How Goldman's Managed To Stay Out Of The Backdating Scandal
As you well know, a newfangled term called ‘backdating’ has got Wall Street and its peripherals (especially those with predilections for kilts and, it would seem, cross-dressing) a bit worked up, of late, on both sides of the fence. (NB: Words whose origins can only be traced back to 1953 or later—vexillology, Kwanza, blog—are fake and, therefore, no reason to get one’s panties in a bunch, but I guess I’m a day late and a dollar short, so to speak, and you know cross-dressers—there’s never any reasoning with them). Anyway! At Market Watch, David Weidner, the guy who once advocated getting oneself up in Stevie-boy Cohen’s grill as an investment strategy, has a Goldman Sachsian take on the scandal du jour.
Ever notice that Goldman Sachs Group never seems to get involved in executive-pay scandals? No backdating, no hidden payments, no corporate-jet brouhahas. That's because largesse at Goldman comes in a variety of above-board forms. Just when you think it can't get any worse, that these guys can't get any richer, it does and they do.
Wall Street's gold standard of investment banking detailed in a regulatory filing Thursday that its executives -- who already had been awarded record compensation -- also had received investment income. A lot of it.
Like many firms on the Street with private-equity arms, Goldman allows its employees and those close to them to invest along with the institutions. That means when Goldman closes the $19 billion fund it's been working on, part of the proceeds may go to bankers inside the company.
Private-equity funds raised a record $401 billion during 2006, as 612 new funds were launched in that span, according to Private Equity Intelligence. This amount exceeded the previous record of $311 billion set the year before.
How many people you know got into those funds?
At least a small part of that money came from Wall Street big shots. With opportunities like that, who needs backdating?
Basically, Goldman never has compensation tittle-tattles because it has no shame. Blankfein and Co. just put it all right out there: our guys make more than everyone you know. Combined. Including all your one-night stands. Yeah—including that guy. Suck it. Fin.
In other 85 Broad news, a new anthropological study from Blogging Stocks’s Peter Cohan shows that Goldman Sachs apparently shows favoritism to the hairless, in terms of executive pay, which seems entirely plausible/reasonable to us. As our favorite Governor and erstwhile GS’er once said, “We consider ourselves to be a group. And, just so there’s no confusion, the follically-gifted who choose to go bald—which is to say those who shave their heads—have done so to be fashionable, and we don’t consider them to be a part of the bald community. So it's no dice for them on the $$$.” Make of that what you will.
Goldman's pot is even sweeter [Market Watch]
At Goldman, bald pate == big bucks [Blogging Stocks]
