the finance industry / wall street

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2038139/Colin-Birch-hanged-paying-2-prostitutes-stage-mock-execution.html

the monk who sold his ferrari kinda shite

have long pondered a book of common-sense negativity, provisional title 'feel the fear and cop the fuck on'

Detective Superintendent Lee Neiles told the hearing: ‘Mr Birch had been redundant since September 2009 and had had difficulties in finding other means of employment, although the family were financially stable.’

god I *hate* the british use of the term 'redundant'. it's so callous.

not in the british meaning, though

iykwim

yeah I guess I didn't think of that! but from an american's perspective it just sounds evil.

here it's like 'you were bad at your job' or 'we can't afford you' but 'redundant' gives me a sense of 'you are unnecessary as a human being'

which means it probably was correctly used w/r/t to this banker, but outside of that...

nobody rly uses redundant as a synonym for unemployed and 'laid off' is more often used instead of 'made redundant' in newspapers etc

i think it's just policemen and their strangely clunky phrasing, cf 'other means of employment' instead of 'a job'

'made redundant' still common terminology iirc, though there's subtle emp. law differences between the two i think

it is a shitty term tho, def

eh i dunno, it's quite useful as a means of conveying the right tone of contempt society ought to feel for the wastrel layabouts tbh

I have no problem w/redundant. It doesn't imply fault like 'fired' does. It implies that the employer doesn't have any meaningful/profitable work for you to do.

that's awful

this is typical police illiterately pretentious usage though. no one except a policeman would say "he has been redundant for a year". you get made redundant, and then you are unemployed. like how only police say "i was proceeding along oxford st" or "he asked myself how to get to piccadilly circus".

holler

Redundant is only a little better than 'managed out'. Not by much.

further underscoring the impotency of the SEC

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/business/sec-official-in-madoff-case-may-draw-a-criminal-inquiry.html?_r=1

ts your maddie vs our maddie

Adoboli (who, let me stress, has yet to enter a plea) was in exchange traded funds – which used to look like unit trusts, but have got increasingly complicated. One of the top market regulators, Mario Draghi, recently described ETFs as "reminiscent of what happened in the securitisation market before the crisis". Read that quote again: he's comparing them to sub-prime mortgages. Most of us should get very worried; rogue traders should go steaming in.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/19/brain-food-ubs-kweku-adoboli/print

http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2011/09/16/why-financial-reform-hasnt-stopped-rogue-traders/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/business/dodd-frank-act-is-a-target-on-gop-campaign-trail.html

Republicans say Dodd-Frank is the root of some of today’s economic problems. It has stopped banks from lending to “job creators,” they contend, and is a direct cause of high unemployment. “It created such uncertainty that the bankers, instead of making loans, pulled back,” said Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, speaking at a South Carolina rally over Labor Day weekend where he again called for the law’s repeal.

ahahahaha

hahahah

haha

...

*shoots self*

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,788462,00.html

for this headline I am not against journalistic muckraking

Jérôme Kerviel, gambled away billions in 2010. He is still serving a three-year jail sentence.

p cool how you can lose billions and just do 3 years in a minimum security jail

that study sounds pretty weak but oh well i'm still always happy when people push the psychopath angle, cuz if there were a cultural and spiritual system that caused and possibly even mandated people who were not psychopaths to behave like psychopaths that system might benefit from review

never review ILM, please

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAWv9gV8Cxo&feature=related

yeesh

hahaha! they rule! literally.

you would think they could afford better cameras

and thrones

they should throw blood diamonds at all the passing hippies.

i'm no help cuz i kinda hate all the people involved. the cops, the fatcats, the hippies. they all need some billy club action.

The Hibernian Express will shave six milliseconds off that time.
Of course, verifiable figures are elusive and estimates vary wildly, but it is claimed that a one millisecond advantage could be worth up to $100m (£63m) a year to the bottom line of a large hedge fund.

This is kind of the real plot of the latest William Gibson novel

http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/low-latency-network-to-connect-london-and-hong-kong-40545

A high-speed fibre network between London and Hong Kong could help decrease financial trading times

Financial traders and law firms are set to benefit from a new low-latency network between London and Hong Kong, which can conduct data on a round trip from Europe to Asia in around 176 milliseconds.

The cable network, run by UK-based trading technology company BSO Network Solutions, has been in place for some time, but previously had to route around large parts of Russia, due to difficulties laying fibre in that country.

However, a new lower latency and higher availability ‘Transit Mongolia’ connection has helped to reduce the time of a round trip by more than 20 milliseconds during the last 12 months. Improvements have also been made at BSO’s Ancotel point-of-presence (POP) in Frankfurt and Mega-I POP in Hong Kong.

the real reason they are installing these new high speed pipes is to have the world's best COD5 ping time

Some dude in my building just volunteered to me out of the blue that he's been camping out on Wall Street.

