“I think that out of difficult times, opportunities present themselves,” Mr. Biden said today in Athens. “And with a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, a year from now we will have not only weathered this crisis, but even be in a stronger position.” [WSJ]
Archive for December 2011
If All Went According To Plan, Years Of Hard Work Were “Validated” This Weekend, If Ya Know What He Means
By Bess Levin
From: [redacted at large PE firm]
Sent: Thursday, December 01, 2011 2:18 PM
To: Associates
Subject: Models and Bottles (For real)Fellow colleagues!
Finally life has been good to us. A close friend of mine, Matt happens to know a lot of women on the modeling circuit in Boston. Several of them have moved here from rural areas with starry-eyed dreams and the kind of naiveté we all pray for.
Are you a strip club owner whose city doesn’t appreciate the performing arts you’re bringing to the community? A guy whose spouse is unconvinced that spending several hours watching topless women dance is just as if not more culturally enriching as taking in Swan Lake? A first-year analyst who’s about to get canned if you can’t explain to HR why you’ve started to take meetings at/had your calls forwarded to the Hustler Club? Judith Hanna’s got your back. Continue reading »
As many of you know, to call Hank Paulson a fan of birds would not do justice to the special relationship between the former Treasury Secretary and his feathered friends. Birds get nine mentions in his memoir (verus Warren Buffett’s six), he was said to “freak out when [they'd] fly into the glass windows of 85 Broad,” they’ve become the third person in his marriage (Wendy Paulson, also a huge fan, was apparently “jealous” of a recent outing Hank took without her, preferring to have them all to himself), they were the ones he was referring to when he said 20 percent of the staff at Goldman added 80 percent of the value, and, despite having to neglect them in order to deal with the whole Bear Stearns situation (he said he was sorry and he meant it), birds have remained unflaggingly loyal, among HP’s closest confidants, the sources of his most joyful and precious moments in life and just really great buddies. That’s why it doesn’t hurt that people aren’t banging down his door to kick back and watch the game over some non-alcoholic beer and learn about the observable differences among types of manure.
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Italy Plan Opens Pivotal Week For Euro (WSJ)
Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, in his first test since taking office two weeks ago, outlined a three-year plan made up of €30 billion ($40.2 billion) in tax increases, spending cuts, pension overhauls and growth-boosting measures. The package—equivalent to 1.9% of Italy’s €1.6 trillion gross domestic product—will likely be followed by Franco-German proposals on Monday to create a new regime for budget policies in the euro zone, which European leaders could adopt at a summit on Dec. 8-9. Leaders hope a deal could pave the way for a massive European Central Bank intervention in government bond markets that is aimed at stopping the exodus of private capital and reversing the rise of countries’ borrowing costs to ruinous levels. “On the whole—considering that Monti’s cabinet has been in place for 18 days or so—this package amounts to a valid and rapid first step in the right direction,” said Vladimir Pillonca, an economist with Société Générale…Under Mr. Monti’s plan, the retirement age for women with private-sector jobs would be raised by 2018 to 66 years old, from 60 today, a change that would align the retirement ages of men and women. Labor Minister Elsa Fornero broke into tears during the news conference, saying the pension changes were necessary to avoid “collective impoverishment.” [At left, a montage the Journal put together of Fornero in said tears, in what presumably is the first in new series of government officials and private sector executives called "I'm Not Crying, You're Crying."]
Monti’s Austerity Debut Risks Italian Wrath (Bloomberg)
“The huge public debt of Italy isn’t the fault of Europe, it’s the fault of Italians,” Monti, who took over last month after former Premier Silvio Berlusconi resigned, told a news conference as he detailed the package yesterday. “Together, we will make it.”
Merkel Heads to Paris as EU Seeks Debt Strategy (Bloomberg)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy will hold talks in Paris today starting at 1:30 p.m. over lunch.
