Which is why this story– Maybe Goldman Sachs Will Make It’s Employees Give Money To Charity, Maybe It Wont, It’s All Relative– was leaked to the media. Here’s the rub: as you may have noticed, Goldman’s had a tough go it lately, PR-wise. They’ve adopted kittens, they’ve let the first known instance of an apology pass their lips, they’ve touched actual garbage, all in the name of getting everyone to shut the hell up with the Goldman hate. And yet the bitching and the moaning and the “Hey mister, those Swarovski crystals you’re about to have applied to your balls were paid for by the American taxpayer” continue apace. And now it’s not just coming from the plebes, who can for the most part be written off as people who don’t know what they’re talking about, it’s coming from shareholders, too. Since it’s most likely only going to get worse when the bank backs up the bonus truck, here’s what GS is considering: what would you think of Lloyd and Co being forced, publicly of course, to give money to charity? They used to do something like this at Bear Stearns, and while Goldman tends to avoid adopting any idea devised by two guys hot-boxing an air shaft,* this one seems like it might have legs.
While the details of the latest charity initiative are still under discussion, the firm’s executives have been looking at expanding their current charitable requirements for months and trying to understand whether such gestures would damp public anger over pay, according to a person familiar with the matter who did not want to be identified because of the delicacy of the pay issue. The charity idea would be similar to a decades-long program at the failed investment bank Bear Stearns, which required more than 1,000 of its top workers to give 4 percent of their pay to charity each year and then checked their tax returns to ensure compliance.
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Know this, Swiss: they’re on to you.
UBS’s bonus numbers are due out the end of February, but for the second year in a row, this has been because they’ve delayed both bonus communication and payouts. The idea is that many recently opened positions at other banks will have been filed by the time the Swiss bend us over with shitty comp numbers.
Banks Brace For Bonus Fury (WSJ)
(Some) banks are going to pay (some) people with much more stock than cash which might leave them asking for money on the streets. Really! Seriously, not just a bluff: “I don’t think it’s just whining,” said one person at a Wall Street firm. “There are legitimate liquidity issues that people have.”
Investor Alwaleed says Citigroup “on right path” (Reuters)
FYI, according to its favorite shareholder, the “worst” is “behind” the Big C. All good in the hood.
Geithner Has Support of Obama, Democratic Lawmakers, Aides Say (Bloomberg)
So if you thought you were going to start shit, Rep. Issa, think again. Asked yesterday for comment, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said he stood by his earlier statements that the president had full confidence in Geithner. Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, said “Secretary Geithner enjoys the strong support of the Senate Democratic caucus.”
U.S. Bankers Are Fed Up With British Regulations (NYT)
Surprise! People don’t like the 60 percent tax so much.
Thiel Gets A Tanning (NYP)
Peter Thiel’s Clarium Capital lost 10 percent in December and ended 2009 down 25 percent. CC now has 1.33 billion in assets under management. At the start of the year, it was $2 billion. His hedge-fund assets peaked in 2008 at more than $7 billion
Are They Really? (NYT)
The Times editorial board is skeptical that all the bankers who’ve been apologizing lately are actually really sorry. In case you thought you were fooling anyone, Lloyd.
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So sayeth noted prognosticator John Carney.
Remember that story yesterday, about how then NY Fed Chair Tim Geithner and his staff maybe instructed AIG to keep its payments to banks hush-hush, as backed up by emails? Never happened, says New York Fed’s general counsel. He has no idea what any of you are talking about. In fact, he’s never even heard of this Tim Geithner guy. What’s he like?
“Matters of AIG securities law disclosure were not brought to the attention of the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,” Thomas Baxter, the New York Fed’s general counsel, said in a statement.
The U.S. Treasury and White House also have said Geithner was not involved in any e-mailed discussions between New York Fed and AIG lawyers over disclosures of the insurer’s payments to banks.
NY Fed: Geithner not involved in AIG disclosures [Reuters]
Hopefully the extra money will help. If not they’re going to have to go with Plan B: bring in Lenny Dykstra and allot each employee 5 minutes to tickle torture Nails while Twizzlers hang out of his mouth. That’s always tends make people feel better.
The bank’s employee “morale is exceptionally low and they’ve been beaten up every day for the past two years, so you can’t get any worse, so any uptick is a success story,” Jason Kennedy, chief executive officer of Kennedy Associates, a London-based recruiting firm, said today in a Bloomberg Television interview.
As previously mentioned, back in December there was a “situation” at Reuters wherein the newswire chose not to run Matthew Goldstein’s story on Patricia Cohen suing her ex-husband, Steve Cohen, and alleging things like Stevie insider trading. It was unclear why the article was held, and it still is, even after editor-in-chief David Schlesinger held a conference call with staffers to discuss the issue. Schlesinger said it was “not a bad story” and “could have run” but still failed to say why it, you know, didn’t. If SAC did in fact complain about the story, well, that’s probably to expected. Most people or organizations would at least try. What we want is the unanswered question as to why Reuters kowtowed to the request. Was it that:
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Yesterday we discussed the matter of Jeffrey Gundlach, who is being sued by his former employer, TCW Group. The Los Angeles-based asset manager is claiming, among other things, that Gundlach and a bunch of ex-employees stole TWC proprietary information to be used in a new company launched last month, DoubleLine LLC. The other “things” being alleged are that on the day JG was fired, a search of his office turned up drugs, paraphernalia (“bearing evidence of recent use”), 12 sexual “devices,” 34 “hardcore pornographic magazines,” and 36 “hardcore sexually explicit DVDs and videocassettes.”