I guess I kind of support that except I don't really understand the protest. There doesn't seem to be any focus or goal.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/protesting-in-real-america_25.html

alfred posted this yesterday, it's a good take I think

This dude can barely contain his excitement at the crash he hopes is coming:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15059135

(Excesses: pink tie)

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-wall-street-activists-disrupt-sothebys-art-auction/1316786413

This is pretty effective actually, I think.

would love to punch the champagne drinkers in the face -- BUT WITH THAT SAID the troll inside me applauds

OTM

yeah you have to admire them. they should do coke too, though

I would love a glass of champagne now tbh

Pay a liberal arts grad to bring you one

I wish they would drive through the crowd in Bentleys shouting "Pardon me, but if you'd be so kind as to step aside, I've an appointment with the president of the federal reserve. Oh, and do you have any grey poupon?"

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/09/goldman_sachs_has_reduced_its.html

lmao, these guys,

Oh, and do you have any grey poupon?"

As if they'd ever touch that vulgar stuff!

vxx (etf based on volatility index) is shooting up today. Wonder if we're seeing the beginnings of a big fall selloff.

Yesterday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing on Wells Fargo should have ended with CEO John Stumpf hauled off in handcuffs. In a little over two hours, Stumpf revealed enough information, combined with what was already known in public records and filings, to make a powerful case for securities fraud. Specifically, that he touted fraudulent sales figures to investors as evidence of the bank’s growth, boosting the stock price and personally benefiting by $200 million. Worst of all, Stumpf used low-paid workers as the raw materials for this scheme, and as the scapegoats when it unraveled....

If the SEC and the Justice Department don’t get involved here, they might as well not even exist. CFPB’s Cordray and OCC’s Thomas Curry wouldn’t say whether they issued criminal referrals to law enforcement in this case, though Cordray hinted at it. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, if she wants to emerge from wherever she’s been hiding on this issue, has enough information to bring cases.

Will President Barack Obama’s administration end its tenure as it began, by refusing to prosecute systemic fraud in the financial markets? That’s the unavoidable conclusion so far.

https://newrepublic.com/article/136977/obama-administration-must-prosecute-wells-fargo

saw some of Elizabeth Warren's leveling of Stumpf on CNN yesterday, kinda made me want to cheer at my cubicle in the big bank I work for

Obama's doing $34,000 a plate fundraising dinners and then imploring money to get out of politics a day later. Sure, it's good theater to watch Warren put him on the hotspot but she'd never publicly go after the person who could actually launch an investigation: Lynch has always been a stooge.

Wells Fargo has multiple ex-cabinet members on its Board. Get politics out of money is more like it.

the amount of money involved in this huge fraud.... 2.6 million dollars.

Does that include the lost wages for all of the people WFB threw under the bus?

5300 people * $50k per annum is $250MM.

Supposedly (according to the informational memo WF "helpfully" provided employees about this crisis) WF goes through 100k branch employees a year. I'm not sure how that was intended to reassure.. Branch employees (tellers, personal bankers, even sales managers) get treated like crap and not paid a living wage, yes, but that's an even larger issue than the small amount of people that were fired in connection with this.

I'm not even convinced that all of those layoffs were really due to "bad acting" tbh, given that their MO is to fire people after like two months if they don't meet their sales targets.

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/the-cost-of-a-financial-transactions-tax-to-retirement-funds

Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz recently introduced a bill proposing a 0.1 percent tax on financial transactions. This means that when people trade a share of stock or a bond, they would pay a tax rate of 0.1 percent ($1 on $1,000), on their trades. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this tax can raise more than $80 billion a year in revenue, somewhat more than the entire annual budget for the food stamp program.

Not surprisingly, the financial industry doesn’t like the idea. It has argued that this tax would be a big hit to retirees and pension funds. While it is understandable that the industry would try to raise such fears to protect its profits, its claims have little basis in reality, as a bit of arithmetic can quickly show.

um yeah, pension funds and individual 401k holders are probably the least active traders. Not to mention that transaction costs are at all-time lows as it is.

it's free money to the tune of $80B/year and our political system is so in hock to finance that it won't pick the money up off the ground

https://www.trashberg.com/p/i-think-i-found-jamie-dimons-secret

Jamie Dimon is so boring his secret social media accounts aren’t even horny.

Matt Levine in top form today on the Archegos report:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-29/archegos-was-too-busy-for-margin-calls

Everything in the report is like this. This report is not a bunch of lawyers identifying a bunch of problems and characterizing them, in hindsight, as 'red flags.' Everyone saw all the problems here, evaluated them reasonably, came up with sensible solutions and then didn’t do them.