It’s summertime and the living is easy. To make life even easier, however, DealBreaker is launching a weekly newsletter focused on escaping work and engaging in leisure. This summer, BeachComber will be focused on the Hamptons and your trip out there. Every Friday afternoon we’ll update you on the expected weather, traffic and parties you’ll be encountering in the East Egg of the twenty-first century. We might throw in a couple of links to business stories too.
For now, BeachComber will only be available by email. Sign up below by simply entering your email address. It’s free! First issue comes out this Friday.
(Also, if there’s anything you’d like to see–such as league tables for nightclubs, Further Lane party invitation origami–let us know. We’ll be happy to oblige.)
Summer
The Shake Shack in Madison Square Park is open for business, and we’ve already heard reports of summer interns at Credit Suisse standing on the long lines to get burgers and fries for lunch.
This reminds us of the perennial question: who has the best lunch time eating options in finance? Credit Suisse’s offices, located on the east side of Madison Square Park, make it a clear nominee simply because the superb shake shack is located there. Please leave your other nominations in comments.
It’s almost summer and you know what that means—DealBreaker is looking for one or two lucky individuals to be our interns and, if you play your cards right, it might just be you. Basically, it boils down to willingness for, nay a passion to excel at, picking up Carney’s dry cleaning. Are you man enough for the job? If not, please seek alternative employment via the DB Career Center. For those of you up to the task, read on.
1928 was a great year to be a WASP—the Crash hadn’t yet happened, no one questioned the sexuality of a man who adorned his body with silk twill pocket squares, and Mein Kampf was going into its ninth printing (only to be outdone several years later by Dana Vachon’s Mergers and Acquisitions, now in it’s nine-thousandth printing). To commemorate this glorious 26-times-a-fortnight, when life was droll and full of hilarious bon mots, and to celebrate the recent opening of their Wall Street branch, Hermès is offering a limited edition version of its “Cape Cod 1928” watch (“Cape Cod Wall Street”) for your consumption, exclusively at the 15 Broad store.
Complex has deemed the piece a “little Eichmann” and notes that it perfectly captures the “homogeneous banality” of “long summers on the beach,” which was the designer’s intent. We want to agree and say something about how the wearers of these things specialize in autoerotic asphyxiation but we’re actually really into the black crocodile strap, rose gold case and sunny bronze face. Jesucristo, what’s happening to us? Look away, please. Is this what it sounds like when doves cry?
Hermès Watch Reminds Us Why Wall Street and Cape Cod Sucks [Complex]
If you’re left muttering, “that doesn’t make any sense,” you’re probably not a summer at Lehman Brothers, and you don’t have a double Windsor knot (all business formal, all the time) choking the blood/air supply to your brain.
Courtesy of Bankers Ball (courtesy of Intern Memo), an ex-Lehman HR lackey gives the scoop on how Lehman Brohamsters cages its veal (an apt description from what I hear about the relative size of Lehman’s cubicles).
You see, Lehman is happy to entertain the thought of giving all of its summers full-time offers (it tries to try), as long as the summers keep their end of the bargain, by being one of the 70% of summers Lehman wants to hire. Help Lehman help you, in other words, by not ‘forcing’ Lehman to make trips to dingy college campuses. Lehman doesn’t want to go back to college and make out with a mono-addled makeout queen after drinking backwash and floor particulate from old beer pong vessels. Lehman doesn’t like it.
Lehamn hates this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it. Lehman can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. Lehman feels saturated by it. Lehman can taste your stink and every time it does, it fears that it’s somehow been infected by it.
Did you know that the first Lehman Brothers was designed to be a perfect investment bank? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the lifestyle. Entire deals were lost. Some believed Lehman lacked the internal strategic consultants to describe that perfect world. But Lehman believes that, as a species, investment bankers define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect investment bank was a dream that bankers’ primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why Lehman Brothers was redesigned to this: the peak of Wall Street civilization.
Here’s the quote from the Lehman HR person:
We do not approach the summer with a set percentage of offers that we’re looking to give out. If all 50 summer analysts perform at a high level, then we would be more than happy to give out 50 offers. The more offers we give out, the easier it is for us to fill our full-time class. It actually makes our job easier. So, in general, our interests are aligned. Lehman takes the summer interview process very seriously, because our hope is that we do not need to return to campus full-time to hire additional people. Obviously it never works out that 100% of the class receives offers, so I would venture to say that it’s more like 70%; however, that number would vary by division and year.
