Michael Lewis has it long, and Felix Salmon has it short: the U.S. Department of Justice looks out, not for the people of the United States, but rather the people of Goldman Sachs. Lewis discusses in detail the case of Sergei Aleynikov, a one-time Goldman Sachs employee who now faces an eight-year prison sentence, on…
Tag: Wall Street follies
Felix Salmon: Freaking Fag Revolutionary or Wall Street Water Boy?
Okay, Felix is not really a freaking fag revolutionary. I’m just fonder of alliteration than truth. But still I wonder about Felix. Recently he was bitching about the malicious tricks that business folk pull on us: “And so merchants will always find ways to charge us more now, if we’re not going to really feel…
Alan Vanneman, Doubly Wrong
Earlier this week I took a prolonged pot shot at Peggy Noonan, for claiming that the selection of Condoleezza Rice as Mitt Romney’s running mate would be “brilliant choice.” In fact, I said, the selection of Condi would be applauded by about six people, ending my post with an exceedingly under-researched rhetorical flourish suggesting that…
Great God, how naïve!
Back in the day—pretty far back in the day, actually—James Thurber announced that he would no longer discuss T.S. Eliot’s stage rage “The Cocktail Party” with young women. He was tired, he said, of hearing them all exclaim “Great God, how naïve!” Although I’ve never discussed “The Cocktail Party” with anyone, I have a pretty…
“Hundreds of rules,” “inconsistent,” “uncoordinated,” still allow JPMorgan to haul in $19,000,000,000
Felix Salmon (actually, Ben Walsh) highlights the woes of JPMorgan, and outlined by Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, moaning in his letter to the company’s shareholders about the iniquities of Dodd-Frank, inflicted on Wall Street by those ham-handed rubes down in DC. Still, the “record” $19 billion the firm hauled in in 2011 was up…
Greg Smith: Truth-teller, dumb-ass, or pussy?
OK, that might be just a tad strong, but those seem to be the options for Greg, based on the reactions I’ve seen to his farewell to “toxic and destructive” Goldman Sachs that appeared in the NYT yesterday. According to Matt Yglesias, Greg just doesn’t get it. Once upon a time Goldman was a firm…
You have a friend at Goldman Sachs. Unfortunately, he just quit
Greg Smith, formerly of Goldman Sachs, lays it on the line in an Op-Ed in the Times that will undoubtedly ring around the blog world today: “TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for…
U.S. Government not yet entirely a wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman-Sachs, as of this writing
Felix Salmon points us to a rare victory of common sense and decency over leading Wall Street tentacle Goldman-Sachs and its subsidiary tentacle, the U.S. Justice Department. Of course, Wall Street quasi-hustler Sergey Aleynikov had to put in about a year of jail time to win this famous victory, but all’s well that ends well,…
Nobel Prize Winner Meets Capitalism, Gracelessly Succumbs
I’ve been reading Sam L. Savage’s sometimes too breezy but often quite informative The Flaw of Averages, largely a paean to distributions, which are in fact quite interesting. Among other things, he tells the story of the famous Black-Scholes equation, which tells you how to minimize the risk in your stock portfolio over time. Myron…