As of February 1, news outlets must “verify the credentials of organizations and columnists before publishing their commentaries and analyses,” ensuring that journalists have either “worked in securities and futures organizations or covered finance and economics for at least two years.” Continue reading »
Archive for January 2011
Seeing as all were nice and none were naughty this year, Santa Ping made some holiday wishes come true. Continue reading »
“I’m waiting for someone to come back and tell me my data was wrong,” Big Al said in an interview with the Journal today. “Allow the facts to fall where they are. I have answered my critics. I have put the data out there. Let them prove me wrong.” He meant about the economy though feel free to freestyle on other topics. Come one, come all. [WSJ]
Miro Kazakoff, a former Bain & Co consultant and self-described “poet” and Tom Rose, a quant and product of Duke University, are MBA candidates at MIT’s Sloan School. They graduate this spring and while Wall Street may beckon, anyone hoping to land these guys is going to have stiff competition from the comedy club circuit, according to senior lecturer Howard Anderson, who says “stand up is an option” for these two. Anderson drew that conclusion from watching their MBA Show, a satirical web series that he and other business students have apparently found to be a real gas. Continue reading »
Are you looking for love? A wife? A maid you can have sex with? Joseph Weiner is here to help! It’s been fourteen years since the 73 year-old former investment banker and Wharton grad started Hand-in-Hand, a “matchmaking agency” which asks male customers to fork over $2,000 and in exchange offers a “supervised courtship” with a young Eastern European lady of their choice. Has the financial crisis hurt H-in-H’s bottom line? On the contrary- according to Joe (a New Yorker living in London where he manages the “multinational operation”), it’s been great for business. Continue reading »
Bloomberg reports that Dipak Patel, who ran a five-man tech team at SAC’s Sigma Capital unit, “is winding down his portfolio and is transitioning out of the firm.” Let us not suggest this has anything to do with anything. He might just be looking for a little “me” time.
Facebook Sets Stage For IPO Next Year (WSJ)
Facebook, of Palo Alto, Calif., said it plans to increase its number of shareholders above 500 this year, according to the private-placement document, forcing the social-networking company to begin disclosing reams of financial information or go public by April 2012.
Fact Check: Mass Bird, Fish Deaths Occur Regularly (AP)
The reality, say biologists, is that these mass die-offs happen all the time and usually are unrelated. Federal records show they happen on average every other day somewhere in North America. Usually, we don’t notice them and don’t try to link them to each other.
Unemployment Down 9.4% But Jobs Report Disappoints (Forbes)
Private sector payrolls added 113,000 workers in December, driving the overall gain of 103,000 jobs. Both figures were improved from November’s upwardly revised figures (79,000 and 71,000), but considerably below estimates that crept up this week after the ADP employment survey found that private sector payrolls added 297,000 jobs last month.
Citi: ‘Insolvent’ Portugal Will Soon Plead For Help (CNBC)
“Now that the Irish government has reached an agreement with the EU/IMF on a financial support package and associated conditionality, the market’s attention will turn to Portugal, whose sovereign, at current levels of interest rates and growth rates, we judge to be less dramatically, but quietly insolvent,” Chief Economist Willem Buiter wrote in a research note Friday. “We consider it likely that Portugal, too, will need to access the EFSF/EFSM soon.” Buiter said.
Hedge Funds Rebound 1.7% In December (Bloomberg)
Ending 2010 at the highest level in more than two years.
AIG Issuing Warrants To Shed Government Stake (AP)
It’s been real.
The $60 Million Dream House (WSJ)
The developers of the $60 million Miami Beach house say the estate, which has cost them $30 million so far, has one of the state’s first in-home projection 3-D movie theaters. The home, which was built by developers Shlomi Alexander and Felix Cohen, also has a hidden art vault, an elaborate security system and a wine room that can be accessed only via fingerprint identification. Materials like mother of pearl, rare marble and Austrian oak are used throughout. To find the right gold-flecked marble for the master bathroom, the developers say they flew to Italy to personally pick it out from a quarry. To get inspiration for the home’s waterscape and pool, which has a waterfall cascading from the second floor, they visited the Amanyara resort in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Continue reading »
$$$ Why it’s a great time to launch a hedge fund, according to Martin Sorrell’s son. [Fortune]
$$$ Apple Said to Have Approached Blackstone’s Tosi to be CFO [Bloomberg]
$$$ That guy from those vampire movies will star in the movie version of Cosmopolis as a “28-year-old financial wizard and billionaire rides around Manhattan in his limo for 24 hours, gets stuck in traffic, cheats on his wife, is stalked, and loses his fortune.” Continue reading »
Emotionally abusive bosses? Couldn’t take the highs and lows? Whiteboard marker situation? Or something so much worse? Continue reading »
What Does 2010′s Best Performing Hedge Fund Manager Think Would’ve Happened Without Quantitative Easing (And The Sequel)?
By Bess LevinTake it away, Don Brownstein: “Before Copernicus, there was the view that earth stood still and the sun moved around it. That was the view that told basically that the universe was static. That’s turned out not to be true. I think people who believe that policy is somehow or other exogenous to the behavior of fixed-income markets are just deluded. The Copernican Revolution took place a long time ago in physics and it’s about time that something like that took place in finance.” Continue reading »
This time by ACA. Continue reading »
