Unhappy in your current position and desperate to make a move? Completely content but looking for opportunities for professional growth? Today’s your lucky day. Patriarch Partners founder and CEO Lynn Tilton, she of Christmas cards, jello shots, whipped cream off her breasts, and “The number one lie people tell is ‘I won’t come in your mouth‘” fame is looking for a personal assistant. Think you’re up for the challenge? Here are the non-negotiable prerequisites and responsibilities you’ll face (emphasis ours): Read more »
Archive for June 2012
Kind of! Remember Old Lane? That hedge fund Citigroup had to buy to get its hands on CEO of the Century Vikram Pandit? If you missed out on the chance to invest in it during its all-too-short two years of managing money, don’t despair. Another chance is on the horizon. Sutesh Sharma, the guy who co-founded OLP with Pandit is getting the band back together, minus Uncle Vik, who will be missed, and starting a new fund this fall. Read more »
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Morgan Stanley Won Its Lead Role On The Facebook IPO By Showing Mark Zuckerberg A Picture Of A Pretty Pretty Sports Car
By Matt Levine
Here is a detail from the Wall Street Journal’s article today about how Morgan Stanley tech banker Michael Grimes excluded the other underwriters from having much of an active role in managing and pricing the Facebook IPO and I cannot stand how good it is:
A page of his pitch book to other companies,* which he calls the “Driver/Navigator Model,” shows a black sports car. A company about to go public, the pitch reads, must choose between a “single driver [who] operates the steering wheel, gas, brake and clutch,” or the “two driver model, where the car literally has an extra steering wheel, gas, brake pedals and clutch for a second driver.” Morgan Stanley, the pitch says, “favors the sole bookrunner approach.”
Imagine being persuaded by that! You could construct a hierarchy of pitchbook pages based on how persuasive they’d be to a rational person; I’m the sort of person who tends to find tables of numbers most compelling, followed by charts (I know, I know), followed by functional diagrams of functional things (“we put the mortgages in this green box, and then sell them to this red box”), followed I guess by pages of texty bullet points, followed last of all by METAPHORICAL CLIP ART.** Read more »
Greece’s Conservatives Start Coalition Talks (WSJ)
Greece’s conservative leader Antonis Samaras, whose New Democracy party came first in a crucial election Sunday, is set to meet the main opposition leader, radical left Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras, to start the formal process of coalition-building talks. Mr. Samaras saw the Greek president of the republic earlier Monday and received the formal mandate to start coalition-building talks, as his party is 21 seats shy of an absolute majority in the 300-seat parliament. The talks with Mr. Tsipras are purely a formality, as the radical left leader made it plain Sunday night that he wouldn’t join a coalition with New Democracy. “Don’t expect any surprises, this is a formal procedure. Mr. Samaras has to see the leader of the second party first, that’s the protocol,” Syriza’s spokesman said.
Greek Election Defuses One Crisis, but More Lurk (NYT)
“Unless they make a radical change, we will be back with another Greek cliffhanger in three or four months’ time,” said Darren Williams, a European economist at AllianceBernstein in London.
Wilbur Ross: Real Question For Greece Is What Now (CNBC)
Ross also said the government has to improve tax collection for a more permanent solution to the country’s debt problems and said higher revenues would allow the country to ease up on austerity measures. “The tax avoidance in Greece — including by government officials — is ridiculous. The black economy is a ridiculously high percentage,” he said. “Those are the problems they have to deal with and if they can deal with those than more limited austerity is what’s needed.”
Europe Gets Emerging Market Crisis Ultimatum As G-20 Meet (Bloomberg)
As elections in Greece reduced the immediate risk of the euro area’s breakup, China and Indonesia signaled growing exasperation with more than two years of European crisis- fighting that has failed to stem the threat of global contagion. World Bank President Robert Zoellick said that policy makers bungled their attempt to rescue Spain’s banks.
