Numbers for first, second, and third year analysts. Read more »
bonuses
The juniorest of mistmakers have received their numbers (and a little perspective). Read more »
Convicted Insider Trader Matthew Kluger “Shocked” To Find Out He Couldn’t Trust The Guys With Whom He Was Committing Federal Crimes
By Bess Levin
Remember Matthew Kluger? To recap, he’s the mergers and acquisitions lawyer who spent two decades feeding inside information to convicted insider trader Garrett Bauer, that he picked up from partners at the six different law firms he worked at over the years. The operation, which included Kenneth Robinson, an old friend of Kluger who acted as the tips mule between MK and GB, went very smoothly for a very long time (17 years), and would have continued going smoothly had Robinson stuck with the plan instead of deciding to start making the same trades as Bauer, raising suspicion with SEC, which was watching the men and used “relationship analysis” to determine they were “part of the same trading scheme and had a common source: Kluger.” In March 2011, federal agents showed up to Robinson’s house and after thinking it over for a couple days, he decided to cooperate by giving prosecutors a step-by-step guide to how the scam operated, telling them Kluger’s name, and recording conversations with Kluger and Bauer in which the two said things like “I went right up to my apartment and I broke the phone in half and went to McDonald’s and put it in two different garbage cans” and “I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep. I’m waiting for the FBI to ride into my apartment” and “We have to get all the fingerprints off that money. Like you wearing gloves or something and wiping every bill down or something” and “There is no way [these cell phone conversations] could ever be recorded.”
Robinson was ultimately sentenced to 27 months in prison, Bauer got nine years (despite his 147 speeches about how insider trading is a bad idea on the college lecture), and Kluger was handed 12 years, beating Raj Rajaratnam for “the longest insider trading U.S. history.”
Recently, Kluger sat down with Bloomberg to offer a few more specifics re: how the scheme went down (“Sometimes it was a deal I was working on, sometimes it was a deal I heard being discussed in the office”; “I would call Ken and say ‘X/Y/Z company is considering a takeover of Q company”) but what he really wants to talk about? What was the biggest surprise and hardest punch to the gut in all of this? Is what it was like finding out that his buddies were stiffing him on cuts of their ill-gotten gains. Read more »
Junior mistmakers at the Royal Bank of Canada received their numbers last week. Read more »
The French bank has some very angry little mistmakers on its hands. Read more »
You would think that European regulators have a lot to worry about with their banks but they’ve got time for a surprising distraction: finalizing a plan to cap bankers’ bonuses at 1x base compensation*:
Bankers’ bonuses across the European Union are set to be limited by law, with many bank lobbyists admitting in private that they have lost the fight against a European Parliament initiative to limit the size of bonuses relative to salary.
Some banks still hope to increase the proposed ratio from 1:1 to 2:1 or beyond, while others are trying to limit the restriction to upfront cash bonuses, excluding deferred payouts. But many bankers now accept the principle of a ratio as inevitable.
“It’s dawning on many banks that this is game over,” said one senior lobbyist. “Many are now resigned to the 1:1 ratio.”
Assuming – as is currently the case – that the caps will be only on the ratio, not the amount, this is a somewhat weird move. Banks in Europe, as you may have heard, are somewhat undercapitalized. They also continue to need to employ bankers, and the going rate for senior bankers in Europe seems to be around 2.5x their current base salaries,** which are already up due to previous noise (and action) about bonus caps. A cap like this should push them up further, increasing banks’ fixed costs at exactly the moment they can’t afford to pay them.
But of course the regulators know that and view it as an acceptable trade-off for the benefit of the bonus cap, which mainly to nudge banks’ culture away from levered risk-taking and toward … I’m gonna say bureaucracy? Read more »
BreakingViews has a couple of posts up about one of my favorite things in the financial universe, Credit Suisse’s habit of paying its bankers in structured credit instruments that take pages to describe. How’s that going? Great:
Three years ago, around 2,000 employees were forced to take some $5 billion of the riskiest assets from the Swiss group’s balance sheet as their bonuses. Now, recipients are being offered the chance to buy more. What once seemed like a punishment has turned into something of a perk.
Investors in the “Partner Asset Facility” already sit on a paper profit of around 80 percent, thanks to a recovery in the value of the original portfolio. That gain is essentially safe, since most of the assets involved have been liquidated or sold down and the funds are sitting in low-risk, low-return investments. The snag is that beneficiaries can’t get to the payouts until 2016.
To ease the pain of waiting, Credit Suisse is giving participants another bite. They have a chance to plough some of their paper profits back in, buying up to $1 billion of risky assets, including mortgage securities, from the bank’s books. Over a third of participants opted in to a similar offer late last year. Some of the purchases are to be funded by leverage, leaving perhaps half to come from willing PAF holders.
Phrases like “risky assets, including mortgage securities,” are always a bit of a minefield, but the sense is clear enough, which is that a whole lot of senior people at Credit Suisse are pretty keen to take money that is basically theirs, which is currently held in the form of basically cash, and invest that on a ~2x levered basis in, er, “risky assets, including mortgage securities,” which let’s just stipulate have a higher risk and higher return than cash.
How would you describe those people? Read more »
Lloyd Blankfein’s compensation dropped 35 percent, while his in-a-mood president got a raise. Read more »
In an effort to strike a balance between being competitive and responsible, Bob Diamond will only receive 6.3 million pounds ($10 million) for his work in 2011, down from $9 million in 2010. Technically, his total package amounts to 17 million pounds ($26.9 million), but that includes stuff from previous years. [Reuters]
From the front lines: Read more »
At Bloomberg today you will find a piece that is a bit hard to stomach if you’re the type of person whose heart goes out to the suffering. A bunch of financial services employees’ bonuses were slashed last year and, as a result, their lives have been turned upside down. Perhaps recalling how well their colleagues came off in Bloomberg’s first piece in what is apparently a series on bankers who are down, out, and willing to talk on the record, these people thought it wise to turn to reporter Max Abelson to tell their tale.
First, there’s Andrew Schiff, director of marketing for Euro Pacific Capital. Schiff has almost too many woes to mention but they include having to scale back his Connecticut summer house rental from four months to one; facing the pressure of paying private school tuition for two kids; living in a “crammed” 1,200-square- foot Brooklyn duplex (Schiff and his wife were planning to buy a $1.5 million brownstone nearby but now, who knows); and traffic (“Schiff was sitting in a traffic jam in California this month after giving a speech at an investment conference about gold. He turned off the satellite radio, got out of the car and screamed a profanity. ‘I’m not Zen at all, and when I’m freaking out about the situation, where I’m stuck like a rat in a trap on a highway with no way to get out, it’s very hard,’ he said”).
Then there’s Cobble Hill resident Daniel Arbeeny, a headhunter whose “income has gone down tremendously” and now must buy discounted salmon at Fairway and “read supermarket circulars to find good prices for his favorite cereal, Wheat Chex,” which is one step from giving out hand jobs under the Brooklyn bridge to make ends meet. Hedge fund manager Richard Scheiner had to sell two motorcycles (though because he actually saved some money, Zelda the labradoodle and Duke the bichon frise still get to live the lifestyle they’ve grown accustomed to at $17,000/year). Michael Sonnenfeldt’s friends are suffering from “malaise and a paralysis that does not allow [them] to believe that generally things are going to get better.” M. Todd Henderson feels sick (“Yes, terminal diseases are worse than getting the flu,” he said. “But you suffer when you get the flu”).
All traumatic experiences to be sure. And yet none come close to that of Hans, whose harrowing story should serve as a cautionary tale to all. Read more »
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