He’s got 100-large for whoever delivers AQR the right stuff. Continue reading »
Archive for October 2011
Supposedly. Continue reading »
-
Posted in:
business school
“Students Prefer Larger Postschool Wages But Dislike Studying”
By Matt Levine
That’s how two Wharton professors, Daniel Gottlieb and Kent Smetters, model their students in a recent paper that tries to explain why so many business schools have policies – typically adopted by student vote – that prevent students from disclosing their grades to employers. Seems reasonable!
We construct a model with students, schools, and employers. Students prefer larger postschool wages but dislike studying. Schools are heterogenous in their selectivity (reputation). Under disclosure, employers can observe both a student’s grades and the school’s selectivity; under non-disclosure, an employer can only observe the partial signal of the school’s selectivity.
That model leads to a bunch of equations (no charts, sorry) with conclusions that again seem pretty reasonable. The driving force for preferring a non-disclosure policy turns out to be that mean post-graduation pay has to be higher than median pay – and the authors think that this is likely at a selective school where the top students can be very valuable, but less likely for a less-selective school where everyone is clustered closer to average ability. If the average value of a Wharton student is higher than value of the average Wharton student, then making it hard for employers to figure out who is actually valuable will let everyone get paid for the optionality:
Continue reading »
Remember just a few years ago, when the first smartphones came out? People would tease each other for checking e-mail on the device, as if it made them obsessive or just plain strange.
The world moves fast. At this point, it’s hard to believe there was ever a time when the Internet, e-mail and your entire work life was not right at you fingertips, regardless of whether you are anywhere near your office.
Ubiquitous connectivity has fundamentally changed the business world — for the better, no doubt. People periodically refer to the modern “mobile workforce,” and it’s an accurate term. Everyone seems to be constantly traveling for work. Conferences in Florida, client meetings in Wisconsin, whatever. Two weeks ago in Florida, we were posting to Dealbreaker.com and AbovetheLaw.com on our hotel wifi, while our editor in New York made sure Fashionista.com posts went live on deadline. On the way home, we were blasting time-sensitive emails back and forth until the moment the planes took off.
Americans make more than 405 million long-distance business trips per year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. And one in five adult Americans plans to take at least one business trip in the next six months (you can imagine the Wall Street number is probably a teensy bit higher). But when you’re on the road, the deal still needs to be closed, and the trades still need to be made. Thank God for your laptop, your smartphone, your tablet.
It would be hard to quantify the astronomical increases in efficiency and productivity that technology allows just during travel alone.
Flight delay? No biggie. Stuck in a hotel room? Just pop in your wireless card.
“As one of the people who will be directly affected by the proposed new rules, let me say that I wholeheartedly endorse them,” says George Soros of carried interest and Obama’s proposed Buffett rule, which would force those making more than $1 million to pay at least as much federal income and payroll taxes as those who make less. [AR]
-
Posted in:
Love
Investment Manager Counter-Sued By Playboy Modeling Ex-Girlfriend Over Blank Checks, Tuition Fees
By Bess Levin
Remember Andrew Oberwager and Karolina Stefansi? For those who need a refresher: they’re two highly educated kids who were once in love and are now suing each other in court. When they met, Oberwager was a PM at Columbus Circle Partners, who had earned the right to not only put the letters C, F, and A after his signature, but M and D as well, having graduated from Harvard Med school before getting into investing. Stefanski, left, was a former Playboy model from Germany, who had earned her journalism degree from Suffolk University (the $33,000 tuition for which Obes covered). Thing were good.
Then MDCFA might have started an affair with a chick from Texas he met online, a relationship Stefanski was not cool with even though it probably meant nothing to Oberwags (i.e. he didn’t put her through vet school), she moved back to Germany and cashed the blank, signed checks he had given her, including one for $80,000.
