Or may he did and “patently ill-advised” and “grossly wrong” were compliments? Continue reading »
Wall Street Journal
Know Your Goldman Sachs CEOs: Lloyd Blankfein Would Rather You Call Than Email, Reads The Journal Sometimes But Not Always But Sometimes, Does His Job
By Bess Levin
Rajaratnam’s defense lawyer, John Dowd, asked Blankfein whether he was a daily reader of the Wall Street Journal. “Sometimes I do,” Blankfein testified, before hurriedly adding, “Often I do. But not always.”…Blankfein [also said he] checks his bank’s profit every day, prefers voice mail to e-mail and makes unscheduled calls to board members at times of market “uncertainty.” [Bloomberg]
Remember that story a few months back in the Wall Street Journal, about the hedge fund “idea dinner” that insinuated a bunch of managers got together to break bread while plotting to take down the Euro? David Einhorn and the Greenlight team do! They’ve been discussing it amongst themselves for a while, and today it made their latest quarterly letter. What’d they think of the piece? Well, reporting the actual facts instead of pulling them out of the reporter’s ass would’ve improved things slightly. Apparently the Journal got a whole bunch of stuff wrong and now the responsible parties are going to pay. Sorry, kids. Sometimes the nicest hedge fund manager in the world just has to cut a bitch. Sayeth DE and Co:
Two regional bank CEOs say they can’t find a failed bank they want to buy. The Wall Street Journal runs a story that makes it seem like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is going to be stuck with “a growing pile of terminally ill U.S. banks.”
Well, that’s not exactly true: One of the banks did find a failed bank it wanted to buy, but another bank made a better offer. Oh yea, and the FDIC says it’s having no problem selling the banks it seizes.
You have to look hard for it, way down there in the 12th paragraph, after a quote from Stearns Financial Services CEO Norm Skalicky claiming that many of the seized banks “are of very poor quality” and something about “sluggish interest in doomed banks.” But it’s there:
First off, we weren’t even going to mention obscenities that appeared on the front page of the Journal today. Obviously, I’m talking about this:
Why? Because we’re an upstanding financial publication with standards, unlike the smut factory Rupert Murdoch is running. But then a few things happened. 1) You people would not stop e-mailing us about it. 2) I started to realize that this wasn’t just some accidental slip of the tongue on the headline writer’s part but a calculated course of action to send us a serious coded message about what’s been a’ poppin’ over at the Galleon Group (The scribes brought it on home by beginning the third paragraph thusly: “Parts of that network appear to have turned on the billionaire investor”). 3) I found myself with time on my hands, given that Raj is yet to call us back to talk shop (tried him at the office twice and a few times at home; his assistant seemed flustered and in chatting with the wife, I’m prettay prettay prettay sure I detected some growing irritation on her part, though she claimed she’d pass on the message we’d called). So, I did what anyone in my position might do, and uncovered some of the rejected headlines the Journal originally wanted to go with but were sadly prohibited from using. I don’t have them all so if you caught wind of any, let us know below.
* Colleagues Finger Bang Billionaire
* Colleagues Fist Billionaire
A bit obnoxious as a headline for the Wall Street Journal (and of us for telegraphing it), no? Really, the entire piece makes this entry more about the continuing slide in Wall Street Journal quality than any political statement or position. (Actually, we find it quite amusing what some of the readers here think our politics are, though).
It should go without saying that the Journal is being beyond manipulative here. It is a statement that we are simply annoyed rather than outraged. Nothing the Journal does anymore seems to surprise us.
Perhaps Mr. Bernanke’s blunderbuss political intrusion will win him more Democrat friends, and maybe even Mr. Obama’s goodwill. To the rest of the world, he has harmed the Fed and made himself less credible.
Bernanke Endorses Obama [WSJ]
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