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This may surprise you, but CBOE CEO Bill Brodsky wasn’t exactly predicting yesterday’s little incident. Or, as he’d prefer to think of it, “a learning experience.”
The software glitch that shuttered the Chicago Board Options Exchange for several hours on Thursday “cropped up unexpectedly,” CBOE Holdings CEO Bill Brodsky told CNBC television on Friday.
And that’s pretty much all he’s got to say about the matter. Read more »
The founders of hedge fund 5:15 Capital Management named it for a song whose opening and closing lines are, “Why should I care?”
Separately, 5:15 Capital is closing its doors. Read more »
As you may have heard, earlier today, Citigroup announced that CEO Vikram Pandit would be resigning from his post at the bank, effective immediately, along with several longtime lieutenants. While the news came as a shock to Wall Street, it was assumed that on the inside, employees had been given some advanced warning and time to get used to the idea of life without Uncle Vik. That they weren’t just realizing now those hugs on the elevator Monday had been their last. That he’d stashed something away for them to remember him by. (A one dollar bill with this face on it. A glossy 8X10 photo to keep on their desks. SOMETHING.) That he hadn’t just left in the middle of the night. Unfortunately for those who’ve grown quite attached to Vickles since he took the reigns in 2007, however, that’s exactly what happened.
The news of Mr. Pandit’s departure after five years atop the company came as a shock to Citigroup employees, including senior executives. In the firm’s London office, some executives emerged from a meeting and read the news on their computers and Bloomberg terminals, well before the bank’s internal memo was released. Soon a dozen employees were crowded in front of television monitors, following the story on financial business shows. Others were seen around a water cooler on the trading floor, discussing the news. Still others retreated to their desks to parse Citigroup’s recent earnings release, looking for hints of internal conflict. “There’s shock,” said a Citigroup executive based in New York. “Even senior people were surprised.”
And although early reports suggested that Count Vikula had simply decided that Citigroup had come so far since he’d taken the gig five years ago that his work was done, and that while it was time to move onto the next stage of his life, he’d cherish the memories and the people he met at Citi, it now sounds like the split was a bit more acrimonious than that. Read more »
The Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC’s chairman on Friday acknowledged that the bank had miscalculated the public and political reaction to the £963,000 (around $1.5 million) bonus in shares awarded to Chief Executive Stephen Hester, who subsequently turned down the payment…”We knew it would be a difficult reaction, but the speed and scale of it took us by surprise,” Mr. Hampton said in a briefing with reporters. [WSJ]
Yesterday we reported that Highbridge’s Asia man, Carl Huttenlocher, would be leaving the firm, in a move that seems to have come as something a shock CEO Glen Dubin (and investors from whom Huttenlocher spent most of 2010 raising assets), who flew out to Hong Kong to let employees know that nothing is fucked (though the firm will be winding down the Asia equities portfolio). Today the Journal‘s Jenny Strasburg has more details on Carl’s plans for the future. Read more »
His time here is almost over but before he takes off for a little maxing and relaxing, the Compensation Cop is apparently thinking about having some fun with bonuses that were paid out that for “the bailout year of 2008″ by all banks that took TARP funds and not just the ones who’ve yet to pay back the blood money. So not just fuck-ups like Citi and Bank of America but also institutions such as, to name a few, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and, gird your loins, Goldman Sachs. Feinberg has just finished a “look back” at the cheddar paid out by those institutions and according to Charlie Gasparino, “does not like what he saw.”
Sources say that Feinberg, in concluding his study, and one person with knowledge of Feinberg’s thinking says he is “leaning” toward forcing at least some of the big banks that he reviewed to give back bonus money.
You can break her foot, sneaky Vespa bike, but you will never break her spirit, or sense of fashion. Read more »
[via NYT]