Apparently this set Andy off and in July, he sued Karolina, a) claiming those checks were “meant to pay for household expenses” and b) demanding the tuition funds be paid back, plus interest, arguing that the couple had “drawn up a contract on his personal computer” (which has since gone missing) because “she said she didn’t want charity…it was actually her idea to make it a loan.”
Anyway, Karolina has now come back to 1) let Andrew know he can go fuck himself and 2) tell the court that this man is a liar. Continue reading »
-
Posted in:
For the kids
Roseanne Barr Advocates Using The Guillotine On ‘Guilty Bankers’ To Teach Kids A Lesson
By Bess Levin
Here’s her thinking: Continue reading »
Koch Brothers Flout Laws With Secret Iran Sales (Bloomberg)
In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts. “I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova- Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.”…What many people don’t know is how the Kochs’ anti- regulation political ideology has influenced the way they conduct business. A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries — in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East — has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism.
Buffett: ultra-rich tax may generate $20 billion per year (Bloomberg)
“It’s to have the ultra-rich who are paying very low tax rates pay more taxes. There’s all kinds of ultra-rich who pay normal taxes, but there’s a small segment who pay very low taxes including me. People who make money with money only pay very low taxes at very high levels of income. People with jobs like yours or all those around us pay perfectly normal taxes. What I am talking about would apply to 50,000 people out of 310 million in the country. It would simply mean that if you make tens of millions of dollars and your tax rate was 16% or 17%, you would start paying like the person who made $100,000 or $10 million who paid normal tax rates. An athlete making $10 million would not have a change in his tax rate at all. Somebody who buys a stock index future and sells it 10 seconds later and gets 60% by long-term gains, he would have a different world to live in.”
Wall Street Protestors Dress As Zombies In NYC (AP)
Patrick Bruner, a spokesman for the group, says Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are being urged to dress in business wear with white faces and blood, and will march while eating monopoly money. He says financial workers should see them “reflecting the metaphor of their actions.”
Anti-Wall Street Protesters Reach ‘Prime Time’Goal as Arrests Surpass 700 (Bloomberg)
The rallies, which began 16 days ago with a goal of occupying Wall Street for months, spread to cities including Los Angeles and Boston, where 25 people were arrested Sept. 30 after police said they refused to leave the lobby of a Bank of America Corp. building. The next day, New York City police halted a march over the Brooklyn Bridge and took hundreds of activists into custody for blocking traffic. Some people arrested claimed officers had tricked them into leaving the pedestrian walkway.
Pimco’s Total Return Fund Has 16% in Treasuries (Bloomberg)
Eight months ago Bill Gross, manager of the world’s biggest bond fund, said Treasuries “may need to be exorcised” and cleaned them out of his $245 billion Total Return Fund. The company then used derivatives to bet against the debt in March. Now the Pacific Investment Management Co. fund has 16 percent of its assets in U.S. government securities as the debt posted the highest quarterly returns in almost three years.
Profits, But No Joy, For Merrill (NYT)
Nearly three years later, taxpayers have been repaid, with interest, and what is now Bank of America Merrill Lynch is doing surprisingly well. But the company as a whole is groaning under the weight of many billions of dollars in bad home mortgages, most of them inherited from Countrywide Financial, which it acquired in 2008. Bank of America’s stock, down 54 percent this year, is the biggest loser in the Dow Jones industrial average. The irony is not lost on bankers, brokers and traders at One Bryant Park. The billions of dollars that Bank of America Merrill Lynch is earning from its businesses on Wall Street are being wiped out by the red ink flowing out of Countrywide. Bonuses are on the line. So are jobs. “It’s debilitating and depressing,” says one Merrill veteran, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “People are very angry. How could we not be?”
Arrested Development creator plans new series as prelude to movie (The Guardian)
Hurwitz told an Arrested Development session at the New Yorker Festival on Sunday that he and the show’s cast were “trying to do a limited-run series into the movie”, the New York Times reported. “We’re basically hoping to do nine or 10 episodes, with almost one character per episode,” he said. Continue reading »
