…has just been moved forward.
[Steven Cohen] maintains his innocence, despite SAC agreeing to pay the biggest insider trading fine levied by the SEC. Not only his reputation, but that of his industry, now rests on it.
One of America’s great universities is in the trust of the current biggest target of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
UD assumes there’s a person at Brown whose full-time job, at this point, is Steve-watching. If Cohen is pulled in by the government, and is still on Brown’s board at the time, it will be embarrassing for Brown, which has already had to dump one trustee for attracting the attention of the SEC… and there’s the recent embarrassment over its ex-president’s activities on the Goldman Sachs compensation committee…
Yes, in defenestrating Steve, Brown stands to lose not just millions but perhaps billions of dollars, Steve being the kind of guy who routinely takes in billions in compensation. But look at it this way: SAC is losing clients very rapidly, what with all the bad publicity. Steve will be paying a huge chunk of his billions in his own defense; and of course the firm has just paid out that big ol’ insider trading fine. There will be lawsuits against SAC by investors. Etc. The money might not be there anyway.
… University of Iowa professor is dumping on ethanol, and this pisses me off so I write to my buddy – President Pro Tem, Regents, University of Iowa, and I say Bruce, what the fuck? So Bruce – prominent contributor to Governor Brandstad’s campaigns, by the way, and himself an ethanol guy – contacts the university’s president and complains about this “uninformed” professor who says bad things about ethanol and Bruce says let’s do an intervention, have him talk to the industry, etc. And she says sure, and next thing you know this guy – just because he criticized ethanol at an academic conference – has the university president and industry and a trustee breathing down his neck!
Is this a great country or what?
Big investors are starting to pull out of the fund run by Brown University’s highest-profile trustee, Steven A. Cohen. Too much bad “insider trading” press.
Titan invests for FIU, and has decided to take that university’s money elsewhere.
… feature endemic cheating. Big deal. If someone says of Brown University’s highest-profile trustee that “you have to wonder whether his returns have been generated not only through his trading brilliance but also through a culture of cutting corners and pushing employees to the point where they break the law,” you’re not exactly going to pee your pants.
If someone says of his investors that
There is a point where willful blindness turns to complicity. Investors profit from any added juice that SAC might gain, whatever its source. And if Mr. Cohen were to face charges, they would pay no price.
Major banks and investors around the world shoveled money to Bernard L. Madoff despite doubts about his purity. Some thought that Mr. Madoff was using his brokerage firm to front-run. In other words, they thought he was cheating on their behalf, not ripping them off. And that was an enticement.
you’re not going to get all amazed that the writer cites Bernard Madoff – a Yeshiva University trustee – right after talking about Brown University’s highest-profile trustee.
Still – Brown itself, especially given this background and this background, might want to start reviewing its relationship with Steven Cohen. So far, the university won’t even comment to the Brown Daily Herald about the situation. Most unwise.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm realizes how difficult it is to fashion a statement under these circumstances. Cohen is in a position to give the university not millions, but billions. OTOH, some people and institutions are beginning to pull their money out of SAC Capital Advisors, because there’s too much noise in the press about insider trading, and the possibility of the SEC actually collaring Cohen. What to do?
Brown could of course ask Cohen to leave the board of trustees. No one in the money world cares about this sort of thing, so it wouldn’t hurt SAC. Or Brown could issue something like this:
We are aware of the insider trading allegations against some SAC employees. We also believe that SAC continues to have among the highest standards for compliance in the industry. Steven Cohen remains a great asset to Brown.
… keeps a close eye on Brown’s highest-profile trustee, Steven Cohen, and his unlucky-in-love hedge fund, which keeps hiring people who betray the firm’s passionate commitment to the highest business ethics.
It’s hard to account for this betrayal. Six traders charged with insider trading! Freud would call it repetition compulsion. You keep falling for people who break your heart. Who knows why? I guess Steve Cohen is naive.
But Brown isn’t.
Marisa Quinn, vice president for public affairs and University relations, had not returned multiple requests for comment on the developments as of Wednesday night.
Talk to the press? Are you fucking kidding me?
… How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown, talks about how doctors diagnose personality disorders.
The most recent edition of the DSM series, DSM-IV in 1994, had a whole slew of personality disorders, including histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, and so forth. The editor of DSM-IV, Allen Frances, was a psychoanalyst, and the list is a kind of last gasp. The problem is that patients who qualified for one, tended to qualify for almost all of them. The individual “disorders” were quite incapable of identifying individuals who had something psychiatrically wrong with them; the “disorders” had become labels for personality characteristics that are found in abundance in the population.
Moreover, who needed labels? Psychiatrists had a seat-of-the pants definition of a PD: “If your first impression of your patient is that he is an asshole, then he probably has a personality disorder.”
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You begin to see the basis of Steven Cohen’s defense.
… you might upset the delicate balance that’s made the University of Tennessee one of America’s most pathetic sports factories.
