At first, the FBI considered sending an agent to work undercover at one of the suspected hedge funds …
“We couldn’t get in. It was such a closed industry — much like an organized crime family — that it was difficult for the FBI to either introduce an undercover agent or recruit a cooperator.”
Corrupt traders relied upon secret alliances, longtime friendships and even sexual relationships.
… [Raj] Rajaratnam relied on Anil Kumar, a former McKinsey partner, and Rajiv Goel, a former managing director at Santa Clara, California-based Intel, whom he’d known for decades. All three attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Writers are falling over themselves ridiculing the two poets who’ve withdrawn from consideration for a pretty big-time poetry prize in England because the money behind the prize comes from a hedge fund.
There’s the guy in this post’s headline, for whom no contemporary Alexander Pope could be satirical enough to do justice to this absurdity.
There’s this guy in the Economist: “The poets should watch out, or they may soon have only their own words to eat.”
I mean, what’s wrong with these glorious engines of financial growth? I mean, sure, a day doesn’t go by without the SEC announcing a new case against a hedge fund… And of course
…[I]n the categories of custody and financial disclosure, …hedge fund adviser violations were about double that of other advisers. Hedge fund advisers that were examined by state regulators were cited for violations concerning their valuation of holdings, undisclosed conflicts of interest, cross-trading (not recording transactions that cancel each other out, often to hide a markup), preferential treatment, selling to nonaccredited investors, and selling unregistered securities without an appropriate exemption.
Google HEDGE FUND SCANDAL if you want to spend all day online.
To be sure, the particular hedge fund giving money to the poetry prize might be pure as the driven snow. That doesn’t really mean anything, does it? Hedge funds as such have tarnished themselves plenty in the last five or so years, and they shouldn’t be surprised that some people don’t want to be associated with them…
But no, it’s ridiculous. It’s like turning down the opportunity to have Donald Trump moderate your presidential debate. Where is the author of The Dunciad when you need him? After all Trump is a perfectly respectable businessman… a glorious engine of financial growth, really… What is it with Huntsman, Perry, Paul, and Romney? Silly buggers. They should watch out.
No, that’s not right.
UD has known for years about online Scrabble.
She has shunned it as one shuns heroin, sensing its life-sucking flow…
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UD is an extremely good, intensely competitive Scrabble player who almost always scores well over three hundred points.
At Scrabble clubs and tournaments, experts average between 330-450 points per game… A better measure of skill is determining the “average points per turn” score. If [you] average 30 or more points per turn, not counting tile exchanges, then [you] may very well be a Scrabble expert. The very top Scrabble players average 35 or more points per turn, not counting exchanges.
UD plays very quickly, rarely waiting more than a minute to put a word down, and routinely putting a word down right away. Her impatience with opponents who actually take time to make a move, and with opponents who shuffle their tiles around on their tile holder (UD sees her words, whatever the configuration of the tiles) is notorious. In short, though UD would never win anything at a truly serious Scrabble tournament, she’s an expert.
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So far UD‘s meaningful Scrabble life has consisted of regular matches with her similarly ferocious older sister; but Barbara lives in upstate NY and they don’t see each other too often. UD‘s last game was a few weeks ago, in ‘thesda, with Rita Kosofsky (Eve and David’s mother). Rita and UD sat side by side on Rita’s couch and played on her iPad.
Maybe it was Rita’s iPad that began the insidious process of UD‘s undoing… UD had tried to build a break-water of order and elegance against the sordid tide of Scrabble and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of its tides within her.
But now… Two words: MANUMITS. SPEEDING. Triple word score. Last night.
The game allows players to chat. After she made speeding, at the very end of a game in which UD had been down by a few points, her opponent wrote
I LOVE IT WHEN THAT HAPPENS
and UD realized that in virtual opponent land (this one was from Vancouver) many serious players prefer exciting competition to simply winning (UD‘s all about winning).
That chatting is another thing. It makes UD a little nervous. How friendly should you get? These are total strangers, etc. Yet how strange can they be when they are exactly like you Scrabblewise?
WE’RE EERILY WELL-MATCHED
wrote UD toward the end of this game, during which our scores tracked one another extremely closely… Could this be my long-lost soulmate? Perhaps my life with Mr UD has been a horrible mischancing (he sucks at Scrabble) and I’m meant to be with the Vancouver person…
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Yes, it all has to end. It must be nipped in the bud and I will try to do that.
Andrew Sullivan quotes Newt Gingrich:
“The Congressional Budget Office is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.”
Sullivan then comments:
The CBO is just a branch of the Congress that is widely respected for its scores for legislation and refuses to build into its calculations now-discredited theories about how cutting taxes increases revenues, among other such “conservative” innovations in math. To pick on the CBO as “socialist” is to attack, as Newt has since he first appeared in politics, yet another respected institution in Washington, the better to condemn them all.
The better to condemn them all.
Newt – seriously – Newt has a certain sexiness. I know late night comedians call him the Pillsbury Doughboy, but Newt Gringrich has the sexiness of the nihilist.
The better to condemn… them all.
Newt’s appeal… Well, when I read Sullivan’s comment, I immediately thought of all the years I sat in my parents’ living room in Garrett Park (in a house almost directly across the street from the house I now live in) and listened to my aunt and my mother be nihilistic together about politics. They condemned it all – all politicians, all political institutions, all political journalists, all political movements… It was all cynical thieving crap.
