It was 5:01 p.m. The Blue Smoke bar was humming. Outside was hammering rain. The stock market had closed up smartly. Conversation strayed: “So I’m off to Sydney tomorrow. Then Hong Kong.” “You doing anything tonight? Tomorrow night?” “My wife was really annoying yesterday. She just doesn’t get ‘Family Guy.’” A suited man was telling a colleague, “I either get flowers for Janet or she’ll put my head in a vise.” [NYT]
Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs Employees Worried About Wives’ Inability To ‘Get’ Family Guy, Having Body Parts Put In Vise Grips, According To Reporter Who Stood In The Middle Of A Bar Near Goldman And Wrote Down Things People Said
By Bess Levin
The summer cuts continue.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) cut several dozen jobs from its U.S. operations on Thursday, aiming to cut costs amid a slowdown in capital markets activity, three people familiar with the matter said.
Goldman cuts jobs across U.S. offices [Reuters]
The bad news is that Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, UBS, and others have been making cuts and are expected to continue to do so. The good news is that not everybody is upset about it. Read more »
Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the debt ratings of 15 major international banks and securities firms on Thursday, a move that could cost the banks billions of dollars in extra collateral…U.S banks that were downgraded included: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley. “All of the banks affected by today’s actions have significant exposure to the volatility and risk of outsized losses inherent to capital markets activities,” Moody’s said in a statement. “However, they also engage in other, often market leading business activities that are central to Moody’s assessment of their credit profiles,” the firm added. “These activities can provide important ‘shock absorbers’ that mitigate the potential volatility of capital markets operations, but they also present unique risks and challenges.” [CNBC, related]
Sell-side M&A work is mostly a pretty good and lucrative business model but it has a few flaws. Try to spot a key one here:
(1) you represent a target;
(2) you spend your days fighting tooth and nail with the buyer to try to make them pay more and give up optionality, and generally to get more of the benefits of the deal for the target than for the buyer;
(3) then the buyer acquires the target, fires all the directors and officers, changes the locks, and replaces the stationery;
(4) then you get paid.
Did you spot the problem? Carl Icahn did: Read more »
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Posted in:
the boy who would be king
Gary Cohn Is Very Happy Doing What He’s Doing i.e. Waiting For Someone To Pick Up The Hints He’s Been Dropping And Retire Already
By Bess Levin
“Of course I would like to be CEO of Goldman Sachs, but I am very happy in the role and job I’m in now and I’ve a great job and a great opportunity in front of me. I am very happy doing what I am doing.” Read more »
Dartmouth Grads Still Into Wall Street, Despite One Man’s Campaign Against “A Field That Sanitizes The Intellect And Offers Almost Nothing To Human Society”
By Bess LevinBack in August, a Dartmouth student named Andrew Lohse made a simple request of his peers: to stop being whores for Wall Street. “Should landing jobs prestigious 16-hour-a-day jobs at some faceless hedge fund, where they’ll learn about manipulating capital instead of imagining a freer and more just world be the goal of the valedictorians of Ivy League institutions,” Lohse asked and then answered, “No matter how hard I try, I cannot think of more pathetic ambitions.” Lohse charged the undergraduates to “do better” and by better he meant anything other than being “pulled into what is essentially a vulgar and extortionate system of lending and predatory capitalism which is increasingly underwritten by what remains of the public’s coffers.” Was Lohse’s argument a persuasive one? Did the image of him “vomiting in my mouth” at the idea of his peers becoming financial services employees cause anyone to reconsider? Read more »
The less good news is that a jury found the former McKinsey executive guilty on three counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy for passing material non-public information to his friend*, convicted insider trader Raj Rajaratnam. The good news: Read more »
Which Goldman Sachs CEO “Was Known To Challenge Subordinates To Impromptu Wrestling Matches”?
By Bess LevinWas it:
a) Lloyd Blankfein
b) Hank Paulson
c) Jon Corzine
d) Stephen Friedman
e) Gus Levy
f) John Whitehead
g) John Weinberg
h) Sidney Weinberg
i) Marcus Goldman
j) other Read more »
Lloyd C. Blankfein, chairman and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs for the past six years, said it’s a “tough job to leave” and he’s unlikely to follow his predecessors into government. “When you think of my last five or six predecessors, five of them left because they went to the government,” he told reporters after participating in a discussion at the Chicago Club. “I would say the government isn’t going to call me up. So that means staying forever or dying at my desk.” [Bloomberg]
Over the course of the Rajat Gupta insider trading trial, attorneys for the former Goldman Sachs director have attempted to show that while their client was privy to material non-public information about, among others, Goldman and Procter & Gamble, and had an established relationship with Raj Rajaratnam, the hedge fund manager currently doing eleven years for trading on material non-public information, their client had no role in helping Raj-Raj score his ill-gotten gains. Last Monday the defense put a witness on the stand who told the jury that while once close, Gupta wasn’t even invited to Rajaratnam’s “lavish 50th birthday party that took place in Kenya,” ergo there is no way Rajat would’ve shared inside info with the guy. This week, the team was hoping to play wiretaps of conversations that took place between Rajaratnam and Goldman executive David Loeb, who they claim is the actual person who tipped off the Galleon manager. Unfortunately: Read more »
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