the finance industry / wall street

http://i.imgur.com/Wbu5w.jpg

the inner dimon won't be caged:

http://dealbreaker.com/2012/02/jamie-dimon-doesnt-care-how-bad-paul-volcker-wants-it-he-will-not-have-his-employees-balls-examine-every-time-they-want-to-make-a-trade/

Doug Henwood on, well, everything:

So in return for hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds used to keep the financial system from going under, the banks will emerge from this crisis largely unscathed. One reason for this is Wall Street’s skill at lobbying, and its ability to spread huge amounts of cash around Washington. As Public Citizen documented, between 1998 and 2008, Wall Street spent $5 billion in campaign contributions and deployed 3,000 lobbyists across Capitol Hill to get its way. While $5 billion sounds like a lot, it was less than a third of the Goldman Sachs bonus pool for 2009, and spread out over a decade. Wall Street has a lot of money, and Congress can be bought on the cheap.

But, as I argued earlier, Wall Street also represents the commanding heights of the economy, the central mechanism by which ruling class economic power is formed and exercised. It’s only surprising to people who don’t understand this that Washington dances so faithfully to the bankers’ tunes.

...Thanks to a small band of people who moved into a private park near Wall Street last September 17, political discourse and activism have taken the most hopeful turn that I can remember. I have my reservations about the ideological orientation of a lot of the Occupiers. And it’s hard to know whether this spirit will survive the winter—or the banalizing tendencies of presidential election campaigns. But I’m going to bracket that for now and admit to more than a shred of hope that things are turning in a seriously better direction. Finally.

http://lbo-news.com/2012/01/29/reflections-on-the-current-disorder/

https://twitter.com/gselevator

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-28/jpmorgan-chief-dimon-assails-pay-practices-at-newspapers-in-bank-s-defense.html

a+ trolling but I can imagine that pr-wise pissing off every single journalist in america is prob not in his long-term interests

“Newspapers -- I went and got this one day just for fun -- 42 percent payout ratio, which I just think is just damned outrageous.”

“Worse than that, you don’t even make any money!” Dimon said, directing his comments to those in the media covering the company’s investor day and drawing laughter from his audience. “We pay 35 percent. We make a lot of money.” JPMorgan posted $19 billion in profit last year.

fucking bond villain i swear to god

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/as-bank-profits-plunge-wall-street-bonuses-fall-modestly/?hp

Despite the difficult environment, New York firms paid roughly $20 billion in year-end cash compensation to their employees. The average bonus was $121,150, down just 13 percent from the year before as the head count shrank. In 2006, the year before the financial crisis, the average investment bank employee took home a bonus of $191,360.

I would think newspapers probably have a higher payout ratio BECAUSE they don't make as much money.

fuck this industry

#employee

http://www.fastcompany.com/1822449/scamming-seamless-how-big-banks-are-getting-taken-for-big-cash

no honor among thieves

http://billmoyers.com/segment/david-stockman-on-crony-capitalism/

http://billmoyers.com/segment/gretchen-morgenson-on-industry-influence/

JP Morgan Cheats:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/j-p-morgan-chases-ugly-family-secrets-revealed-20120313

The ex-Goldmanite op-ed that's lighting up the blogosphere:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?hp

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-gongloff/greg-smith-goldman-sachs_b_1344716.html

this is not just a Goldman Sachs problem, but a Wall Street problem. Goldman was not alone in selling clients CDOs stuffed with shaky subprime mortgages, for which it paid the SEC $550 million a couple of years (and two Greg Smith bonuses) ago. Nor was it alone in pumping Russia full of debt in the late 1990s, nor was it alone in parachuting out of the market ahead of its clients in 1929.

Of course, this won't change the view of Republicans and the likes of Geithner and others.

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/why-i-am-leaving-the-empire%252c-by-darth-vader-201203145007/

"We used to make things in this company. Like synthetic credit products. And the clients liked them!"

like i said in another thread, if you started at Goldman Sachs when Henry Paulson was running things and you're looking at that as some sort of golden era of ethics and integrity, then you've wearing some pretty strong blinders or have a strange definition of ethics and integrity.

