According to a new study, a high salary may actually make your company’s CEO meaner. In the study’s white paper, “When Executives Rake in Millions: Meanness in Organizations,” professors from Harvard, Rice and the University of Utah argue that rising income inequality between executives and ordinary workers results in “power asymmetries in the workplace such that top executives come to view lower level workers as dispensable objects not worthy of human dignity.” [HP via HNM] Continue reading »
Archive for July 2010
Astounding Research Reveals Highly Compensated Bosses May Not Give Rat’s Ass About Their Organization’s Peons
By Bess LevinIf Anyone Wants To Talk About What It Felt Like To Preside Over The Financial Crisis, Kevin Spacey’s Here For Ya
By Bess Levin
To research his role in Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, Shia LaBeouf spent a good deal of time at John Thomas Financial, an Encino branch of Charles Schwab and Goldman Sachs. It was there he learned how to stick $20,000 in an online brokerage account and turn it into $450,00-ish in a matter of months, wow the shit out of Lloyd Blankfein in the 47th round of interviews, and insider tips for passing Level I of the CFA. You know what he never did? Ask any of the guys he was shadowing about their feelings. Same goes for Penn Badgely, who spent some time on the Citi trading floor to prep for his role as a junior analyst in Margin Call (where he learned that “young traders sport ‘nice clothes that were not terribly tailored’ and that that the term ‘bucks’ means millions”). That’s because these two whippersnappers only care about the surface. They’re not interested in drilling down to the person underneath that suit and the fifties still stuck to your ass from the weekend. One guy who is? Kevin Spacey. He cares, deeply.
“I am trying to humanize bankers,” said Kevin Spacey, the Academy Award-winning actor, who plays a senior trader in Margin Call. “Everyone talks about facts, figures and debt. I was more interested in what they were feeling.”
The reason a run-of-the-mill financial bust became a catastrophe, Mr Kaletsky claims in his book, was due largely to the stunning failures of one man: Henry Paulson, George Bush’s treasury secretary. In a passionate ad hominem attack, called “The Economic Consequences of Mr Paulson” (after Keynes’s 1925 pamphlet “The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill”, a devastating critique of Sir Winston’s defence of the gold standard), Mr Kaletsky excoriates Mr Paulson, particularly his decision to allow the investment bank Lehman Brothers to fail. The hyperbole is spectacular. Mr Paulson, the book claims, came “closer to destroying capitalism than Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong combined.” [The Economist]
$$$ Is BP For Sale [FBN]
$$$ Man shot three times in Stamford. One of the robbers pulled out a gun and shot the man in his both legs and his scrotum as he fled, police said. His gun shot wounds were not life-threatening. [SA]
$$$ At Icahn Group, The Son Also Rises [WSJ] Continue reading »
As you may have heard, there’s a World Cup outcome-predicting cephalopod mollusk that people are just obsessed with. So famous he is for being (completely randomly) right every damn time, that he’s actually started to receive death threats, which is how you know you’ve made it. As you may have also heard, there’s a bank called UBS that can’t do anything right. It is pretty much at this point a commonly accepted fact. So this just seems gratuitous and uncalled for. Continue reading »
Yesterday a fellow named Sean Michael Carey started a Facebook group called “Punch Jamie Dimon (CEO of JPMorgan Chase) in the Balls,” the stated purpose being exactly that. He didn’t say why he wanted someone to inflict harm on JD’s (glorious, possibly cup-protected) sack, only that after doing so, you should add “Sean Michael Carey sends his regards, fucker.” Today Daily Intel found out the source of SMCs beef toward James: after bouncing a few checks, Chase froze his account and said they were investigated him for check fraud. And then: Continue reading »
Hedge Fund Manager Steven Bell Unwittingly Gives Ray Dalio A Few Ideas For Updated Version Of “Principles” While Decrying “Megalomaniac’s” Methods
By Bess Levin
Silly little Brit. Continue reading »
Survey says possibly and/or that they launched a stapler through the thing. From the mailbag: Continue reading »
Someone I think will back me up on this one.
CNBC is currently at this moment trying to make the case that the open letter sent by Dan Gilbert to Cavs fans last night was ill-advised. “We’re all for CEO’s speaking their mind but you need to do so in a well-thought out, controlled manner,” said one guest. “This was probably something you wake up and wish you’d hit ‘save as draft on’,” commented Melissa Francis. “Don’t do it!” was their general thesis. DON’T LISTEN TO CNBC IS MINE. Continue reading »
Hedge Fund Manager Achieves “Personal Breakthrough” While Reading Twilight, Shares The Moment With Staff
By Bess Levin
Take it away, Tom Barrack:
Gang,
The last few weeks have been an incredible adventure. Thanks to you, Colony is on fire across the globe and we are conquering new frontiers and new themes on a daily basis in almost every venue in which we conduct our business. You are the A Team and I am deeply grateful and proud of what all of you have “teamed” to our reality.
I am going to share with you a personal breakthrough, which does not relate directly to our business but does reflect upon how we all look at all the “stuff” that drives us on a daily basis. Many of you will think that I have lost my mind or have finally experienced a mystical intervention of “my feminine side”. I promise you, it is neither.
This is just like the time Meredith Whitney downgraded Citi. Continue reading »
