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$$$ Abacus might have had other benefits for Goldman [Reuters]
$$$ Banker Saves Septuagenarian Trapped in Corn Silo [Daily Intel]
$$$ Moore’s Bacon Richest Hedge Fund Manager In U.K. [FINalternatives]
$$$ The GS Metaphor Reel [HP]
$$$ Goldman SEC charges to spark cases against others [The Deal]
$$$ Citi CallsThe Cops On The Schnitzel Truck [BI]
$$$ Feeling The Adrenaline Of Wall Street (BigThink) Continue reading »
Remember that story a few months back in the Wall Street Journal, about the hedge fund “idea dinner” that insinuated a bunch of managers got together to break bread while plotting to take down the Euro? David Einhorn and the Greenlight team do! They’ve been discussing it amongst themselves for a while, and today it made their latest quarterly letter. What’d they think of the piece? Well, reporting the actual facts instead of pulling them out of the reporter’s ass would’ve improved things slightly. Apparently the Journal got a whole bunch of stuff wrong and now the responsible parties are going to pay. Sorry, kids. Sometimes the nicest hedge fund manager in the world just has to cut a bitch. Sayeth DE and Co:
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced that a federal district court in Nevada has entered a final judgment, by consent, against Marlin R. Brinsky of Santa Monica, California, in connection with an enforcement action filed in 2005 concerning a penny stock manipulation and accounting fraud. The final judgment against Brinsky, a certified public accountant, was entered on April 21, 2010. It permanently enjoins him from violating provisions of the federal securities laws governing accountant’s reports and orders him to pay a $20,000 civil penalty. Separately, Brinsky also consented to an administrative order suspending him from appearing or practicing before the Commission as an accountant, with a right to apply for reinstatement after two years.
“We’ve been working with Goldman Sachs since Blackstone was founded almost 25 years ago and I’ve been personally working with them for over 40 years, and we’ve never had any circumstance where there’s been any question about their ethical character or their behavior on any transaction we were involved with.”
“We’re a major client of Goldman and we’ll will continue to remain a major client of Goldman.” (via Reuters)
Tetsuya Ishikawa worked for six years as a credit banker at ABN AMRO, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Last year he was fired from MS, and a couple years prior to that, he was listed as one of the salesman investors should contact if they wanted to get a piece of ABACUS. And since getting canned, he’s written a novel based on his “personal account of 21st-century banking excess,” which was just published this week. How much of the story relayed by narrator Andrew Dover actually happened to ‘Tets’? He’d put it at “close to 90 percent.” (Dover was hired for his job with a $3 million guarantee, whereas in six years, Tets only took home a little “more than £1 million before taxes.” Also, Andy does a lot of blow, where as the author says that “he was never a keen consumer of cocaine”). As for being a real page turner, according to reviewer Sathnam Sanghera, Ishikawa “makes structuring, syndicating and selling credit derivative, CDO and securitisation products as dull as it sounds,” and does not name-check The Fabulous Fab, having not realized during the writing process that the SEC would be going after his former colleague the same week he made his authorial debut. And it’s not clear how much light is shed on how exactly we got into this mess. Tets (via Dover) does however do a pretty good job of talking lap dances, strippers, and turning hoes into housewives, based on his experience in the field. Continue reading »
Michael Steinhardt used to run a $4.4 billion hedge fund that typically returned 30% before fees. He shuttered the firm in 1995 and now he fills his days by outbidding Martha Stewart at rare-plant auctions (“Don’t expect to buy much if Michael Steinhardt is there. He buys everything,” she tells people) and tending to a “zoo-sized collection of animals that includes zebras, camels and albino wallabies,” which he communicates with, and gives better loving to, than his wife.
On a recent Friday…He pointed out the barns his wife had built for the animals and showed off a pair of red-ruffed lemurs, the most recent additions to his menagerie of roughly 200 (excluding waterfowl). Mr. Steinhardt mimicked the low honk of a capybara, a large rodent from Central and South America, wandering nearby and said, “And that’s what he has to say!”
IKB Deutsche Industriebank took a $150 million bath on Goldman’s famed Abacus deal and is named as the key victim of the alleged GS/Paulson scheme in the SEC’s lawsuit. But the German bank touted itself as an expert in CDOs with a top notch staff that examines investments with a fine-tooth comb.
“CDO pools are examined with a drill down to underlying assets and stress testing of the underlying asset pools,” IKB bragged in marketing materials obtained by John Carney at The Daily Beast.
But it appears like the German bank never “drilled down” enough to realize the underlying mortgages in Abacus were doomed to failure. Continue reading »
[Photo credit: Reuters]
It’s a pretty well-known fact that Lloyd Blankfein, unlike some of his other colleagues on the Wall Street, was not born a little rich boy. Because before he knew Street life, LB knew street life, lower-case ‘s,’ having grown up in the projects in Brooklyn. Apparently Al Sharpton was not aware of Lloyd’s bio, which is why when he saw the Goldman CEO at Obama’s speech yesterday, he smirked to himself at thought, “Look at him, out of touch fat cat. He doesn’t know what it’s like for people who don’t take home a unit a year, let alone what it’s like to be dirt poor.” Wrong, Reverend! I’d tell him to check thyself, but it looks like Lloyd’s got it covered. Politics Daily reports: Continue reading »
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZMOglfp76Q
A couple months ago, we discussed an SEC worker who got in a bit of trouble with his employer for checking out a little porn while on the job. The unnamed supervisor made at least 1,800 logged attempts to check out some sites that included www.ladyboyx.com, www.ladyboyjuice.com, www.trannytit.com, and www.anal-sins.com, which, he admitted, “were kind of distraction per se.” Since then, when mentioning the Commission, we’ve casually suggested (by stating outright) that the majority of the staff spends its time looking at porn instead of, for instance, nailing Allen Stanford or Bernie Madoff. But we were just kidding! We had no reason to believe anyone but the tranny fetishist did this. A little hyperbole, etc. You know how it goes. As it turns out, though, the guy is actually in some good company. Like he told the lawyer sent in to investigate the matter, the hundreds attempts to get on www.ladyboyjuice.com alone in one day was an outlet to deal with the stress of the job. And according to a new probe by the SEC inspector general, over 30 of his colleagues, who ramped up their porn viewing time since the crisis started, have the same excuse. The world was ending! How could they be expected to deal with the global financial meltdown without Anal Sins 9-5? Also let’s give props where props are due. Some of these people (like the attorney who “admitted to downloading so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office”) are great problem solvers. They’d probably do a good job of catching frauds if they weren’t looking at tranny tits all day.
