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$$$ Goldman, CEO hit with lawsuit [Reuters]
$$$ Goldman Sachs, Obama and Wall Street Reform [The New Yorker]
$$$ Thomas Montag, the former head of sales and trading in the Americas at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., called a set of mortgage-linked investments sold by his firm “one shi**y deal,” according to an excerpt from internal e-mails released by Senate lawmakers. [Bloomberg]
$$$ Why Does Larry Summers Like Banks So Much? [The Atlantic]
Ahead of tomorrow’s hearing, there have been a flurry of stories about Goldman Sachs everywhere you look, including this here site. But it was only Kate Kelly’s Wall Street Journal article that really hit home. For whatever you think about Goldman Sachs and its employees, they’re just people. Just men. Just financial services hacks who, when they’re not coming up with nefarious plots to take over the universe (JK…JK I’m serious), are shoveling food in their mouths as quickly as possible for sport.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s mortgage traders, under the spotlight because of the U.S. government’s fraud lawsuit against the securities firm, made markets in more than just bonds during the real-estate bubble. They also cast bets on a White Castle hamburger-eating contest. In December 2007, after the firm distributed multimillion-dollar bonus checks in part thanks to bets on a mortgage meltdown, about 10 Goldman mortgage traders, surrounded by dozens of cheering colleagues, wolfed down the burgers, according to attendees. Bystanders wagered cash on how many burgers the traders could eat.
If you care about Lloyd and Co at all, and maybe you don’t, tomorrow you’ll step up to the plate and do one of these (but after the hearing so I can provide coverage, otherwise there’s no point). And if not for Lloyd, do it for Pookie. Continue reading »
He hasn’t been ready to talk about it until now but yes, you should know, April 16th was the day Lloyd saw Viniar for the first time in the new steam room during an AM soak. All innocence lost. Not even the on-site cupcakes could console him. And the day got only worse. Here’s what he has to say about that. Continue reading »
Entertain the thought of crossing him and he'll burn them off.
They seem to have all but made him the fall guy for this little matter with the SEC but do not be deceived, ladies– Goldman Sachs has got Fabrice Tourre’s back! The firm told Charlie Gasparino that Mr. Fantabulous would’ve been canned a while ago if they thought he’d done anything that could get them into any legal trouble. Continue reading »
Many of you have likely done things you should be embarrassed about in the name of getting laid. Given. For the most part, though, that embarrassment (and second hand embarrassment) remains contained to a relatively small group of people. Your friends, onlookers at the bar, cab drivers and so on and so forth. It’s likely that tens of millions of people will never see the depths to which you’ve sunk to put your d in a v. Such is not the case for Fabrice Tourre, who in one of the many emails released by Senator Carl Levin (no relation) over the weekend, has him begging off the ‘fabulous’ title in a message to lady-friend Marine Serres, a Goldman colleague. There’s nothing NSFW about this, but it should be considered NSFThoseWho’veJustFinishedLunch. Continue reading »
Shaquille O’Neal may have hung out with, and even bench-pressed, accused Florida Ponzi man Nevin Shapiro, but he flatly denies Shapiro ever gave him a pair of diamond-studded handcuffs.
Shapiro, who liked to hang out with pro athletes, was arrested last week on charges of running a $900 million Ponzi scheme. He promised investors annual returns of as much as 25 percent from buying cheap groceries in one region and selling them in another locale where prices were higher. In a press release last week, prosecutors said Shapiro gave the cuffs to a “prominent professional athlete.” Continue reading »
The following post is by Dealbreaker reader and commenter Infinite Guest.