How to Behave if You’re a Lehman Intern [Bankers Ball]
[The following is an imagined conversation based on a real event. After the Times ran its exposé on men in their 40s who don’t let their 20-something girlfriends come out to the Hamptons for the weekend, John Ivers, 42, got himself and the 19 people with whom he went in on a sweet 4-bedroom summer share in the Hamptons kicked out of their house*].
Ivers: Brosef, it’s Ivers.
Guy Ivers went to college with 85 years ago, ATO brother: Who is this?
Ivers: Ivers, man, Ivers! 2 minutes, 30 seconds ATO record setting keg stander-Ivers!
Guy: …Jeff…?
Ivers: John, brah, John!
Guy: Right. Hey man. Been a while. How are you?
Ivers: Not good, brah, not good at all.
Guy: What’s the trouble?
Ivers: The Times did a story on me being, more or less, AWESOME, you know, ‘cause I told that girl I’m dating she can’t come to the Hamptons because it cramps my style vis-à-vis nailing other chicks, etc, and Summer Share Ivers doesn’t do girlfriends, whatever, and the owners of the house I guess saw the article and were PO’d cause it’s not supposed to be a shared house and to make a long story short I have no place to stay for the rest of the summer and to, more importantly, hang my paddle…you know what I’m talking about.
Guy: Yeah, can you actually hang on a sec?
Ivers: Okay.
Guy: Sorry, kids.
Ivers: Kids? You gotta watch that shit, man, if they’re under 18 it gets risk-ay.
Guy: Actually I meant my children. I have 2 of them, 5 and 7.
Ivers: You dog!
Guy: Right.
Ivers: So brohamster, what I need is for your to tell me where you beach house is and when I can make a copy of the keys.
Guy: Yeah, actually I can’t do that, I just go there with my family, and my wife would probably have a problem.
Ivers: Brohamster, we’re bros! We’re brothers! This is not cool man, NOT COOL!
Guy: Yeah, I gotta go, but good luck with the house Jeff.
Ivers: You’ve changed, broheim.
Earlier: DealBreaker PSA: You Could Learn A Lot From This Guy
*Which we were told by quasi-reputable sources over the holiday. Any of the homeless 20 want to comment? John? You know where to find us.
Were you worried there wasn’t going to be an update to the pettiest story of all time? Worry no longer. Here’s a quick recap for those of you who haven’t been keeping score, which seems ridiculous to us since this story is about shrubs, but whatever, that’s your journey. Anyway, Goldman Sachs MD Marc Spilker wanted to widen his path to the beach at his house in the Hamptons. Unfortunately, his neighbor, Kynikos founder Jim Chanos had a problem with this, since his row of hedges would have to be taken out in order for Spilker’s family to be able to “maximize their beach enjoyment.” Spilker cited a deed that said he could have 15 feet, Chanos produced one that said otherwise. Then this week they went to court to negotiate; Spilker claimed to only want a few feet (i.e. 6-7), Chanos gave it to him and asked for it to be put in writing.
The (soon-to-be-promoted?) Goldman Sachs employee apparently then had a change of heart, re: abiding by the terms of the agreement, and yesterday afternoon decided he’d rip down the remaining hedges on Chanos’s property. Oh, and new neighbor Stevie Cohen, who shares the path to the beach, has thrown his support to Spilker.
Boys—I would like to introduce you to a man you should be watching, studying, stalking and taking copious notes on, for he is your lord and savior. Emulate this man and you will go far in life. Don’t emulate this man and you will fail at everything you do.
Who is this beacon of light in a world cast in darkness? His name is John Ivers, he’s a 42 year-old self-employed stock trader (AKA the ghost of Tim Sykes’s future), and he just wants his summer share. Obviously, there are people who want to stand in the way of Ivers’s happiness, namely his 25 year-old investment banker girlfriend, but when you’re John Ivers, you don’t let 25 year-old girlfriends who want to get in on your 20-person summer house in Amagansett tell you what to do—you tell them (her) what you’re going to do.
