As you may have heard, a giant Duane Reade opened on Wall Street today. It includes the standard items you’d expect at a DR, plus hairstyling services, a nail salon, a smoothie bar, beer growlers, a stock ticker and sushi. Clearly the company is hoping to be a big hit with the financial services professional who work nearby and while Duane Reade president Joe Magnacca said he and his team “believe it’s the most exciting drugstore in the world,” where one should not think twice about buying and consuming the fish, some remain skeptical. Continue reading »
Archive for July 2011
Burnett’s show was announced in the same memo in which the bad news was broken that Eliot Spitzer’s foray into television, In The Arena, will be put out to pasture, which could make things around the water cooler slightly awkward (apparently Spitzer hasn’t yet left the building, with network execs trying to find him “an alternative role”). Continue reading »
June performance. Continue reading »
Follow Along As Accused Insider Trading Walter Shimoon Attempts To Crack Steve Jobs’ Code
By Bess Levin
Yesterday afternoon, former Primary Global consultant Walter Shimoon pleaded guilty to passing inside information to his hedge fund clients. According to court documents, Kingdom Ridge Capital made about $560,000 in October 2009, based on Shimoon’s tips about Apple. We now know that the expert network analysts’ material non-public information was about the iPhone 4 and the iPad, though at the time, in the case of the latter product, Shimoon struggled to explain what he was talking about. Here’s how he described the iPad, which had not yet been unveiled, to Kingdom: Continue reading »
Credit Suisse Departee Looks Forward To Laughing With You About Everything And Nothing At All
By Bess Levin
From: [redacted]
Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2011 10:42 AM
To: CS IBD
Subject: FarewellFriends and colleagues,
Some men are strangers in their birth place, ever ready to throw themselves into the torrent of The Uncertain. Pleasant as it may be, Ogygia remains for them but a place of passage. It has been a highly educational experience on the sell side over the past year and a summer, and I expect that my new position not to deviate much from the arrangement of glowing pixels on one (or multiple) flat screen(s). Yet the stormy Ionian Sea’s calling, and it’s time to set sail.
According to Reuters, the only reason the SEC put its case against the former McKinsey exec/Goldman board member on hold is because federal prosecutors intervened, which “suggests continuing interest by U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors in Gupta,” who in one instance was so excited to pass inside information to Raj Rajaratnam that he rang up the Galleon founder 23 seconds after getting off with the Goldman board. [Reuters]
While there are many people who work on Wall Street for reasons that have nothing to do with money (trading gives them a thrill, they enjoy analyzing companies, they love the hours, it’s what they believe they were put on this earth to do, etc), there exists at least a handful of individuals who got into this whole thing for one reason and one reason only: the cash. To those people and more, investor Jim Rogers has some advice: become a farmer. Perhaps you’re a first, second or third year investment banking analyst whose timing (re: when you graduated college but also dating back to when you were conceived) could not have been worse, for whom the year 2006 and the associated bonuses are but a dream. Perhaps you’re a seasoned veteran making great money who’s wanted to try something new but couldn’t think of an industry that could beat your current pay. Perhaps you’re employed by a hedge fund whose performance YTD is not inspiring confidence in this year’s bonus. Perhaps you’re a banker who wants to be compensated in cash and not company stock paid out over 14 years. Doesn’t matter if you’ve never done manual labor in your life, if you don’t know the first thing about milking anything, if you’re emotionally scarred from the one time you rode a tractor. If you wanna make some real money, start working your contacts on the farm. Continue reading »
“You should go work for a real bank,” Mr. Dimon taunted a Citigroup banker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, interrupting while the banker was schmoozing clients. Mr. Dimon says he made the comment in jest and is “sorry.” The incident inflamed Citigroup executives, already peeved by what they saw as attempts to poach Citigroup clients by highlighting the bank’s turmoil, said people familiar with the matter. [WSJ]
Greek Banks Ready for Debt Rollover (Bloomberg)
Greek banks are willing to roll over their government bonds as part of a European Union aid plan, Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said, as debt-holders meet in Paris today to discuss their role in rescuing the country.