The e-mails from Goldman Sachs that Senator Carl Levin posted on his website Saturday, ahead of Tuesday’s hearing before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, demonstrate, if anything, that late in 2007, as was widely reported in contemporary media, Lloyd Blankfein and others were rightly concerned by the firm’s mortgage exposure, and the continuing performance of their hedges. The e-mails themselves are not newsworthy. They are only news in the sense that a newsmaker, the senior Senator for Michigan, has presented them along with his office’s own peculiar narrative, at what appears to be, in light of the negative PR dogging Goldman Sachs, a politically opportune time. Nor do these e-mails contribute to our understanding of the financial crisis, nor do they offer any insight into preventing another crisis. Tuesday’s hearing itself, if the statements from Senator Levin’s office are any indication, is bound to be a waste of time. That’s too bad, because Senator Levin, a powerful man, an intelligent, well-connected and highly respected man, is uniquely positioned to understand and address mortgage failures: as Washington is to politics, Detroit is to subprime. Continue reading »
The Druries will make their debut co-anchoring The Call while Melissa Francis is on maternity leave. “Amanda is one of the smartest and most talented business news anchors anywhere in the world and we are very excited that she is joining our U.S. team,” said Jeremy Pink, SVP Business News, CNBC. No doubt but we’ve got bigger issues to focus on. Namely the fact that AD will be here May 10 and before she’s made an member of the stateside team, she’ll need an official nickname. If inspiration is necessary: Continue reading »
Have you often wondered to yourself, does Citi’s favorite investor max and relax (indoor) poolside after a long day of riding Vikram’s ass like Zorro? Does said indoor pool have a jungle theme going on around it that includes life size ceramic elephants, antelopes and giraffes? Would the Prince’s style be best described as late eighties chic? Yes, yeah and hell fuck yeah. Continue reading »
Lawyers from Jones Day, who are overseeing the estate of Lehman Brothers, will begin arguments today in a closely-watched case that seeks more than $11 billion from Barclays, which lawyers for the estate said the British bank received after purchasing Lehman’s assets shortly after it filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.
The Lehman estate plans to argue that executives at Barclays, with the blessing of Lehman’s negotiating team, arranged for a $5 billion discount on the purchase price of Lehman’s brokerage unit while failing to inform the bankruptcy court and Lehman’s board about last-minute changes to the deal. That and other alleged changes to the deal resulted in Barclays picking up Lehman on the cheap, according to the suit.
Bankruptcy Judge James Peck, who approved the original sale transaction to Barclays, is expected to decide whether the Lehman estate’s claims allow it to redraft the deal.
Treasury to Sell “Up To” 1.5 Billion Shares of Citigroup Stock (BW)
The Treasury will give its agent, Morgan Stanley, “discretionary authority” to sell the amount, and expects to give clearance to sell additional shares thereafter, the department said in an e-mailed statement today. “We’re putting TARP out of its misery,” Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in an interview with CNN television aired yesterday. “This is going to cost us much less in fiscal terms than even the S&L crisis,” he said, referring to the collapse of savings and loan banks in the 1980s and 1990s.
Goldman Sachs And the Financial Crisis (NYT)
Emails from Goldman Sachs execs released Saturday by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In a message dated July 25, 2007, David A. Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer, reacted to figures that said the company had made a $51 million profit from bets that housing securities would drop in value. “Tells you what might be happening to people who don’t have the big short,” he wrote to Gary Cohn.
Goldman Trader’s Email Slur (Times Online)
In a series of emails released yesterday, Fabrice Tourre dismissed the complex debt products he created for the bank as “pure intellectual masturbation.” He also compared the products to a “Frankenstein” monster that had “turned against his own inventor.”
Larry Summers: Goldman Emails Show Need For Transparency (Reuters)
Summers, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” said he would not comment on specifics of a fraud suit against Goldman brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. “But I will say this,” Summers said. “This underscores what is at the center of the president’s vision here: the importance of transparency, the importance of things being in the open, the importance of it being known who is in a position to benefit from what.”
Greece Confident of EU-IMF Bailout Package (WSJ)
“We’re all confident that this will be done in time and that we will be able to finance Greek public debt without any problem,” Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou told a news briefing. “Early May is a good ballpark figure.”
C.D.O. Days, S&M Nights at Derivatives Conference (NYT)
Financiers, lawyers, traders and accountants gathered last week at the annual International Swaps and Derivatives Association conference here to discuss “Collateralization and Netting — the Impact” and “Systemic Risk: Advances and Challenges in the Wake of the Crisis.” By Thursday night they needed to put out of their minds the specter of sweeping legislation to regulate the derivatives. They escaped to Supperclub, a bar and restaurant, where some plopped on the beds that covered the floor while a waiter in denim short shorts, suspenders and a scarf delivered drinks. The truly relaxed turned over on their tummies and received back massages from a dreadlocked member of the Supperclub staff. By midnight, others ended up in the S & M chamber with a bed-to-ceiling stripper pole and videos of dominatrixes playing in the background. Continue reading »