You say, “Listen, Toots, I’ve been coming to the Hamptons as a single guy since before you grew breasts (John’s been in 14 houses). Now, I don’t have a problem continuing seeing your breasts, but in the city, k? When I come to the Hamptons I come alone. If I wake up one morning and want to sleep with one of my housemates, I do it. If I go out one night, and run into one of my ex-girlfriends, perhaps the one from three summers ago, who wears slender madras shorts and likes to watch me from a pebbled yard nearby, or the one from four years ago, who wears jeans and reminds me of what it was like to be 38, I do her. If I want to eat an $80 lobster roll by myself on the beach without anyone breathing down my neck and asking me ‘Where’s this going?’ I do it. So there’s not so much room for a girlfriend in that equation. Also, you know I’m in a band called Hot Lava, and rock stars don’t have girlfriends, they have groupies! You’ve seen the messages they leave me on Hot Lava’s Myspace page.”
When you’re John Ivers, 42, you wear flip-flops and Ray-Bans and a typical night would be something along the lines of:
A friend’s engagement party until around 10 p.m., a party at a house in Amagansett run by a “group of girls” until midnight, a gig by the band Booga Sugar at the nightclub Stephen Talkhouse until 3 a.m. or so, and then an after-party until near sunrise back at his place.
You’re not a pathetic aging frat boy who thinks nostalgically back to the nights of rohypnol cocktails and paddle slaps, ’cause you’re still living the dream. You can’t believe those guys you went to college with are already in their forties, having kids and letting their girlfriends come to their summer houses—losers!
One summer stay in the Rental o’ Rapture will set you back about $3,200. Some skeptismos in the group might say something about it being lame for a person that age not to have (or, at the very least, rent) his own place, or remark that perhaps your day trading isn’t going so well, but those people just don’t get it (and were probably in DTD).
When Boys of Summer Linger Till Autumn [New York Times]
What are hedge fund mangers doing this summer? According to Forbes, buying BMWs in hideous colors (even though the blurb says Aston Martin). They also have plans to spend $82,000 on watches and jewelry, $446,000 on yacht rentals, and $77,000 for luxury spas. Some of them are allotting an average of $96,000 to companies like Blacktomato.com, a firm that creates vacation packages that are off-beat and quirky so that people with no interests can simulate personalities.
These vacays run the gamut, from heliskiing in Chile to anaconda hunting in the Amazon. The firm also offers the option of “BlackBerry-free zone” packages for those who have not yet mastered the On/Off button. For $159,000, Blacktomato.com will send you to Iceland for a two-night stay in an ice house with meals provided by a “top chef” flown in for the occasion. For an extra $250,000 you can light him on fire, though Loeb is reportedly the only one who’s shelled out the extra cash for that so far.
How The Hedgies Will Spend This Summer [Forbes]
Is Rupert Murdoch expressing unbridled confidence (“I can take a few days off, Dow Jones will be there when I get back”) or throwing in the towel?
Check out the full picture after the jump.
We here at DealBreaker don’t usually take part in the Goldman-hate for Goldman-hate sake that seems to pervade the financial community and its outliers. We don’t have the testosterone fueled rage that makes us want to simultaneously kill someone and make out with them. And, of course, there’s always JSC.
But this whole Jim Chanos of Kynikos versus Marc Spilker from Goldman Sachs, hedge fund/investment bank/hedgerow smackdown seems to have one clear villain, whose sense of entitlement is rivaled only by his ability to ignore legal documents.
After the jump, you’ll find the 1982 resolution that seems to back-up Jim Chanos’s extraordinary claim that his Goldman Sachs neighbor cannot just roll in with a team of landscapers and rip out his hedges to make way for a wider bath to the beach. Sometimes even managing directors can’t get everything they want.
It’s not just the residents of Further Lane who are edge about this. Yesterday it reached all the way into Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. In a segment about the hedge row, CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino snapped at Erin Burnett “I’m trying to do real work here.” Gasparino just cannot abide landscaping gone wrong.
(More or less completely unrelated: Spilker’s Hamptons neighbor on the other side is Stevie Cohen, whose shrubs nobody has the balls to uproot.)
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