They seemed happy to have this nihilistic conversation about the world again and again. There’s something thrillingly clarifying about this philosophy of life, about the rage and disdain it releases…
Yes, there’s even something sexy about it. A man walks onto a stage and snarls at all the Occupy movement people in America: “Take a bath.” “Get a job.” It’s Clint Eastwood: Make my day. And when Eastwood says that, UD says: Hold me back.
“Take a bath.” “Get a job.” People protesting inequality are … they’re stinking layabouts like … well, like most people…
Sarah Palin had a lot of sex appeal with voters; Newt does too, but his is more complex. Deeper. He is the voice of my mother and my aunt. The hope of the nihilists.
After Sussex, [Raj Rajaratnam] decided to get an M.B.A. at Wharton. Of the 600-odd students there, 20 were South Asian. That’s where the Galleon network began. His roommate ended up being head of investor relations at Galleon; another classmate later oversaw Asia for Galleon. Altogether, four people from his class ended up working for him.
UD thanks David.
Scary macho surgeon!
In August 2010, [Ivan] Oransky co-founded the blog Retraction Watch with Adam Marcus, managing editor at Anesthesiology News.
… In one memorable post, the reporters describe ringing up one editor, L. Henry Edmunds at the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, to ask about a paper withdrawn from his journal… “It’s none of your damn business!” he told them. Edmunds did not respond to Nature’s request to talk for this article.
In the grand tradition of Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein, another tough guy – the House Majority Leader, for chrissake – has cantered (might as well keep playing with his name) away from a public speech because protests were planned.
Eric Cantor claims Wharton (Wharton! He was among friends! One of whom, angry at the protestors – but why not be angry at his hero for backing down? – hung a sign out of a Wharton window for the protestors to see: GET IN OUR BRACKET.) told him it’d be a nice civilized talk open only to the amazingly well off, or at least people guaranteed to agree with Cantor’s take on the whole 1% / 99% thing… Wharton says au contraire – “there [has] been no change in the attendance policy.”
The Wharton speaker series is typically open to the general public, and that is how the event with Majority Leader Cantor was billed.
A number of amusing things were said along the way to this latest retreat coming from the God forbid unseemly envy of the successful should tear this country apart crowd. One student remarked, “I think it’s a little too much to bring the protest to a college campus.” Of all the places for a protest!
Another Wharton student sweetly said: “I definitely understand the anger. …But they have to realize that corporate greed is not taught at school. If you spend time at this school, never is greed, unfairness, and immoral behavior ever taught or propagated.”
Then how did so many of your only recently greatly celebrated alumni (start with Raj Rajaratnam) learn it? This student should glance over the Wharton rap sheet. Short version: It’s long.
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Update: Note to Cantor: Here’s how it’s done.
Almost 60 years ago, the Bell Telephone Company launched a program to address rising concerns about the education of its managers. W.D. Gillen, president of Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, felt that many of these managers would eventually rise to positions in which they’d need a broader point-of-view…
To that end, Gillen established the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives, a 10-month immersion program that amounted to a complete liberal arts education. The program required more reading than the average graduate student had to complete in a similar time frame. They also visited museums and art galleries, attended orchestral concerts, and listened to guest lecturers. The program’s capstone came in eight three-hour seminars devoted to Ulysses.
Sadly, the program didn’t last past 1960. Multiple assessments found the executives to be more confident and intellectually engaged, but also less interested in putting the company’s performance ahead of their family and community commitments.
The trajectory from faculty to fatcat is often impressive and inspiring. To come up with original ideas that make you and other people rich can be very cool. Here a Nobel Prize recipient, William Sharpe, thanks Barr Rosenberg, once a Berkeley professor, now a financial titan, for his pioneering work in computer-based trading. Berkeley’s business school boasts of its graduates’ internships with the outfit that bears his name.
Barr has now been barred from the securities business.
[I]n late June 2009 a [Barr Rosenberg] employee discovered an error in the code of a complex automated optimization model that caused $217 million in losses in about 600 client portfolios. After the employee discussed his finding with Rosenberg and other employees, the SEC claims Rosenberg directed them to keep quiet about the error and not to inform anyone else about it.
Rosenberg also directed that the error not be corrected at the time.
… It is a hard fall for Rosenberg, a supremely wealthy man and widely respected academic, who pioneered the use of quantitative techniques to implement investment strategies for decades.
His clients lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Barr will pay a $2.5 million fine.
First up and then out of the Anglican Church, Jonathan Kirkpatrick turned to one of New Zealand’s universities, where, as head of this outfit, he got away with $666,000 until he got caught.
Court documents showed the large scale of the fraud, which stretched back to 2002 soon after Kirkpatrick got the job…
He resigned from his role as chief executive of AUT’s business innovation centre after large sums of money were discovered missing from research and development funds last week.
… Kirkpatrick was a Reverend and Priest in Charge at St Alban’s Church in Balmoral, in central Auckland, where his assistant priest was Reverend Philip Sallis, who is also the Pro Vice Chancellor of AUT.
In the midst of Preet Bharara’s crackdown on insider trading, the future denizens of Wall Street have one burning question for the hard-driving federal prosecutor: What can we still get away with?
During his tenure as U.S. attorney for New York’s Southern District, Bharara has made the rounds at the country’s best business schools, lecturing on ethics and compliance in what he calls his version of Scared Straight.
His audiences, though, are far from frightened. Instead, students invariably ask him how close they can get to the line without crossing it.