Now, on the one hand, maybe all of this is legit. Maybe Gundlach just loves his drugs and porn, and needed them close to him at all hours of the day. On the other hand: the sheer volume of stuff just seems really suspect, and as though perhaps someone was maybe tasked with stashing some stuff around the office to make Gundlach look bad, except that whoever was put on the job failed to exercise a little restraint, making the whole thing slightly unbelievable.
Let’s just say Gundlach does feel the need to jerk it at the office, and, being blocked from XTube, has no other choice but to bring in his own materials. Fine. Would he seriously need thirty-six different DVDs??? One, okay. Two, fine. Everyone needs variety. THIRTY-SIX? To say nothing of him apparently having every single issue of Honcho? And twelve different devices? So, basically, what TCW is trying to tells us, is that either a) Gundlach essentially spent every single minute of the working day looking at porn, in a sex swing, with a ball gag in his mouth or b) he was operating a online wholesale sex shop distributor and kept the inventory at his office. And not that there’s anything wrong with either, but it just seems a bit suspect. And forces me to ask:
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Stephen Schwarzman loves romantic comedies. There, I said it. Maid In Manhattan, How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, You’ve Got Mail, all of ‘em. So what if he wants to live in a world in which fairy-tale endings really do come true? So what if he wants to be transported to a place where you could correspond with someone over the internet for years and when finally meeting, instead of getting hacked up and dumped in the East River, fall in love? So WHAT? They’re his thing, and he shouldn’t have to defend it to you, or anyone else. He works really hard, and this is the shit that gets him through the day. So excuse Stephen, if, on the opening weekend of a movie he’s been waiting months to see, he does what he has to do to ensure no one’s going to mess with his viewing.
Steve Schwarzman won’t let anything get in the way of a good time at the multiplex. To see “It’s Complicated” over the holidays in West Palm Beach, the Blackstone billionaire had an aide hold two seats in the middle of the theater for him and his wife, Christine. “The assistant was shooing people away until Christine and Steve got there,” says a spy, “at which point she gave the seats to them and left.”
The Right Seats [NYP]
Hey business owners, you know what would be a great way to get employees to stop quitting your company? I’ve thought about this long and hard and I think I’ve got it. Are you ready? Are you ready for this one? Here’s comes the money shot: you could pay them. I know Bank of America agrees with me because they’re expected to pay out bonuses close to 2007 levels. Employees previously threatening to walk out that door and never come back seem to like this new plan.
Bank of America’s willingness to pay bonuses near 2007 levels is calming tensions among former Merrill executives and tamping down talk of more defections. “Nobody is talking about leaving,” said one person familiar with the matter.
The arrangement could cool tensions among bankers who were at BofA before the Merrill deal and saw their bonuses drastically reduced in 2008. For 2008, this person said, “the feeling was the Merrill guys got paid and Bank of America guys didn’t.”
BAC, of course, would like to keep this on the DL, pretending to have no idea what any of this is about, lest anyone– perhaps a former employee who didn’t get paid last year– get upset:
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London’s Investment Banks Double Pay to Lure Back City Talent (Bloomberg)
Great news: “The banks are killing the boutiques,” said Daryl Bowden, co-chief executive officer of ICAP Plc’s equities unit in Europe and Asia. “They’re doubling salaries and offering above-average compensation. Banks today have limited risk so people can work there without fear.”
Contrarian Investor Sees Economic Crash in China (NYT)
Jim Chanos “is warning that China’s hyperstimulated economy is headed for a crash, rather than the sustained boom that most economists predict. Its surging real estate sector, buoyed by a flood of speculative capital, looks like ‘Dubai times 1,000 — or worse,’ he frets. He even suspects that Beijing is cooking its books, faking, among other things, its eye-popping growth rates of more than 8 percent.” Meanwhile, Jim Rogers, who says China “is not a bubble,”‘ is making the bold claim that Jim Chanos didn’t know how to spell ‘China’ as of ten years ago.
Swiss Regulator Broke Law on UBS Client Disclosure (Bloomberg)
Oops: Switzerland’s financial markets regulator broke the law when it ordered UBS AG to give data on 255 of the bank’s clients to the U.S. last year, a court ruled. “Even if Finma was in a difficult situation because of the threat of a lawsuit against UBS, it shouldn’t have authorized the data transfer without following the proper administrative procedure,” the court said in a statement attached to the ruling. “An authority like Finma cannot apply state of emergency measures in place of the government.”
Tip Of Iceberg (New Deal 2.0)
Eliot Spitzer still wants to see those AIG emails. You people can’t hide much longer.
TCW Group Sues Former CIO Jeffrey Gundlach For Having Drugs, Pornos And 12 “Sexual Devices” In Office (DB)
In case you missed it yesterday.
Goldman Sued By Pension Fund Over Bonus Plans (Reuters)
In a lawsuit filed in New York state supreme court in Manhattan on behalf of shareholders, the Central Laborers’ Pension Fund said Goldman had by September 25 set aside nearly $17 billion for compensation and might pay out more than $22 billion for the year. It said this “highlights the complete breakdown” of corporate oversight.
Spending Bonus Cash Becomes Risky as Clawback Rules Increase (Bloomberg)
Seventy-three percent of Fortune 100 companies, or the largest U.S. firms based on revenue, said they had clawback policies in 2009 compared with 18 percent in 2006, according to Equilar, a Redwood Shores, California-based executive compensation research firm.