CUNY biz school fixed Wall Streeters’ GPAs to keep receiving tuition (NYP)
An internal CUNY probe found the course grades of “approximately 15 students” were falsified to keep their GPAs high enough to stay in the programs, Baruch officials acknowledged. The trickery prevented enrollees, including many mid-level Wall Streeters whose firms picked up their tabs, from flunking out — and kept their tuition checks flowing in. The accelerated “executive programs” in business and finance allow students to earn a master’s degree in 10 to 22 months while working full-time. The tuition: $45,000 to $75,000. Baruch has referred the matter to law-enforcement agencies, the college said in a statement. Spokeswoman Christina Latouf would not say if students knew their grades were being changed or were complicit in the scheme. But Baruch has started calling some recent graduates with disturbing news: Their sheepskins are invalid. “What do you mean? My diploma’s on my wall. How can you tell me I don’t have a degree?” one grad said, according to a source…Zicklin officials gave a sales pitch for prospective students last week, but directors and professors made no mention of the problems. Instead, they promised “respected and well-recognized” degrees that would put grads on the path to become chief executives and financial officers. “This is a master’s program on steroids,” one said. Read more »
$$$ Hopes for central bank action mount [FT]
$$$ Mohamed El-Erian: “There is only so much central banks can do” [FT]
$$$ Got Cash in Greek Banks? Don’t Pull It! [NetNet]
$$$ Hedge fund closures hit 2-year high in 1st quarter [Reuters]
$$$ A “driven, even obsessive entrepreneur with a proclivity for micromanagement” who is unlikely to take his company public [NYTM]
$$$ Also, bath salts [Spin]
$$$ “Looking like Jesus can have a very powerful effect on people. When I appeared on stage as Jesus for the first time, a man saw me and collapsed into tears. Looking like this in daily life can be interesting. When I go into bars, for example, I always see people nudging each other. Invariably someone will come up to me with a bottle of water and ask me to turn it into wine. That happens a lot. I was on a date once in a wine bar, and we ended up with three tables joined together with everyone wanting to re-enact the Last Supper using the wine and the bread. It was strange, but fortunately the girl I was with thought it was fun.” [FT]
Read more »
He’d keep it conservative at the office but come ladies’ night you’d better believe he’d be working what his momma gave him. Read more »
Well that was fast – and a bit strange. What do you make of the counts on which Gupta was and wasn’t convicted? He was found not guilty on counts 2 and 6 of the indictment:
So he’s off the hook for his work at P&G, with the lesson perhaps being that people will believe much more nefarious things about Goldman than they will about Procter & Gamble. More amazingly, the jury decided that he did not leak confidential information from the 2007 Goldman audit committee call that he seems to have conferenced Raj Rajaratnam into; perhaps they bought the defense that he was having an unrelated conversation with Rajaratnam during the entire duration of the Goldman call. Read more »
Dartmouth Grads Still Into Wall Street, Despite One Man’s Campaign Against “A Field That Sanitizes The Intellect And Offers Almost Nothing To Human Society”
By Bess LevinBack in August, a Dartmouth student named Andrew Lohse made a simple request of his peers: to stop being whores for Wall Street. “Should landing jobs prestigious 16-hour-a-day jobs at some faceless hedge fund, where they’ll learn about manipulating capital instead of imagining a freer and more just world be the goal of the valedictorians of Ivy League institutions,” Lohse asked and then answered, “No matter how hard I try, I cannot think of more pathetic ambitions.” Lohse charged the undergraduates to “do better” and by better he meant anything other than being “pulled into what is essentially a vulgar and extortionate system of lending and predatory capitalism which is increasingly underwritten by what remains of the public’s coffers.” Was Lohse’s argument a persuasive one? Did the image of him “vomiting in my mouth” at the idea of his peers becoming financial services employees cause anyone to reconsider? Read more »
The less good news is that a jury found the former McKinsey executive guilty on three counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy for passing material non-public information to his friend*, convicted insider trader Raj Rajaratnam. The good news: Read more »
Analyst: If Greece Beats Russia On Saturday, It Will Mean…Something In The Context Of Sticking With The Euro Or Not
By Bess Levin
An unusually large numbers of voters are still wavering, pollsters say. With the traditional Greek left-right political divide sidelined by the debt crisis, other factors could sway voters. “Nothing is certain, many voters are still undecided and factors such as the soccer match may be a major factor,” said a candidate for New Democracy. Greece play Russia late on Saturday in the European Soccer Championships in Poland. If Greece win, they will progress beyond the group stage and could face Germany on June 22. “Our analysts say a victory may fan nationalist feelings but they are not sure which party would benefit from that,” the candidate said. A second big factor is the weather, he said. Unusually high temperatures may send younger voters to the beach rather than the polling stations. [Reuters]


