Like sands through the hourglass, these are the days of our lives. Is that show even on TV anymore? And if it is, are Bo and Hope still together? (Note to self: ask Mom.) Meanwhile, on to another long-running melodrama, the madcap saga we call the market. Where will the Street lead us in 2013? Read More
“I haven’t read it yet,” admitted Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein at Monday’s book party at The Lambs Club for Carol Loomis’s Tap Dancing to Work, a collection of Warren Buffett’s wit and wisdom as published in Fortune over the years. (Mr. Blankfein strode briskly away when the Transom asked his thoughts on the upcoming “fiscal cliff.”) Read More
Hurricane Sandy has been something of a catastrophe for New Yorkers, but opportunistic celebrities (who, like, totally LOVE charity) have been popping up all over the state to get involved with the relief efforts. It would appear that other causes are very much out this season now that superstorm victims are in, so take a Read More
Mayor Bloomberg just announced that more than 10,000 people have donated more than $32 million to the Mayor’s Fund for New York City to help with recovery efforts. There are some interesting, if unsurprising names on the list. Big Real Estate—the Rudins, the Speyers, Brookfield Properties, the Related Companies, Glenwood Management among them—were big backers, even as many of their buildings were buffeted by the storm.Lloyd Blankfein made the list, as an individual, as did his firm Goldman Sachs, which is may be smart given the ire directed at Mr. Blankfein for keeping the lights on at Goldman HQ while power was out everywhere else downtown.
There are plenty of other Wall Street outfits, like Barclays, Evercore Partners, Julian Robertson, Stan Druckenmiller and New York Life. Diane Von Ferstenberg, Ralph Lauren, the CFDA, Sketchers and Vogue all donated money (maybe some warm fur coats, too?) as did casino kingpin Steve Wynn, Ron Perelman, the Giants (but no Jets), News Corp., Microsoft, and more. You can see all the cash donors, as well as the companies, like Walmart, Pepsico, North Face, Hunter Boots, JetBlue, Sullivan Street Bakery and Jamba Juice. Read More
Naval enthusiast Paul Singer of Elliott Management and secretive Mexican financier David Martinez are still battling in court, according to The New York Times. Mr. Martinez is said to have a $140 million painting by Jackson Pollock in his Time Warner Center apartment, but no one is willing to stake their name on it. Also Read More
In October 2008, with the financial system teetering, the U.S. Treasury convened a meeting with the leaders of America’s biggest banks. The agenda: to convince the executives to accept billions of dollars in bailout funds, whether the bank bosses believed their institutions needed it, or not. The story has been told before, now it’s been Read More
Here are the things you need to know about J. Michael Evans: he is a Goldman Sachs vice chairman, a potential successor to Lloyd Blankfein, an Olympic gold medalist with the 1984 Canadian rowing team and a man of a certain sort of confidence. What sort? “Any great rowing crew has a strong, shared confidence in its ability to win,” Mr. Evans said in an interview for a Goldman publication head of the London Olympics. “You don’t often see this spirit in any pre-race histrionics—the high fives and chest-thumping seen in other sports. Instead, successful teams exhibit unspoken self-belief that sustains the crew throughout the race.” Read More
Sixty Minutes and Vanity Fair asked a bunch of Americans who Jamie Dimon is—two-thirds didn’t know, and another 20 percent of respondents believed him to be either an X-Games skateboarder, daredevil motorcyclist or Texas congressman. This is a funny and sad if not unsurprising thing about Americans, but more importantly a potential point of embarrassment for he of the salt-and-peppery good looks and formerly gold-standard risk management chops. (“What kind of trading losses do I need to suffer before they know me!”) Well, Mr. Dimon can rest easy: Americans don’t know the names of the leaders of any of the country’s biggest banks*, and to prove it, we conducted our own informal survey**: Read More
Wall Street ax: The six largest U.S. banks have cut 18,000 jobs in the last year, according to The Wall Street Journal, and the industry is showing no signs of slowing down its cost-saving efforts. Goldman Sachs said it would pare an additional $500 million in expenses in the second half of the Read More
Goldman Sachs president and COO Gary Cohn—who many consider to be next in line for Lloyd Blankfein’s job, assuming he isn’t immortal—has a novel idea about Goldman Sach’s place in the press: To stay out of it. Which he said on television this morning. Read More
