what?

  • 19 Mar 2013 at 3:58 PM

How Many Portraits of Prince Alwaleed Grace Prince Alwaleed’s Office?

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[Twitter via BI]
Only two are visible in this photo he tweeted of himself and Prince Charles but presumably the gold thing behind the couch is an oil painting of his HRH and one would hope that if the cameraman zoomed out, we would see glossy 8X10′s of this, this, this, and this. And maybe a huge version of this, on the wall behind his desk.

  • 30 Jan 2013 at 1:47 PM

Area Man Can’t Believe Stovetop Storage For Highly Important (And Allegedly Forged) Documents Resulted In Evidence-Destroying Inferno

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Brandon Fradd is a hedge fund manager who previously ran Apollo Medical Partners with a guy named James Melcher. Melcher claims that Fradd cheated him out of $6 million in profits. Fradd claims that Melcher was never owed those profits in the first place, as per their profit-sharing agreement. Initially, Fradd attempted to argue that because his former partner never made a stink about his cut while they were working together, he wasn’t entitled to anything after the fact. When that argument proved unconvincing, he turned to Plan B, the (alleged) forging of a document that conveniently contained “an amendment to the profit agreement [that] undermine Melcher’s claim.”

Unfortunately for Fradd, someone on the other side had to go and call in an “ink expert,” which sent him scrambling to figure out Plan C, in order avoid to the prison sentence that generally comes with forging documents. Let him know what you think. Please consider that he didn’t have much time to come with this: Read more »

  • 25 Oct 2012 at 5:32 PM

Westport-Based Investment Firm Just Wants To Let People Know None Of Its Principals Are Sexual Deviants, Nor Have They Given Birth To Weirdos

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Investment Professionals [EIP]

  • 26 Jul 2012 at 1:56 PM

Mike Mayo Will Have You Know It’s Hard Enough Doing His Own Job, Let Alone James Gorman’s As Well

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Especially when he’s working his ass off to make this company big money and no one seems to give a baker’s damn.  Here’s a tip from the Mayo Jar: When Fortune All-Star Analysts talk, you listen. Read more »

  • 11 Jun 2012 at 1:47 PM

Metro North Operators Will Drive And Read The Paper If They Want To

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Riding Metro North later today? If so, do yourself a favor and hole up in the Bar Car and/or sit quietly while minding your own damn business, whether or not you suspect the driver is doing the crossword puzzle while driving, which he or she probably most definitely is. After a video shot by a passenger last week showing “a Metro North engineer engrossed in a newspaper while operating a rush hour train” resulted in the guy being suspended pending an investigation, fellow railroad workers, rather than making a big show of proving they don’t all catch up on the news while driving, have responded by more or less telling riders, “We don’t come to where you work and slap the dick out of your mouth.” Read more »

  • 29 May 2012 at 1:47 PM

Woman Wants $150 Trillion-ish From MF Global, Thinks She Is Barack Obama

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Earlier this month, the Journal explored the difficulty MF Global customers have encountered in attempting to get their “missing” money back, after the firm went down for the dirt nap last October. One woman who can relate all too well? Barack Obama AKA Angela Dozier-Carter, who is owed $150 trillion and then some, of which she hasn’t seen a dime. Read more »

Goldman Didn’t Disclose Its El Paso Conflicts Except In Publicly Available SEC Filings

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“Goldman received a $20 million fee for playing matchmaker for El Paso. The fee, of course, was not disclosed, nor was the Kinder Morgan stake owned by Goldman Sachs’s private equity arm, worth some $4 billion.” [DealBook]

  • 08 Feb 2012 at 3:46 PM

New Rules May Prevent Banks From Blowing Themselves Up For Cheap

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If you’re in a certain line of work, and I bet you are, then your main concern about things like the Volcker Rule and increased capital requirements for banks is that they might reduce your comp. If you’re in that line of work, you’re also probably the sort of person who has a higher than average aversion to having your comp reduced. However, you’re also the sort of person whose comp everyone else would be happy to see reduced, because you make too much already you greedy jackass.

That poses a quandary because nobody’s all that interested in hearing your arguments against the new rules, even if they’re good arguments and not 100% about your own personal remuneration. One thing you could do is get proxies to make your arguments. If you think that the Volcker Rule will reduce liquidity in foreign government bonds, you could suggest to foreign governments that it’s really important that they lobby against the rule on your behalf. You did that. Good work. Let’s see how it turns out. If it turns out well, the next step would be to get other clients to say “well, we want liquidity in our [stocks/bonds/rate swaps/whatevers] too,” since that would then be a more compelling argument.

I think that’s what’s going on in this sort of amazing FT article, but something has gone terribly wrong: Read more »

  • 06 Feb 2012 at 8:32 PM

“Another Guy In A Chicken Suit Spotted At RBS”

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Why have there been multiple instances of guys dressed up as chickens descending on RBS’s Stamford trading floor, the most recent one being this past Friday? Read more »

Hedge Fund Rights Are Human Rights

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It probably speaks well of the overall state of human rights in Europe that the European Court of Human Rights devotes a lot of its time to compelling moral issues like George Soros’s insider trading conviction. (Fine, there’s some torture too.) But how good is this:

Hedge funds have been known to use hardball tactics to make money. Now they have come up with a new one: suing Greece in a human rights court to make good on its bond payments. The novel approach would have the funds arguing in the European Court of Human Rights that Greece had violated bondholder rights, though that could be a multiyear project with no guarantee of a payoff. And it would not be likely to produce sympathy for these funds, which many blame for the lack of progress so far in the negotiations over restructuring Greece’s debts.

You … you think? You think that might look bad? Hmm.

More specifically the potential human rights violation here is the retroactive introduction of a collective action clause into the Greek-law bonds, which represent some 90% of the outstanding Greek debt. The idea here is along the lines of add CAC, scrape together a majority of the bondholders to agree to the exchange, and then force the holdouts to exchange on the same terms. Because Greece’s bonds do not currently have a CAC, people who bought the bonds would understandably feel a bit miffed to have one added retroactively, and some of them might replace the words “feel a bit miffed” with the words “have their human rights violated.” At the very least, though, retroactively and unilaterally adding material terms to the debt agreements seems pretty shady.

But one can have a little bit of perspective on this. I think there are about four things that Greece could do with its Greek-law bonds: Read more »