.”
Fearing IRS, 14,700 Disclose Disclosed Offshore Accounts (NYT)
Great news for Tim Geithner: “We are talking about billions of dollars coming into the U.S. Treasury,” Douglas H. Shulman, the I.R.S. commissioner, said Tuesday.
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$$$ “We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret,” Blankfein, 55, said at a conference in New York hosted by the Directorship magazine. “We apologize.” [Bloomberg]
$$$ Lobbying Effort Backfires For Hedge Funds [NYT]
$$$ Oops! Yale Doesn’t Actually Have $60 Billion [BI]
$$$ The Hermitage Saga Turns Tragic As Fund Lawyer Dies In Jail [ZH]
Once upon a time, before she was sleeping with married men and having people eat raw fish off her raw fish, all in the name of journalism, Melanie Berliet supposedly worked as a bond trader at “an elite investment bank.” She was one of just a handful of women and sushi girl liked it.
…my token status gave me an extra thrill. There was something doubly funny when I drilled a Nerf football into some guy’s head. Something gratifyingly titillating about my accidental flubs, like the time I announced, too loudly, “I love nuts.” I enjoyed being called a “fucking dullard” or being instructed, patronizingly, to “remove head from ass,” because my reaction–to grin rather than cry–impressed the guys. I loved their attention and the daily opportunities to prove that I fit in.
To that end, Mel B was up to get down when her boss, “Carl Pratt” (whose name was changed for this article, more on that later), texted her shit like, “Just woke up from a dream. I had you on your belly and took you from behind. You came multiple times.” At first she was like, silly Carl you sound like such a tool using the word ‘belly’ but as for the doing me from behind? I’ve been thinking about it too. She hadn’t actually been thinking about it, but Carl was her boss and they’d been doing the sexual banter thing for some time now. Also, Melanie felt “blessed to be able to play the sex card rather than cursed to have the game foisted upon me” and the bottom line was her “overwhelming preoccupation was procuring a fat bonus check.” There was only one thing left to do. Text back: “Wow. And I thought I was the only one still having wet dreams.” She figured, later that night, there’d be a few more drunk exchanges with CP but she didn’t think that even after telling him she had her period and that she’d “pulled her groin” that he’d persist but surprise! He did. So she told him to put on some “hard core porn” and got in a cab.
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Unlike some people who shall remain nameless. NEVERTHELESS– Maria has crossed paths with many, many stock gurus, who laid their investing knowledge on her ass. And now she wants to do the same to you. You WANT a piece this. Skittish about diving in? That’s cool. Maria’s fine with playing just the tip. But dollars to donuts you’ll be begging for more. How serious is MB about this thing? So serious she took a pledge. Need we say more? Okay:
• “Maria has carefully cultivated relationships with many giants of the investing world. And she knows how to interview them to get the very best they have to offer.”
• “Maria will not leave you hanging.”
• “Exclusive insights, analysis and forecasts that Maria gleans off-the-camera.”
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It’s not an outbreak. Yet. (Kidding, you know the banks had their people vaccinated before the plebes.) On another note, it’s sort of unclear how this happened, as Citi took pains earlier this year to teach its employees how to wash their hands in an effort to avoid “accidentally” wiping everyone out and closing up shop.
One of the TMT banker on the 37th floor of the Greenwich Street building has been identified as having H1N1 and was asked to leave just now.