Fed Prepares To Make Itself Perfectly Clear (WSJ)
Federal Reserve officials are close to completing an overhaul of how they signal their policy plans to the public…They are likely to spend much of their Dec. 13 meeting ironing out unresolved pieces of the new communications strategy and seem on pace to unveil it early next year. They have two major objectives: Be more explicit about the Fed’s goals for inflation and employment, and articulate more clearly the interest-rate strategy to meet those goals.
Tony Bennett’s Nude Lady Gaga Sketch Could Soon Be In Your Living Room (WSJ)
Stocking stuffer?
Eight Ferraris Crash at ‘Gathering of Narcissists’ (Bloomberg)
Eight Ferraris and a Lamborghini were part of a 14-car crash in Japan yesterday that wrecked more than $1 million of vehicles. “The accident occurred when the driver of a red Ferrari was switching from the right lane to the left and skidded,” said Mitsuyoshi Isejima, executive officer for Yamaguchi Prefecture’s Expressway Traffic Police unit. “It was a gathering of narcissists.” The drivers were aged between 37 and 60 years old, he said. The accident, at 10:16 a.m. on the rain-soaked Chugoku Expressway in Yamaguchi Prefecture at the western tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu, also involved three Mercedes Benz (DAI) vehicles and two Toyotas, police said. The convoy was heading from Kyushu to Hiroshima when the accident occurred. No fatalities were reported and 10 people sustained bruising and minor injuries. Continue reading »
$$$ White men get paid more on Wall Street [DealBook]
$$$ Merkel vows to build fiscal union [FT]
$$$ “If I understand the news coming out of Europe correctly, the new head of the European Central Bank is offering a simple deal: If fiscal policy becomes hawkish, monetary policy will be dovish.” [Greg Mankiw]
$$$ SEC staffers call for an investigation of the guy investigating SEC staffers for not investigating fraud [Reuters, earlier]
$$$ A pimp who asked to be treated as an expert witness in the ways of prostitution was convicted of robbery and assault charges but cleared of raping a woman who worked for him. … McCord testified that he was certified as a member of the “quiet society of pimps” and he was simply disciplining one of the women according to a “code of conduct.” [NYP]
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The remaining directors of MF Global Holdings turned in their resignations Friday, following the appointment of a trustee to oversee liquidation of the futures brokerage. Former FBI director Louis Freeh was installed as trustee in the MF Global bankruptcy case on Monday. [CNBC]
Why does Southern Connecticut get everything? Why does it get to lay claim to all that is great in this world? A short-list includes Steve Cohen’s Cummings Point Pleasure Dome, a guy who’ll park his car on your roof, a group of asset managers who will be more than happy to do whatever you ask, be it bury a hooker you killed or claim your lotto winnings, Cliff Asness’s doll collection, The Largest Trading Floor In The WorldTM, the No. 1 Candy Theft Prevention Team in the U.S., the Great Toilet War of ’08, Paul Tudor Jones’ Christmas Spectacular, Heights and Lights (“a 20-year Stamford tradition that features an acrobatic Santa Claus rappelling down the side of of a building on his way to a local tree lighting”) and now this? Continue reading »
Nothing official yet but it seems pretty clear that the following anecdote…: Continue reading »
It’s difficult to keep track of all the things that all the people are suing all the banks for regarding mortgages. A place to start is by remembering that banks stood in the middle of originating loans to people who didn’t pay them and selling them to people who are now sad that they didn’t get paid. So the flow of money was kind of Investor -> Bank -> Homeowner -> Incinerator. If you think of that flow of money, it makes sense that the people are are doing the most suing are the investors and GSEs who bought mortgages, and regulators who sort of kind of represent the investors, and so in fact there are a lot of big numbers sloshing around in pretty normal securities-fraud-y lawsuits of exactly that sort.
But there are also lawsuits, with quite large dollar numbers attached to them, that go the other way. In these, homeowners, and regulators who sort of kind of purport to speak on behalf of the homeowners, are suing the banks for really quite stonking amounts of money.
It’s analytically helpful for me to separate those suits into two further buckets: Continue reading »
