“In case you don’t know who we are, we’re Maroon 5,” joked Levine, who performed wearing skinny jeans, a tight black T-shirt revealing extensive tattoos, and his signature three-day stubble. Most people in the several hundred person crowd indeed weren’t sure what they were watching. What’s their name again?” asked on elderly asset trustee; another 40-something hedge fund manager said he looked up the odd-sounding name shortly before the show. “I had to Google it,” he admitted…For the most partk, hedge funders watched politely if unenthusiastically while sipping on Bud Light bottles and 2008 Washington state Merlot; others networked in the half-full ballroom, checking their Blackberries in between business card exchanges. [AR, related, related]
News
Jamie Dimon just did a conference call in which he mentioned something called the “Dimon Principle,” but he did not define it, so I will propose a definition, which is: If you are going to have a Slytherin alumnus running a $375bn book full of snakes and CDX and TIPS (??) and things, and someone notices and the press starts lobbing in guesses about it, and Congress starts fretting about it, and you say things like “this is a tempest in a teapot,” you have to NOT LOSE TWO BILLION DOLLARS ON IT. From JPMorgan’s just-filed Q: Continue reading »
“Where are the ladies tonight?” Levine asked as the drummer kept a faint beat. One could hear a few screams. “That means there are a lot of dudes here,” he shot back. “It’s not the best ratio.” The men nodded and laughed knowingly. A few adoring women in the front screamed a little louder, and Levine indulged them. “Ladies, this song is dedicated to you,” he said before launching into She Will Be Loved. “We loved you so damn much.” [AR]
Back in the day, as in 2007, Wall Street compensated its employees in a way that made them feel loved. In a way that made them feel special. In a way that made the long hours, the constant stress, the soaring highs and the crashing lows, the verbal and sometimes physical abuse bearable. Now, obviously, not so much. Combine that with suffocating regulation and you’ve got a bunch of financial services hacks who are saying “I want out.” Some, like the Goldman partners who’ve already made enough money to not have to work again, are simply retiring. Others are waiting to get fired. Yet others are seeking out the warm embrace of hedge funds. A lesser number, however, are using the shift as an opportunity to finally leap for that dream, be it baking cupcakes or slapping bare asses with branches. But what about your dream?
You know the one. The one you’ve never shared with a soul. The one that’s always in the back of your head. The one that keeps you up at night. The has you giving the side-eye to the dog-walkers you see your neighborhood– because it’s not fair. YOU should be the one wrangling the packs of pups, masterfully juggling dozens of leashes at a time that you’d never let get knotted. Unfortunately, because this is the world we live in, no one would ever give you a chance. Something about being overqualified for the job, they said, looking you up and down in your dress pants and blue button-down, smirking, thinking “Like this guy can command the respect of a bunch of bitches. A single Bichon Frisé would make mincemeat out of him.”
Plus, you had a lifestyle to maintain and the golden handcuffs were still a serious draw. Now though, you’ve been unshackled. And you know all those little plastic bags you’ve been subconsciously saving under the sink for years, waiting for your moment to come? It’s arrived. Continue reading »
Goldman Now Taking Ability To Make Money For The Firm Into Serious Consideration When Deciding Promotions
By Bess Levin
Goldman has changed. Once, when promotions were decided, being a “culture carrier”—Goldman lingo for a person who is a positive force for the things the firm says it values—was at least as important as being “commercial,” i.e., someone who excels at making money. Not anymore: being commercial, I’m told, is more of a deciding factor. “I could have written [Greg Smith's] letter almost verbatim,” a former vice president tells me. “Every meeting I had at the firm for six years was ‘Where is the next dollar of revenue coming from?’ ” [Vanity Fair]
As Greece prepares to default on its new bonds, now seems as good a time as ever to fix the problems that occurred when it defaulted on its old bonds. Remember that? Basically there was this thing where if you had a Greek bond with a face amount of €100 and CDS on that Greek bond, and that Greek bond got poofed into a new Greek bond with a face value of €20 that traded at par, then your CDS would pay out not the expected €80 that you lost on your first bond but rather €0 because the second bond was deliverable into CDS and it traded at par. Which makes no sense if you view CDS as hedging your losses on the first bond, which to a reasonable approximation you do.
Fortunately, though, in the particular case of Greece, the new bonds were split into lots of little tranches and one of them basically looked like the old bonds, value-wise (though not otherwise), and so everything worked out and actually made CDS buyers a little bit of extra money. So that was nice for them, but otherwise it was all just terrible.
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