Daily Intel Jessica and I saw a screening of Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps last week. We haven’t shared our thoughts on it until now because we haven’t wanted to/been ready to talk about it. I’m not going to say it’s so bad you shouldn’t see it, but that’s just because it’s so bad it needs to be seen to be believed and we want more people to be able to share in our collective trauma. Like being stripped naked, covered in honey and sewn ass to mouth to your fellow members of the incoming Goldman Sachs analyst class, you can’t truly understand unless you’ve gone through something like that yourself. Continue reading »
Archive for September 2010
You’re a naughty bank– you’re naughty! Continue reading »
First, there was the World Cup outcome-predicting cephalopod mollusk that everyone was obsessed with, who the financial media took great glee in pointing out made better predictions than UBS. Now there’s Grandpa the Monkey, who’ll likely serve up another kick in the pants for the Swiss bank in the coming days. Continue reading »
Yes, though the situation is fluid. Kate Kelly reports: Continue reading »
Former Deutsche Bank Trader Greg Lippmann Has A Few Things He’d Like To Get Off His Chest
By Bess Levin
First off, Greg doesn’t want to be famous and he says he’s “looking forward to being anonymous again.” The be-sideburned trader (in Greg Zuckerman’s The Greatest Trade Ever his ‘burns are described as “unusually long and thick” and in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short as those of a “1970s porn star”) announced this desire in a recent profile with which he not only cooperated but sat for on two separated occasions and spoke on the record, the genius of which is yet to reveal itself. Second, those hilarious “I’m short your house” shirts he had made back in ’06 when he was one of the few making hugely bearish bets on the housing market? He didn’t come up with that tag-line. “It’s juvenile. It’s funny in March of ’06 when everybody calls you Chicken Little. It’s not funny now,” he told the Observer. “It wasn’t my idea—that’s a fact, on my kids’ lives. … I definitely did not, on my kids lives. Somebody gave it to me.” Third, to those who think Lippmann comes off as “dickish” in Zuckerman and Lewis’s narratives, that’s just plain wrong. Continue reading »
Global-Bank Deal Targets Reserves (WSJ)
Regulators have said new rules will help restore confidence in the global banking system. Banks have warned that such requirements could limit economic growth by crimping their ability to lend. Many bankers had believed their arguments were gaining traction, but the new limits regulators appear close to mandating are stiffer than some had expected in recent days.
Boehner Calls For Two Year Freeze On All Tax Rates (AP)
House Republican Leader John Boehner onWednesday proposed a two-year freeze on all tax rates and a cut in government spending to the levels of 2008, before a deep recession took hold of the economy. In a broadcast interview, the Ohio Republican said he was offering a “bipartisan” alternative to the package of business tax incentives and infrastructure spending that President Barack Obama was slated to announce later Wednesday in Cleveland.
Paulson & co Hit By US Economic Woes (FT)
The firm’s flagship $9bn Advantage Plus fund, which aims to profit from trading corporate events, lost 4.26 per cent in August, according to an investor, writing back tentative gains made in July. The fund was down 6.6 per cent in the second quarter. Paulson’s $3billion Recovery fund lost 9.13 per cent over the month, erasing its 6.5 per cent gain in July and compounding its 12.6 per cent second-quarter loss.
Goldman Sees $80 Trillion Emerging-Nation Stock Market by 2030 (Bloomberg)
The market value of emerging-market stocks may surge more than fivefold to $80 trillion in two decades, overtaking developed nations, as China becomes the world’s largest stock market, Goldman Sachs said. Faster economic expansion and growing capital markets may lift emerging nations’ share of world equity capitalization to 55 percent by 2030 from 31 percent today, Goldman strategists led by Timothy Moe wrote in a research report. Institutional investors in developed nations will probably buy a net $4 trillion of emerging-market equities, lifting holdings to 18 percent of their total portfolios from 6 percent now, Moe wrote.
SEC Looking At ‘Quote Stuffing’ (WSJ)
Mary Schapiro said the agency is looking at a practice others have called “quote stuffing” to assess whether it violates “existing rules against fraudulent or other improper behavior.” The practice involves trading in which unusually large numbers of orders to buy or sell stocks are placed in a fraction of a second, only to be canceled almost immediately. Ms. Schapiro said the agency is considering requiring traders to hold orders open for minimum periods.
