Apparently the SEC has discovered fraudsters trying to impersonate their own intrepid investigators, using fake email addresses containing .gov in the domain. Most of these characters are fishing around on tranny porn web sites (likely running into real SEC officials) for naive investors who will pay them fees to remove restrictions on sales of stock they own.
Archive for May 2010
Don’t Freak out Over that Subpoena from the U.S. Securities and Equities Administration
By Zachery Kouwe
When I think of JPMorgan CEO James Dimon, a few things come to mind. His (devastatingly good) looks. His charm. His jokes. His (alleged) illegal tire dumping. I also think of a guy who takes pride in his roots, which the Dimon family can trace back to a little European country going through a rough patch at the moment. And so I must ask–where the hell is the love? I’m not the only one wondering these things. I was out with some people who are paid to think about such matters last night and they were aghast at the notion hat JD has yet to use JPMorgan to bless Greece with his Croesus touch. People sincerely want to know why he hasn’t offered to buy the place for 1/100th of what it’s worth. For the love of Jimmy Cayne’s roach clip, he did it for Bear’s trailer park of hemp and now, when it’s about family, JD is nowhere to be found? He needs to do something, show some freaking support for C’s sake, and if it’s not the suggestion I just made (which is should be), these are the options he must choose from: Continue reading »
After filing suit earlier this week against Ivy Asset Management for feeding pension fund money to Bernie Madoff, NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is turning his attention back to the big banks, which will obviously score many more political points when he runs for governor in November.
The latest probe from Cuomo involves the banks’ efforts to mislead the ratings agencies on structured products. His office is looking into whether Moody’s, S&P and Fitch tinkered with their models so banks could get higher ratings on CDOs and other products.
Subpoenas recently went out to Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Crédit Agricole and BofA/Merrill Lynch, according to the New York TImes. Continue reading »
“Today at Vikram’s Bizarre & Chotchke Emporium (aka the cafeteria): Tube socks & beach towels are for sale. FML.”
Back in February, we put a once in a lifetime offer on the table. Buy Ken Lewis’s house. For a mere $4.5 million, you were going to get a Charlotte, NC address, 4 bedrooms, five fireplaces, a patio, a porch, a private pond for reflection time, his-and-hers dressing rooms, a chef’s kitchen, a wet bar, and Ken Lewis’s memories (/night terrors). At the time, we didn’t put a gun to anyone’s head because we didn’t think it was necessary. Who wouldn’t want a piece of this, we wondered, figuring KL would be beating off potential buyers with a stick. Well, apparently we misjudged the situation because Kizzle has received exactly zero offers, and has been forced to cut his asking price by more than 20%. He’s also slashed the price on his Hilton Head vacation space, for reasons I won’t get into here. Suffice it to say, Lewis is looking to get out of town ASAP but is running low on the cash. So what I’m going to do now is get down on my hands and knees and beg. SOMEBODY DO THIS FOR HIM. If the deal needs to be sweetened, I’ll throw in an Ang Moz (you can do whatever you want with him). Continue reading »
While Sen. Chris Dodd’s financial reform bill is one giant 1,300 page tome, it’s so vague that almost any financial product known to man will come under its purview.
That’ll create the “largest and most powerful crony system in history,” Cliff Asness, comic book collector, and his AQR colleague Aaron Brown write in their latest Op-Ed in the WSJ. (FD: Asness gave $4,600 to Dodd’s campaign in 2007, but only $409 last year.) Continue reading »
You know how when someone reads your emails or listens in on your phone calls and sees or hears something they weren’t supposed to hear and flips out and confronts you about it? And how on a few occasions you can plead total ignorance and convince them they took everything completely out of context and be like “OMG, that’s what you thought? When I said I was going to ‘choke a bitch’? Wow!” And they feel like an idiot (and a bit of a degenerate) and vow to never stick their nose in your shit again for fear of looking stupid? That’s kind of the approach Raj Rajaratnam is trying to take with this whole insider trading investigation. Continue reading »
CNBC has stormed the castle. One of the queen’s bitches writes:
Don’t know if anyone’s noticed but CNBC is broadcasting from the den of mediocrity AKA the RBS trading floor throughout the day. We were told to be on our best behavior and to dress better than we’re paid. Tune in and watch us put the L in PnL!
CEO Pay Breaks Glass Ceiling as Bartz Gets $47.2 Million With ’09 Bonanza (Bloomberg)
Anyone gonna give her shit for it? Inquiring minds at 200 West Street would like to know.
Moynihan Becomes Obama’s Top Wall Street Ally on Financial-Rules Overhaul (Bloomberg)
One of Moynihan’s assets may be that he is a fresh face. He took over as the bank’s CEO Jan. 1, and unlike his predecessor, Kenneth Lewis, isn’t tainted by public outrage over the $700 billion bailout for banks. Nor has he been targeted by a Securities and Exchange Commission suit — now settled — alleging that investors were misled about bonuses and losses during Bank of America’s 2009 acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co.
Louis Bacon decries European ‘demonisation’ of hedge funds (FN)
LB: “European financial authorities see hedge funds particularly as a threat to their ability to contain prices, information and confidence in their increasingly risky sovereign debt markets. Witness their demonisation of hedge funds in the market even after the Greeks were found to be lying about their deficit data.”
Banker Says She Was Fired For Questioning Account (NYT)
A former private banker at JPMorgan Chase & Company has sued the bank, claiming that she was fired after alerting superiors to possibly questionable dealings by a top client. The former banker, Jennifer Sharkey, said in a complaint filed in United States District Court in Manhattan on Monday that she was let go as a vice president and wealth manager in August 2009, six days after formally raising the concerns. Continue reading »
$$$ “Everyone in life wants to be loved,” Andrew Ross Sorkin answered earnestly. [MarketWatch]
$$$ The Killers will perform at Arki Busson’s annual charity ball tomorrow, where you can bid on a Fiat 500 car painted by artist Damian Hirst; an original Richard Prince photograph from his Cowboy series; and a luxury Caribbean holiday with private jets and yachts thrown in. [Telegraph]
$$$ Cornell Endowment Chief Plans To Start Hedge Fund [BW]
$$$ Socially-Responsible Hedge Fund Aims For 25% Returns [FINalternatives]
$$$ Art is “an anti-currency play,” said Los Angeles money manager Jeffrey Gundlach, of DoubleLine Capital LP. “The sale benefited from that.” Among those in the packed Rockefeller Center salesroom were fashion designer Marc Jacobs, wearing cowboy boots and a denim baseball cap, author Salman Rushdie and SAC Capital Advisors Chairman Steven A. Cohen, who observed from a skybox. [Bloomberg]
$$$ James Gorman was alone in his 40th-floor office after a Thursday lunch when he saw the market wobbling. He called Suzanne Charnas, his head of investor relations. “Oh, God, what’s happening?” they said. Mr. Gorman thought it must have been some kind of mistake. [NYO]
$$$ When Warren Buffett Is Your Daddy [NYO]
$$$ Howard Marks’s Warning Signs [Scribd] Continue reading »