China Raises Rates to Counter Fastest Inflation Since 2008 (Bloomberg)
The one-year deposit rate rises to 3.5 percent from 3.25 percent, effective tomorrow, the People’s Bank of China said on its website today. The one-year lending rate will increase to 6. 56 percent from 6.31 percent. Today’s move may fuel concern that monetary tightening will trigger a slowdown in the world’s second-biggest economy.
Berkshire Is in Group Bidding on Citi Unit (WSJ)
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is part of a bidding group engaged in exclusive talks to buy the consumer-lending business formerly known as CitiFinancial from Citigroup Inc., said people familiar with the matter. Berkshire rounds out a consortium that includes Centerbridge Partners LP and Leucadia National Corp. bidding for the business, which could fetch more than $8 billion, one of these people said.
Audit watchdog, SEC plan Beijing visit (Reuters)
U.S. regulators, reeling from a series of scandals over U.S.-listed Chinese companies, will head to Beijing to discuss launching audit inspections while regulators in Canada announced a probe of foreign issuers.
White House: Geithner has not told Obama he wants to go (Reuters)
Carney, when asked whether Geithner had told Obama he would like to leave in that timeline, said: “Not that I’m aware of, no. I think he will be here for the foreseeable future.”
Bill Calls for Fannie, Freddie Merger (WSJ)
A California Republican is set to introduce a bill as soon as Wednesday to merge Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and restructure the company into a government-held corporation. It’s the latest idea in what figures to be a long, high-stakes drama over what to do with the mortgage giants whose government takeover has put taxpayers on the hook for $138 billion to keep them afloat and stabilize mortgage markets.
Dimon’s Global Growth Pains (WSJ)
The New York company’s investment bank was No. 1 in global market share in the first half of 2011, leapfrogging over rivals. One reason: As competitors teetered during the financial crisis, J.P. Morgan’s last-bank-standing stature lured giant companies. They hoped hiring the bank to underwrite stock and bond deals would be seen as a sign of strength. But a year into a new push for more corporate-loan business outside the U.S. that would help J.P. Morgan reduce the dependence on its saturated, increasingly regulated home country, the company’s profits elsewhere slipped in 2010. The bank’s global footprint is small compared with Citigroup Inc., which staggered through the financial crisis but gets roughly twice as much revenue outside the U.S. as J.P. Morgan.
Debt Raters Miss Iceland Rebound (Bloomberg)
The credit rating companies that were too slow in predicting Iceland’s economic collapse in 2008 may be underestimating the strength of its resurrection.
European money market funds are hemorrhaging (FT Alphaville)
FYI.
Harbinger Capital’s Operating Chief Resigns (WSJ)
Hedge-fund firm Harbinger Capital Partners, founded by Philip Falcone, said Tuesday that Peter Jenson has resigned as chief operating officer and director.
A Pullout by Pensions Hammers a Hedge Fund (WSJ)
In May, executives of FrontPoint Partners LLC were trying to stop the flood of money that was leaving the firm because of an insider-trading scandal when the telephone rang with more bad news. Jim Elkins, an official at Michigan’s state pension fund, told FrontPoint it had decided to yank its remaining $375 million investment in the Greenwich, Conn., firm’s flagship hedge fund. That was close to one-fourth of all the money left in the shriveled fund.
Germany S&P head rejects criticism of Greek role (Reuters)
“The assertions are completely made up out of thin air and factually wrong. The are either based on ignorance of the facts or are politically motivated comments (that) neglect the facts,” Torsten Hinrichs told Austrian radio in an interview aired on Wednesday. Continue reading »
$$$ Obama to meet congressional leaders Thursday on debt (Reuters)
$$$ House GOP pushes back against short-term debt-ceiling increase (The Hill)
$$$ Portugal’s Debt Rating Cut to Junk by Moody’s (NYT)
$$$ Banks to meet to sweeten Greek terms (FT)
$$$ IMF insists on ethics clause for Lagarde (Guardian)
$$$ Matthew Goldstein: Hedge fund giants are coming up small this year (Reuters) Continue reading »
