Opening Bell: 9.9.15

Warren Buffett: Economy 'not bad' but 'not booming' (CNBC)
Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett said Tuesday the U.S. economy is growing at about 2 percent, and he's planning to invest $32 billion in the next four to five months. "We're still on that path we've been on for six years," the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway said on CNBC's "Squawk Alley." "That's not a bad rate, but it's not a booming rate, either."

Harvard Endowment First in Pay Raises, Last in Ivy Performance (Bloomberg)
Harvard University’s endowment, the largest in the world, had the worst performance of any of the eight Ivy League schools in 2013. Its chief executive officer at the time, Jane Mendillo, got the biggest raise. That’s in keeping with the findings of a Bloomberg survey of 62 U.S. college endowments that found compensation often doesn’t square with investment performance. Only half of the managers in the top quartile for pay achieved returns for the three years ending in 2013 that were also in the top 25 percent.

Ray Dalio's Macro Hedge Fund Said to Slump 6.9% Last Month (Bloomberg)
Billionaire Ray Dalio’s macro hedge fund slumped 6.9 percent last month, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, as China’s currency devaluation and commodity market volatility rattled markets. The loss for the Pure Alpha fund reduced its year-to-date gain to 4.1 percent, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The HFRI Macro Index declined 1.2 percent last month and is down 0.7 percent for the year.

Remember when IBD analysts at Citi requested subsidized underwear? (eFinancial)
15 years ago, there were no such ‘perks’. Fed up with being overworked and underpaid, one Citi analyst famously took things into his own hands and pushed for analyst empowerment. The uprising, which was recorded by various news outlets at the time but has since gone forgotten, was led by Paul Leung, a then 23 year-old first year analyst in Citi’s technology group. Leung sent a memo (the ‘Brutal Memo’) to Citi’s management listing a series of 36 demands. These included: 1. A room in which to sleep. 2. Permission to expense toothbrushes. 3. Permission to expense underwear.

Dog walker finds £7,000 lump of whale vomit on a beach in Wales (Mashable)
You wouldn't think there'd be a big market for solidified bodily fluids that have been thrown up by bulky aquatic mammals, but – as an unammed dog walker in Wales found out recently – it turns out there absolutely is. In the business they call the substance Ambergris; it's produced in a sperm whale's intestines and gets used in the manufacture of perfume. The lump found recently on a beach in Anglesey – reported by Wales Online as being around 8 inches long and just over 1 kg in weight – could be set to fetch a whopping £7,000 ($10,763) in auction.

Head of McGraw Hill Financial’s S&P Ratings Division Steps Down (WSJ)
McGraw Hill Financial Inc. said Neeraj Sahai, president of its Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services business, has resigned after less than two years in the post to pursue other opportunities...Earlier this year, McGraw Hill reached settlements—which cost the firm more than $1.5 billion—that resolved government lawsuits and investigations tied to the S&P Ratings unit. The cases involved S&P’s ratings of mortgage-bond deals before and after the 2008 financial crisis.

German finance minister says central banks powerless in face of too much debt (Reuters)
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said on Tuesday that central bank policy could do little to help the economy when people and states take on too much debt. "Too much growth in credit does not solve any structural problems but leads to financial and debt crises. Central banks' monetary policy measures can do little to change this in the long run," Schaeuble told the German parliament.

Challenges to S.E.C.’s Judges May Be Coming to a Head (Dealbook)
The genesis of the challenges is a provision of the Dodd-Frank Act that gave the S.E.C. the option to file almost any case before an administrative judge rather than pursue it in a Federal District Court. For defendants, that means the broad discovery of evidence provided to litigants and the right to a jury trial would not be available. Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the United States District Court in Manhattan said in a speech that the agency’s claim that efficiency justified greater use of its own judges to resolve complex securities cases “suggests a certain chutzpah.”

Kansas State apologizes for phallic marching band formation (UPI)
Kansas State University apologized for a marching band routine that some complained looked like male genitalia assaulting the University of Kansas mascot. University officials said the formation during halftime of Saturday's season opener against South Dakota was supposed to depict the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek engaged in battle with the University of Kansas Jayhawk, but some social media users complained the Enterprise shape looked more like a set of male genitals. "We apologize for anyone offended by our halftime performance depicting the starship enterprise and the Jayhawk mascot," a message on the marching band's official Twitter account reads.