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  • 26 Mar 2010 at 3:15 PM

Shia LaBeouf Pawn In John Thomas Financial’s Attempt To Pump InterOil Stock?

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Method actors at the boy's department's jackets that love them.

Yesterday we mentioned that thespian, Level III CFA candidate and noted stock picker Shia LaBeouf had been talking up InterOil, an oil and natural gas exploration company. “IOC’s momentum is major, and it will surprise to the upside,” LaBeouf said in a text message to the GQ article’s author, Adam Sachs, who wrote about ShiLa’s new hobby (making it rain all from the comfort of his boxers) for the magazine’s April issue. But where did the master trader get the idea? Sure he meets with Goldman Sachs execs on the reg and is thisclose to becoming a CFA but is he really that good? I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt (he’s going to be running one of the most powerful hedge funds in the world one day so trying to stay on his good side and all that) but others are thinking the budding BSD had some help from his friends at John Thomas Financial (the people who brought you the pride rally and breasts as napkins). Continue reading »

  • 18 Mar 2010 at 5:15 PM

Alan Greenspan Admits Some Balls Were Dropped During His Tenure At The Fed

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Shut it, Benji.Alan Greenspan has written a book report that he will present at the Brookings Institution tomorrow. Some are calling it his “most detailed examination of the causes of the financial crisis.” Does he lay out his patented 3-Step Guide For Being Fed Chair (1. Talk like you know your shit, even when you don’t. 2. Cut rates like a Thai hooker with the clap 3. When in doubt, print it out), which may have helped get us into the financial shit-storm du-jour? Not explicitly, no. (Does Coke just up and give out its secret recipe for free? That’s what I thought.) Seven Piña coladas into happy hour in the Maldives, however, he did decide to say this:

We never had a sufficiently strong conviction about the risks that could lie ahead. As I noted earlier, we had been lulled into a state of complacency by the only modestly negative economic aftermaths of the stock market crash of 1987 and the dot-com boom. Given history, we believed that any declines in home prices would be gradual. Destabilizing debt problems were not perceived to arise under those conditions.

Threw this in there too:

For years the Federal Reserve had been concerned about the ever larger size of our financial institutions. Federal Reserve research had been unable to find economies of scale in banking beyond a modest-sized institution. A decade ago, citing such evidence, I noted that “megabanks being formed by growth and consolidation are increasingly complex entities that create the potential for unusually large systemic risks in the national and international economy should they fail.” Regrettably, we did little to address the problem.

Also:

The believers of Fed “easy money” policy as the root of the housing bubble correctly note that a low fed fund rate (at only 1% between mid-2003 and mid-2004) lowered interest rates for adjustable rate mortgages (ARM). That in turn, they claim, increased demand for homes financed by ARMs and hence were an important contributor to the emergence of the bubble.

Having said all that? Lest any of you pipsqueaks (Benji) even think about daring to pin one iota of blame for all this shit on him? THINK AGAIN. There was nothing that could’ve been do done. Continue reading »

  • 11 Feb 2010 at 2:17 PM

Hank Paulson Not That Worried About People Claiming Innaccuracies In His Book

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GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt said today that while he did indeed have a discussion with Hank Paulson in September 2008, it had nothing to do with his irm’s commercial paper woes, as the former Treasury Secretary claims in his new book.
Rather than get defensive about the whole thing, Hank, through his publicist, said that he was merely “relying on memories,” and he was under so much stress that he’s not really sure they were accurate at this point.

“To write this book, I called on the memories of many of the people who were with me during these events. Given the high degree of stress during this time and the extraordinary number of problems I was juggling in a single day, and often in a single hour, I am sure there are many details I will never recall.”

So there you have it. You should expect he got some stuff wrong. Hope that helped cleared things up.

  • 16 Oct 2009 at 11:05 AM

Camo-Loving Raj Rajaratnam Sold Out By Ex-Employees?

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Supposedly the FBI was tipped off that Galleon founder Raj Rajaratnam was conducting a little illegal biz by some traders who were none too happy with Raj-Raj, on account of being fired. Also, he apparently used to brag about his income to the now defunct Trader Monthly, which should be reason enough to lock him up (kidding? But also serious.) From former TM reporter Teri Buhl:

Continue reading »

  • 09 Oct 2009 at 2:22 PM

What Sort Of Files Do We Think Are On Ken Lewis’s Hard Drive?

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The problem Wikileaks often runs into is how to present the material it’s been given and how to make it easier to sift through for vital information, said Assange.
“At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive’s hard drives,” he said. “Now how do we present that? It’s a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it.”

Wikileaks Plans to Make the Web a Leakier Place [PC World]

  • 13 May 2009 at 3:18 PM

In This Scenario “Aggressive” Would Be A Euphemism For…?

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Picture 1355.png
Former Fairfield Greenwich employee Sherry Cohen on the Noels:

Frontline: Did you like them?
Cohen: I think that Walter and Monica are very, very likable people.
I think that the next generation had supreme self-confidence, confidence that I kind of wish I would’ve had, except that it really got to be too much. They were sometimes arrogant. They had a tremendous sense of self-entitlement. And I wasn’t the only one who thought that. And I wasn’t the only one who thought that they were very, very aggressive…

Also:

Continue reading »

  • 20 Oct 2008 at 8:11 AM

No-one Expects A Fallen Master of the Universe to Say Sorry.

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But it would be oh-so warm and fuzzy if they did. Why not, indeed. Reuters, do tell:

…academics say an apology — for all the litigation risk it entails — can be the basis of revitalized confidence and trust.
With global markets paralyzed by the inability to rely on a counterparty, and as trust and accountability form the kernel of debates about effective regulation, some say a slice of humble pie now can help ensure bankers earn trust in future.

Or, as one commenter suggests, perhaps more than verbal contrition is required. A ritual severing of the pinky finger, on the 30th floor of 85, perhaps?
Do it for the children. For the children’s children.
Time for bankers to risk an apology? [Reuters]