Madness is doing the exact same thing over and over again and expecting different results. (SLBP)
posted by vivelame on Jul 9, 2009 - 29 comments

Who said anything about a recession? Sometime between the government bailout of Bear Stearns and the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that America lost 80,000 jobs in March, Lee Tachman, a Wall Street banker, spent roughly $50,000 last month on a four-day jaunt to Miami for himself and three close friends.

“It was just all out — it was insane,” said Mr. Tachman. “I’m not afraid to spend money like that.”
posted by The Jesse Helms on Apr 14, 2008 - 259 comments

While the US equities markets were closed on Monday for Martin Luther King Day, stock markets around the world took a nosedive, losing billions in equity; the markets in Australia, South Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Germany, France, the UK, and more countries have dropped at least 5% each (Canada only fell 4.75%), even though most of those markets had already been seriously down for several days prior. India has been hit particularly hard, at one point down a whopping 11%, tripping their markets' automatic "circuit breakers" for a mandatory time-out period, before scraping back up to close at 8% down. US futures markets are currently predicting a 650+ point drop just at the open Tuesday morning, before even a single trade goes through. [more inside]
posted by Asparagirl on Jan 22, 2008 - 306 comments

At a time when fed-up American citizens are petitioning Congress to end the imprudent financial practices that caused the housing bubble sub-prime mortgage crisis liquidity crisis impending recession -- including the banning of SIV's and refusing any bailouts for Wall Street, banks, or mortgage companies -- the United States Treasury Department has just announced the creation of a giant-mega-ultra SIV called "M-LEC" made up of assets from several of the largest American banks. Already unofficially nicknamed "Sivie Mae" (or worse, "the Frankenstein Fund"), it would be an off-balance-sheet way for these banks to pool and price the ABCP's that they've lately been having trouble pricing and thus selling -- i.e. the liquidity crisis. [more inside]
posted by Asparagirl on Oct 16, 2007 - 82 comments

It's Wall Street bonus season. And, as Henry Blodget writes, the folks who have "the good fortune of working in a hot industry in a favorable market environment" are doing extremely well this year. Notably, Goldman Sachs is breaking records with a $16.5 billion bonus pool. That is roughly $622,000 per employee but some employees do better than others: "[Goldman CEO] Lloyd Blankfein, for one, will probably earn a measly $50 million (loser), whereas Morgan Sze (big man on campus), head of GS's principal strategies group in Hong Kong will go home with a check around twice that." Anyway, whether you're a $120K secretary or a $100M trader, author Michael Lewis has some some tongue-in-cheek advice for dealing with poorer relations.
posted by blue mustard on Dec 20, 2006 - 46 comments

An unexpected side effect of iTunes. Remember Bowie Bonds? Introduced in 1997, bonds tied to future profits of music artists (besides Bowie, James Brown and the Isley Brothers offered them) tanked with the advent of online filesharing. Thanks to iTunes, some on Wall Street are betting that the Bowie Bond is a concept with a future.
posted by me3dia on Aug 23, 2005 - 16 comments

Space-time continuum abused for financial gain Federal investigators have arrested a Wall Street whizz who made $350 million from an initial investment of just $800 in two weeks. The man has confessed to insider dealing, explaining that he travelled back from the year 2256 in his 'time craft' specifically to make a killing on recorded past stock plunges. The kicker? There's no record of the man's existence prior to December 2002.
posted by skylar on Mar 28, 2003 - 41 comments