$$$ Late Breaking: Is Ashley Dupre (aka Eliot Spitzer’s Kristen) lying about her age? We’ve heard stories from people who claim to have known her for many years. Something doesn’t add up with this claim that she is only 22. This profile from Reunion.com suggests she might be 32. Update: N…
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“No, you?”
“No, I just said I didn’t.”
“No, you asked me if I knew how to work it, you didn’t say anything about you.”
“Fine, I don’t know how to work it either.”
“Well, what should we do?”
“I don’t know, I’m really at a loss here.”
“We could go bowling.”
“No, no, we have to figure this thing out.”
“Fine, but I still don’t know what to do.”
“We could get the guy from ten years ago?”
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Thanks to everyone who joined us last night for our beery wake for Governor Eliot Spitzer’s political career. Several well-known commenters, including “girl” and “one-two,” made appearances. A reporter from WNYC radio showed up and recorded interviews with some of those attending. (Note: he’s still looking for recently laid off Wall Streeters. Drop us an email if you’d be willing to let him interview you.)
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The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets has figured out who is to blame for our current financial turmoil, and it turns out it’s you! That’s right. Buried deep in the twenty-one page report are several paragraph chastising investors for not disciplining the markets. Spare the rod, spoil the boom!
“Although market participants had economic incentives to conduct due diligence and evaluate risk-adjusted returns, the steps they took were insufficient, resulting in a significant erosion of market discipline,” the PWG report states.
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Lloyd Craig Blankfein, people! Is the whole world going to shit? The following is absolutely outrageous. And I think we all know who’s to blame. (Starts with an ‘E,’ ends with a ‘liot Spitzer fucked a hooker and this is the fallout.’)
To: All London GS
Subject: Policy Changes - Evening Meals and Taxis
Following a firmwide review of our policy on evening meals and taxis,we have decided to implement the following changes, which will become effective today.
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This is No Longer Funny
I’ve been critical of much of quant modelling for many years. I don’t like the assumptions, the models, the implementations. I’ve backed this up with sound reasons and wherever possible tried to find alternative approaches that I think are better. I don’t honestly expect to change the world, much, but, hey, I do what I can. Human nature is such that very often things have to go from bad to worse to bloody awful before the necessary paradigm shift happens. I hope we are close to that point now.
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We still hate what Eliot Spitzer’s love of whores has done to Jim Cramer, but we’ve got to give the former Governor props for orchestrating the singular awesomeness that was this exchange between CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino and Dennis Neal. Charlie gets pissed off at Neal for interrupting him, Neal points out the irony in Charlie being annoyed with someone for “pulling a Gasparino” and Charlie proceeds to pose the question we’ve all been dying to ask, does Dennis Neal use hookers? …
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Speaking of cute girls, Erin Burnett, the CNBC Street Sweetie who interviewed Jon Corzine on Street Signs this afternoon, might have born and raised in a small town on the eastern shore of Maryland, but she attended the tony boarding school St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware. She graduated in 1994, when he high school yearbook famously predicted that in 20 years she would become a talkshow host.
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Notwithstanding new evidence of its alleged fruitlessness, support for active management seems to be coming from an unlikely source: passive managers….
Fuente Original
Not everyone is a fan of 130/30. One manager says so-called short rebates represent a conflict of interest for “bonus hungry executives” at some firms….
Fuente Original
The economy must truly be bad:
Girl Scouts Say Cookie Sales Down
Girl Scout and Brownie troops say cookie sales are noticeably down this year as their customers struggle to pay for groceries, gasoline and home heating fuel.
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addslashes(Former hedge fund manager Tim Sykes to have had a conversation (Facebook wall back and forth) with Kristen/Ashley last night. Who knows if it’s legit. We like to think it is, if only for the fact that she tells him she’d rather read thestreet.com than his site. Burn, indeed.
Like we said yesterday, the most depressing thing about the revelation that Steamroller Spitzer spent 800 million dollars on whores over the last number of years is what’s it’s done to Jim Cramer. Appearing on the Today Show yesterday, guy was on the verge of tears the whole time and genuinely sounded like his heart had been smashed to into 4,300 tiny little pieces. Whole thing w…
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The possibility for a government bailout of the banks is gaining momentum. Hank Paulson and most of the Bush Administration continue resist the calls for a bailout but a new administration, whether it is Republican or Democratic, may be more sympathetic. None of the probable major party candidates are particularly animated by a free-market philosophy.
Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an article revealing the Myron Scholes supports a form of bailout. He wants the government to consider direct capital injections into the banks. Forget these Federal Reserve deals to lend against risky paper. Why not just hand over cash?
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Spreads widened over the week as risk aversion increased.…
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UnitedHealth’s (UNH) stock got creamed this week after WellCare (WCG) and Humana (HUM) lowered their guidance. Naturally, people have been expecting an earnings warning from UNH bot the company has so far stuck to its 2008 forecast of $3.95 to $4 a share.
Finally today, UNH didn’t warn, but it did caution:
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Finally.
Gold futures hit $1,000 an ounce for the first time Thursday morning as the dollar continues to decline and crude oil prices rise.
Gold futures hit the benchmark after the dollar fell below 100 yen during Asian trading Thursday, its weakest against the Japanese currency in 12 years. The dollar also sank to all-time lows against the euro.
Dollar Plummets Against Yen (WSJ)
Dollar below 100 Yen: This is sort of like the Dollar dipping below parity with the Loonie, but it’s not quite as painful, since it’s not our obnoxious neighbors to the north. Like, you don’t often hear Japanese citizens going on and on and on about their healthcare system and how wonderful it is there. Do they have national health insurance there? They must, since we’ve heard a million times that the US is the only industrialized nation without it. That being said, if you compare one Dollar to one Yen, the Dollar still owns big time..
According to Jane Baird, “a simple form of structured credit - the first-to-default (F2D) basket - has attracted investor demand this year, while the market shuns collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and other complex products.”
The idea of a F2D is to buy or sell credit protection on a small number of names instead of one, and a credit event will trigger a pay-out after the first default and the contract will then terminates. The premium will depend on the correlation between names, the lower it is, the higher the premium is and vice-versa with the boundaries at the sum of the premium at 0 correlation and highest single name spread at perfect correlation. So if you want to sell protection on a AAA name like Ambac [no laughing, please], you could do a single name CDS at X bp, or put on a F2D basket with Ambac, GM, Humana etc and end up with a higher premium, the diffrence being that you don’t know the F2D name or cares.
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The Beeb is not normally my first stop for financial commentary, but Robert Peston has an interesting take on the Carlyle fund and the Fed plan to save the world [again…]
Well, the point of Tuesday’s dramatic $200bn intervention by the Federal Reserve in mortgage-backed markets was to stabilise the price of US government agency AAA-rated residential mortgage-backed securities and – by implication – to encourage the big banks NOT to seize assets in the way they’ve been doing at Carlyle….
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