Not my problem anymore, Brian.When he’s not wreaking havoc on the Raj Rajaratnam trials, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff is giving newly-minted Charlotte-booster Brian Moynihan a headache.
Seems that you can’t call “experts” whose sole source of information are media reports you told your investors to ignore.
In effect the bank is arguing that, even though it expressly warned its shareholders to disregard the media, it can now defend itself by asserting that a reasonable shareholder would have disregarded these warnings and, by consulting the media, perceived that the bank’s alleged lies were immaterial. Even a zealous advocate might perceive that such an argument hints at hypocrisy.
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Bradley Birkenfeld single-handedly made the U.S. government’s case against UBS and forced the Swiss bank to hand over the names of more than 4,000 alleged tax cheats. But he’s still going to jail.
The awesomely-named William Zloch, a federal judge in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., told Birkenfeld he’s not getting out of the 40-month sentence he got for helping UBS clients skirt their taxes. And so, barring a change of heart or judge, Bradley Birkenfeld will be reporting to some sort of federal prison on Friday, despite his patriotic and totally not self-serving assistance to his government, which is $780 million richer as a result.
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Not compensating for anythingHow’s this for bad timing?
The world’s tallest building is set to be opened in the Gulf emirate of Dubai.
More than 800m (2,625ft) high and clad in 26,000 glass panels, Burj Dubai has 160 floors and more than 500,000 sq m of space for offices and apartments.
Some 90% of this ridiculously tall building’s units have been sold, or so they say. They also thought that Dubai ought to be–and could be–a financial center on par with New York and London. So take it with a few hundred trillion grains of sand.
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How lucky that the recovery from the U.S.’s worst economic crisis in 70 years happens to coincide with the country’s oldest economic stimulus policy: The decennial, Constitutionally-mandated Census, which begins today.
But said Census will not only tell us how many more annoying neighbors we have today as compared to 10 years ago. It will also do more than give us an idea of just how empty some of those lovely homes built over the last 20 years in certain Florida towns have become. It also means (bad) jobs for hundreds of thousands, almost 50,000 in Wisconsin alone. And 8,000 in Minnesota. 1,000 in southern Ohio. And 1,200 in Covington, Ky.
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I’ll admit it. I never, ever thought it would happen. Neither did Dive Bové. But the Ken Lewis Era at America’s biggest, if not best, bank is now truly over. You won’t have KL to kick around anymore.
To celebrate the hand-off of power from Tim Geithner to some Irish guy, said Irish guy is everywhere in North Carolina today, in an apparent effort to reassure Tar Heelers that he still loves them. As you’ve seen, the newly-minted Ohio-born CEO spoke to the North Carolina Banker’s Association this morning. The New Englander-by-choice got an op-ed piece in Charlotte’s very own Observer, offering a variety of platitudes about how he’ll make the bank better but without any promises for the Queen City itself.
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Rose only slightly this year. Recovery? Humbug!
All that crap in that annoying Christmas song rose just 0.9% in price this year, buoyed by a 43% increase in gold prices but stymied by a big drop in the price of all kinds of fowl. This year, it would cost $87,402.81 to buy all 78 items.
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How very quaint that this surprises you.Well, we know Lloyd and his tribe didn’t kill Jesus. The Romans did. Plus, even if, millennia ago, Blankfein’s forebears had a little hand in getting rid of a certain troublemaker, that would put a big dent in said troublemaker’s claims of divine origin, if you know what we mean.
So they didn’t kill Jesus. But even if the boys at Goldman celebrated Christmas, they’d be getting a whole lot of coal–or worse–this holiday season, according to the Gray Lady’s one-time star business reporter and ARS nemesis Gretchen Morgenson.
Goldman and other Wall Street firms maintain there is nothing improper about synthetic C.D.O.’s, saying that they typically employ many trading techniques to hedge investments and protect against losses. They add that many prudent investors often do the same. Goldman used these securities initially to offset any potential losses stemming from its positive bets on mortgage securities.
But Goldman and other firms eventually used the C.D.O.’s to place unusually large negative bets that were not mainly for hedging purposes, and investors and industry experts say that put the firms at odds with their own clients’ interests.
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So says the head of the country’s biggest options exchange, Bill Brodsky:
“There are micro-market structure issues – flash orders, short-selling, high-frequency trading – that are being wrapped up into financial regulatory reform in a way that has a lot of political overtones,” he said. “This is something regulators should be dealing with without undue political pressure from Congress.”
So what should Congress be doing? (Nothing is an unacceptable answer; these, people have to get reelected, Bill!)
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Warren Buffett’s a pretty moral guy, we think. He’s old, yes, and thinks that railroads are the future as we enter the year 1910. But he isn’t a cheating bastard.
He just invests in them: to wit, his 13% stake in the lying, thieving Moody’s Corp., parent of the august Moody’s Investor Services, one of the three ratings agencies that allowed Wall Street to wrap fresh feces in a couple of mortgages unlikely to default and sell them as gold. But maybe the O is having second thoughts.
Billionaire Warren Buffett’s company is continuing to reduce its stake in credit ratings firm Moody’s Corp., but Berkshire Hathaway Inc. still controls about 13 percent of Moody’s stock….
Over the past nine months, Berkshire has significantly reduced its Moody’s holdings. Berkshire held 48 million shares in March and reduced that stake to 31.8 million as of last week.
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God bless us, every one!How are we ever going to continue tricking the Chinese into buying our bonds if we can’t properly fudge our economic data or keep a certain lame-duck Treasury Secretary from exposing the lie?
So personal incomes rose 0.4% last month. Great. As with all recent economic indicators, that bit of good news was tempered by the fact that the market expected–nay, demanded!–better news.
And what were we doing with all these newfound riches? Buying crap. At least, buying slightly more crap than we did a month earlier, 0.5% more crap, to be exact. And this of course also disappointed the experts, who expected us to buy slightly more crap.
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RIM job: Toying with your fragile emotions this holiday seasonChristmas vacation is starting early. At least it might as well, since your BlackBerries have stopped working.
Oh, they fixed it? False alarm. Get back to work.
E-Mail Delays Again Plague BlackBerry Users [AP via NYT]
Not my problem anymore, Brian.When he’s not wreaking havoc on the Raj Rajaratnam trials, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff is giving newly-minted Charlotte-booster Brian Moynihan a headache.
