god

  • 09 Nov 2009 at 12:52 PM

Goldman Sachs: You Think God Would Let ‘Egomaniacs’ Work Here?

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Screen shot 2009-11-09 at 12.56.15 PM.pngBy now you’ve likely heard the news: you can no longer say that Goldman Sachs is evil, because Lloyd Blankfein and Co. are merely doing the big guy’s bidding. Actually, that’s not true: you can call the Masters of the Universe sinners all you want but do so at your own peril, knowing full well that you’re fucking with The BG. Take this latest profile from the Times Online. You can see God’s hand in the whole thing. Obviously not just in the insistence that Goldman is basically a charitable organization whose first and foremost interest is to serve society but also in the jokes. It’s clear that God and Blankfein were discussing the upcoming story and the BG suggested going with the self-deprecation. “Be overly sarcastic. Take the shit they’ve been saying about us and then advance the joke,” Blankfein’s boss counseled. “Hide what we’re doing in plain sight; make them seem like the crazy ones and you’ll have them up against a wall. There’ll be no arguing.” For example:
The talk that inside 85 Broad, the MoTU plot to bring modern society to its knees.

“Aha! You catch us plotting in real time,” says Lloyd Blankfein, breaking away from a cabal of senior executives discussing his trip to Washington the previous day. Blankfein, 55, Goldman’s chairman and chief executive, is wearing a grey suit with a jaunty Hermès tie with little red bicycles on it. In his hand, he’s carrying one of those cups of coffee that look bigger than the human stomach. Maybe it’s the caffeine, maybe it’s the tie — a birthday present from his daughter — but he’s in a remarkably jolly mood for a man everyone seems to hate. “It’s like a safari here,” he jokes. “You’ve come in to look at the animals.”

And that stuff about killing adorable animals, endangered or otherwise, sucking out their essence and using it as a source of power.

Goldman is the biggest user of voicemail in the world. The “mind bullets” consist of anything from the latest profit and loss figures, to reports of what the chief executives of key clients have told Blankfein and his top team over lunch, to instructions to “switch off on holiday, for goodness sake.” No calls to meet in the basement to club baby seals to death first thing in the morning to get in the mood for a hard day’s banking? “God, no,” one staffer says wryly. “We don’t club baby seals. We club babies.”

And the most hilarious “urban legend” of them all.

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  • 08 May 2008 at 11:48 AM

GLG Not Too Concerned About The Threat Of Losing Billions, Due To Secret Weapon

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GLG Partners, the London-based hedge fund that’s seen what it would rather you not characterize as an ‘exodus’ of personnel over the last month, said it “hopes” to retain a modicum of assets from the emerging markets funds run by Greg Coffey, who resigned in April, and then withdrew his resignation, and then reinstated it. At the start of the year the value of Coffey’s funds was at about $7.2 billion, before dropping to $6.3 due to investment losses. Noam Gottesman, the co-chief executive of GLG who has been known to say out loud that his former employees cease to exist once they abandon him, commented, surprisingly lucidly and suspiciously calmly that the firm has received $1.7 billion in redemption requests so far, and that the worst case scenario will leave them with about $2 billion. “Obviously,” we’re sure he wanted to say but didn’t, choosing instead to give off an impression of sanity, “it’s not going to come to that, once investors get wind of this.”

Not To Be Outdone, Third Point Has Pledged $300 Million To HeathensUniteTube.com

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kirkcameron.jpgGLG Partners is BACK IN THE GAME. So, okay, the firm has witnessed a mass exodus of personnel, (including “star” portfolio manager Greg Coffey, who resigned, then came back then resigned again all in one week’s time). Okay, it expects to suffer a similar mass exodus of money (investors are likely to pull half of the $7 billion in assets managed by Coffey when he leaves). Okay, it’s run by a CEO who works under the assumption that former employees are sent to live on a farm after they abandon him. That’s all immaterial—the London-based hedge fund recently made an investment that will assure it can’t lose. PaidContent reports GLG has taken its fate into its own hands, by infusing GodTube, the Christian online video sharing and social networking site, with $30 million. Though GLG declined to comment, we have it on good authority that G-dT.com got the idea to pitch GLG after receiving an anonymous tip about senior management’s grassroots initiative to rescue Mike Seaver from captivity, and offer him the position of running Coffey’s portfolio upon his departure.

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