Ryanair’s O’Leary Mulls One-Euro Toilets, Standing Passengers (Bloomberg)
“Why does every plane have two pilots?” asks Michael O’Leary, chief executive officer of Ryanair Holdings Plc, the largest low-cost airline in Europe. Wearing sneakers, jeans, and an off-the-rack short-sleeved shirt, O’Leary is pontificating in his office at the company’s headquarters on the outskirts of Dublin Airport. “Really, you only need one pilot,” he tells Bloomberg Businessweek in the Sept. 6 edition. “Let’s take out the second pilot. Let the bloody computer fly it.” What happens if the pilot has a heart attack? One member of the cabin crew on all Ryanair flights would be trained to land a plane. “If the pilot has an emergency, he rings the bell, he calls her in,” O’Leary says. “She could take over.”
Marilyn Manson Loses His Make-Up, Gains A Mullet (STP)
Interview reports that Manson is a “diehard” fan of HBO’s “Eastbound & Down,” the critically worshiped comedy starring Danny McBride as a washed-up former baseball star whose trademark mullet and angry face Manson is imitating in this photo. “Whenever I see Manson, he’s repeating entire chunks of dialogue and dressed like Kenny,” Adam Bhala Lough, who’s directing Manson in the upcoming film “Splatter Sisters,” told Interview. Lough went on to say that Manson dresses like “Eastbound” character Kenny Powers all the time, and provided this photo, credited to Manson himself, as “evidence.” Continue reading »
$$$ Analysis: the H-P Suit Against Mark Hurd [WSJ]
$$$ Wall Street Firms to Cut 80,000 Jobs in 18 Months, Whitney Says [Bloomberg]
$$$ After $75,000, Money Can’t Buy Day-To-Day Happiness [BW]
$$$ Wall Street And Obama: A Fraught Relationship [NYT] Continue reading »
So, there was a slightly awkward segment at the end of Street Signs this afternoon, wherein Erin Burnett had to cut a bitch (/guest) who was apparently “being a prick even by finance/CNBC standards.” Continue reading »
Just as the deep sea fisherman was about to cut the hook from the shark’s wide open mouth and let him go, out jumped a human foot. “Everything was intact from the knee down,” said Bahamian investment banker Humphrey Simmons, “it was mangled, but there was still flesh on the bone.” That ended a day of fishing for Mr Simmons and his two companions who spent most of the morning trying to get away from sharks. By the time the unusually heavy Tiger shark was landed at the Defence Force’s Coral Harbour base and his distended body cut open, the body of a man, minus his head, was found. The leg that the shark had regurgitated was the man’s left leg. Inside was his severed right leg, two severed arms and a torso in two sections. Mr Simmons, of Cable Beach, a banker with Xanthos Investment, and his two deep sea fishing companions — Keith Ferguson and Stanley Bernard — left Marshall Road, South Beach before 6am Saturday in Mr Simmons 30-foot Pursuit, Azulardo. “We went 35 miles south of Nassau and started fishing about 7.45am,” said Mr Simmons. “After about 45 minutes we pulled up a fish, and a shark took it. There was so much stink coming from the shark’s belly and the belly was so huge that we thought that there might be more bodies inside,” said Mr Simmons. [Tribune via BI]
On the whole, most people do not watch CNBC after leaving the office, as the nighttime programming leaves little opportunity to see a breast to pop out, Mark Haines awkwardly trying to do an Australian accent while co-hosting with Amanda Drury or a fight between anchors and/or guests. That’s very likely to change on tomorrow night’s episode of “Meeting of the Minds.” You see, gang, it’s pretty well-known at this point that Hank Paulson is a lover of birds. For years the former Treasury Secretary has spoken of his passion for feathers, and in his autobiography devoted a whopping 9 pages to the things, which was more than was afforded to Warren Buffett, Erin Burnett and David Einhorn, among others. Hank, it’s quite obvious, would kill a man in cold blood if it meant saving his special friends. He would also feel compelled to avenge the death of bird– wing for a wing and all that shit. And I don’t even want to think what he’d do if he were to, say, come face to face with a guy who massacred an entire flock of them. Which is why a press-release this morning sent shivers up my spine. Continue reading »