I'm slightly sympathetic to him because he's from a foreign country - like I could maybe see him arriving here and buying everything about ~america~ without too much skepticism

it is good that someone who was on the inside is taking a few good kicks at an obvious villain in a relatively well-respected and well-read forum. also, i don't want to jump on him b/c i'm positive that as we speak there's an army of well-paid flunkies working overtime and at Goldman Sachs's behest to tear him down as we speak.

that said, there is a certain naivete to his column.

plus, i hope the he's got a nice stash of "fuck you" money tucked away somewhere ... or pictures of some Goldman Sachs bigwig doing something unspeakably vile (other than what they've done to their investors, the American taxpayers or the world-at-large).

discussion of his bronze medal in ping-pong is a nice touch -- suitably egomaniacal yet somehow naive-seeming as well

yeah, they have to show that they retain the common touch even though they're still smarter-and-more-accomplished-than-pathetic-little-you-will-ever-be.

http://deadspin.com/5893181/bronze-medal-ping-pong-god-bravely-resigns-from-goldman-sachs

dude was UK based, though I gather GS London culture was about the same as New York's.

only for the last two years of his career

Ah right, good catch.

this story reminded me of this bit from a a long Goldman article the Times (UK) did a couple years ago:

[Brian Griffiths] is one of the bank’s international advisers and also acts as company pastor. ‘I had one guy who came to see me — I thought about his career — but he wanted to talk about the morality of banking. That was a long conversation,’ Griffiths recalls.

lol The Church of Goldman Sachs

a long Goldman article the Times (UK) did a couple years ago

link?

oh right http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2009/11/08/goldman-sachs-ceo-lloyd-blankfein-im-doing-gods-work/

the author's a little fawning but there aren't many interviews with Blankfein & co. so it's a decent read

http://www.jackizehner.com/2012/03/16/why-i-left-goldman-sachs-version-two/

first woman partner at GS speaks about the nyt op-ed

strange how rosy the glasses get when reminiscing huh

A not-too-sentimental GS reminiscence:

http://www.financeasia.com/News/294239,goldman-sachs-is-unveiled.aspx

This one seems pretty balanced to me.

IDK I think maybe people have started to read Matt Taibbi a little too literally? It's possible that things actually seemed better at one time at GS, or that not every investment banker and trader and manager in every department had an alter to satan on his desk at which he promised to screw over clients in every way possible.

GS is the Duke basketball team of Wall Street sports.

xxp I worked as a bond salesman on Goldman’s London trading floor in the early 1990s.

according to michael lewis's liar's poker, bond traders are the worst of the worst right?

I feel like every book about every kind of trader makes that claim

idk - I think the rogue's gallery in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Genius_Failed:_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Long-Term_Capital_Management are all former bond traders

Here's a more critical look: http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2012/03/hypocrisy-as-business-model.html

Everyone knows there are sophisticated clients and "sophisticated clients." Your client trust shtick is tailor made to fleece the latter.

This reminds me of the old adage: If you don't know who the sucker is at the table, then it's probably you.

that is one of my favorite blogs, O.Nate.

Everyone knows there are sophisticated clients and "sophisticated clients." Your client trust shtick is tailor made to fleece the latter.

This point needs to be made more. There's a HUGE difference between a hedge fund and an icelandic municipal pension fund. It's basically the larger scale version of why boiler room guys love lawyers and doctors as clients -- professionals with a high estimation of their own intelligence and some real money to invest, but whose professions actually don't require them to have any financial or investing acumen, so they're easily suckered.

you can actually reverse that from the perspective of lawyers and doctors too

Anyway I don't think Goldman is doing anything that different than anyone who trades in specialist merchandise (be it antiques, art, or whatever) just that they do it on a larger scale. If you don't know anything about antiques and you go shopping for something, you're likely to overpay, because only an expert really knows how much these things are worth. It's nice to think the salesman will sell it to you for what it's really worth, but perhaps a bit naive?

yup, in fact art dealers (and probably investment bankers) like to go after newly minted celebrities, athletes who just won their first championship, etc.

difference being that GS hedges against their clients with their client's money

Not sure what that means, unless you're talking about margin?

Actually, something I kind of don't get about investment banking: once a bank is both selling and trading for its own account, isn't it almost by definition betting against anything it sells? Like, GS has investment product X; if it thinks X is such a good investment, why not hold onto it? I'm not talking about underwriting, which is a huge part of their business, but investments where GS actually takes a position and then later sells the position to a "client" -- why the fuck would you ever want to buy what they're selling in that circumstance, if GS is really so smart?

I mean I guess there are other reasons to sell things -- liquidity, short-term versus long-term, appetite for risk, etc. But the whole thing still sounds like a very funny business model to me, and this would be equally true for any investment banking firm.