Perhaps, you thought, after his hedge fund had received a subpoena from the feds, and the FBI had raided the firms of a bunch of his former employees, and an analyst was asked to wear a wire while having conversations with him, all as part of the government’s effort to behead him on live TV, that Steve Cohen would not be in the best of moods. That he would have retreated to the safe room underneath SAC’s headquarters or cryogenically frozen himself inside a Bob’s Big Boy statue and floated in space for 20-30 years, or until this whole thing blew over. Well- think again! He’s in a great mood and he’s out there, getting after it.
At Wednesday’s private opening of the country’s largest and most prestigious art fair, Art Basel Miami Beach, financier Steve Cohen showed no signs of being affected by the subpoena his $12 billion hedge fund, SAC Capital, received last week as part of a sweeping insider-trading investigation…Mr. Cohen, in jovial spirits and eager to chat about his fresh art acquisitions during the fair’s VIP preview, was one of scores of New York collectors who snapped up works in the fair’s initial hours—or, in his case, minutes.
He’s dropping major coin on, among other things, art made out of cans.
Within five minutes of the 11 a.m. opening, Mr. Cohen had dropped into David Zwirner Gallery’s booth, where he spent about $300,000 on Adel Abdessemed’s “Mappemonde,” a large-scale map of the world made from tin cans collected off the streets of Dakar. Within the next hour, he plunked down $180,000 for Tim Hawkinson’s “Bike,” a work of collaged inkjet prints, from Blum & Poe. “It was like boom—immediately,” said Blum & Poe co-owner Jeff Poe.
He’s making jokes (about himself). Continue reading »
Foreign Firms Got Feds’ Cash (WSJ)
Among the biggest loans from a Fed commercial-paper lending program was one to Swiss banking giant UBS AG, which tapped it for $37 billion in October 2008. Barclays PLC, the British bank that declined to rescue Lehman Brothers but later bought much of it from bankruptcy, tapped the Fed for roughly $10 billion in commercial-paper loans in October 2008.
Bank of America Becoming Bank Of Asia As Revenue Rises 30% (Bloomberg)
Bank of America is headed for its best year advising on mergers and acquisitions in Asia-Pacific since 2005, and arranging initial public offerings since 2007. The combined companies have generated 30 percent more revenue from traditional investment-banking businesses in the region than they did as separate entities, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the figures aren’t public.
Kinnucan Won’t Keep Quiet After Refusing To Wear A Wire For Feds (Bloomberg)
“It is a larger story at work here about the proper role of the SEC and its mandate as I understand it to provide guidance to the investment community,” Kinnucan said in an interview. “The Justice Department evidently would like to retroactively criminalize research activities which have been complicitly condoned by the SEC for years. If I don’t raise my voice, nobody will because everyone has gone underground.” Andrew Stoltmann, a securities lawyer in Chicago said: “He’s violating rule number one: don’t do anything that might upset the prosecutors. When someone talks to the FBI, he usually goes as far underground as possible. He’s not helping himself.”
ECB to Keep Unlimited Liquidity, Bond Hints Awaited (Reuters)
“They will probably say something to the effect that they stand ready to increase purchases in government securities if they considered this necessary,” said Frank Engels at Barclays Capital. “I think that would be slightly disappointing.”
Single Trader Holds Bulk Of LME Copper (WSJ)
That trader, whom the exchange hasn’t identified, owns between 50% and 80% of the 355,750 metric tons held in LME-listed warehouses. This amounts to more than 177,875 metric tons of copper, valued at about $1.5 billion. The exchange first disclosed the large position on Nov. 23 in its daily inventory holder report. Continue reading »
In our first posting, we introduced the Four models of Corporate Entrepreneurship. Today, we cover the last of the four models, which we call the Producer. The Producer Model is similar to a “skunk works” organization made famous by Lockheed and a common recommendation in the innovation literature: a separate, well-funded organization to protect innovation projects from turf battles, encourage cross-unit collaboration, build potentially disruptive businesses, and create pathways for executives to pursue careers outside their business units. Unlike the separate organizations of the 1970s and 1980s, however, current implementations are conscious of the difficulties that such separated organizations have traditionally had in bringing proven new businesses back into the mainstream company. Continue reading »
So happy to accept this award.
Oh that’s right, ladies. Citi has actually beat Goldman Sachs (and Morgan Stanley) at something. True, it’s the number of times the bank tapped the Federal Reserve’s credit facilities but they will take what they can get! Continue reading »
Making it one of the largest borrowers of the Fed’s Term Asset-Backed-Securities Loan Facility. This calls for a mid-afternoon conga line.
As promised. If you’re looking for some lunchtime reading material, check them out here. Do feel free to share your favorite passages with the group.
This is just an FYI for anyone doing some risk/reward analysis re: whether or not freeing up the funds to buy unlimited lap dances by screwing clients is worth it– much to the chagrin of one Bloomberg columnist, you’re really just looking at a relative slap on the wrist. Continue reading »
As anyone who’s ever been enveloped in a Jamie Dimon hug knows, when you’re with James, you’re safe. Yes, he can be demanding and yes, he expects a lot from people and yes, if you fail to deliver, you’re going to be held accountable and no, he’s not here to coddle you. But the trade off is that Jamie Dimon protects his cubs. Come near one of them, threaten them in anyway and he’ll scratch your eyes out.
Where did this instinct come from? Birth, likely, and then honed from an early age, when Dimon would “stand up to bullies who threatened his smaller twin,” Teddy. These days he still looks out for Ted, in addition to his three biological daughters, and his approximately 230,000 adopted children. The boys and girls of JPMorgan. Continue reading »
Just, hear him out. Continue reading »
November performance. Continue reading »