… is currently flashing red, as trustee Steven Cohen’s firm gets official deep-shit notification from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Cruddy feds. UD proposes that unlike Texas, which can’t afford it, SAC secede. SAC has 13.3 billion or so in capital. It can be another Liechtenstein.
…headlines the Brown University newspaper which, while it’s at it, reminds readers that this is really a kind of beat-goes-on story for Brown’s, uh, very interesting board of trustees:
[Steven] Cohen is not the first Corporation member to come under investigation for potentially unethical financial dealings. Former Corporation fellow Steven Rattner ’74 P’10 P’13 P’15, a former Herald editor-in-chief, was barred from the securities industry for two years in November 2010 as part of a settlement after his private investment firm, Quadrangle Group, was scrutinized for a pay-to-play pension fund scheme.
See but that one’s former… This one is like get on your pony and ride! Ride your pony! Stay in the saddle! Don’t issue any statements… Just sit there and pray Cohen dodges yet another bullet from the SEC…
Meanwhile, if I were a Brown student, I’d take a look at the rest of the trustees. If the university is comfortable with Cohen, there’s no telling what else you’re going to find, is there?
You really don’t want to know how they’re made. I mean, good ol’ Auburn’s looking for a couple of trustees at the moment — dumb as a goal post Auburn, which is about to get hit by the NCAA again — and I can tell you (if you really want to know) the mix they’re looking for. A guy, a local yokel, who played football for Auburn coupla decades ago and graduated with the sort of higher level understanding of the world you’d expect from a jock who took scads of independent studies with some of Auburn’s finest – like say Thomas Petee . Basically Auburn’s looking for two of the most feeble-minded football freaks it can find. Luckily, the school has graduated many of these, so the search will be a cinch.
You want to know how Penn State makes its sausages? Its thirty-two sausages?
Well, take long-term trustee (since 1997 – wouldn’t want any new blood) Carl Shaffer. Carl’s formal education stopped in high school. He is an impressive farmer, but there’s nothing in his description to suggest knowledge of universities. Or for that matter of public relations. Interviewed about changes to the BOT recommended in the wake of Sandusky (for instance, reducing the number of them to 21), Shaffer said
“This is our university — this university is unique in a lot of ways from other universities … I think it’s up to this board to decide how we’re going to take this university forward.”
… Shaffer said Penn State’s size and location are what make it different: “A lot of things might not fit for us,” he said.
So the same board of trustees that oversaw Sandusky, Graham Spanier, Joe Paterno, Timothy Curley, and Gary Schultz, should be left alone to work out Penn State’s problems because… we’re unique! There’s no one else like us! And how are you unique, Carl?
Well, there’s our location.
You mean you’re the only university situated in the place where you’re situated? Yes, Carl, true; but I can name, oh, hundreds of thousands of universities — all of them, really — unique by virtue of existing on terrain on which no other university exists.
And your size? Let’s see. You have a large student body scattered among many campuses throughout the state. That’s because you’re a land-grant university.
Now it’s Carnegie Mellon’s turn to do what UD calls TRUSTEE-DELETE.
Yeshiva University is the undisputed T-D standard, having – during the wee hours after two of their trustees, Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin, started attracting global attention – simply gone in and without any public comment deleted from Yeshiva’s website all mentions of their names.
Faced with a narco-dollar trafficker on their BOT, Carnegie-Mellon has behaved better than panicky, secretive YU.
Ken Walters, a spokesman for the Pittsburgh university, confirmed that [Marco Antonio] Delgado was a trustee from 2006 through mid-2012.
‘I wish it was someone else,’ he said.
They’ve trustee-deleted, but they’ve also made themselves available for public statements of regret.
Delgado “gave the school $250,000 to establish the Marco Delgado Fellowship for the Advancement of Hispanics in Public Policy and Management.” They’re going to have to decide what to do about that.
Universities, UD has noted on this blog, are reputation-launderers. It’s not surprising that a money-launderer would be attracted to them.
A former portfolio manager at Steve Cohen’s $14 billion hedge fund told the FBI that he gave his boss tips based on inside information.
Bloomberg Business Week updates us on Brown University trustee Steve Cohen, truly The Most Interesting Man in the World — at least to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
What will Brown do? Although Cohen’s not yet been charged with anything, the SEC and FBI seem awfully interested in exploring possibilities along those lines…
In the case of the also-problematic Steven Rattner, Brown seems quietly to have evicted him from the board after a certain critical mass of fines and bans and suits was reached.
With one thing and another, Brown University’s managers are becoming experienced hands in trustee-management (know when to hold ’em; know when to fold ’em) and, like Yeshiva University (home of trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin), could probably start offering seminars.
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Some people seem to think this whole thing is one big joke.
Sometimes ol’ UD just has to laugh. The email postmortem on The Dragas Rebellion at the University of Virginia confirms her hapless, incredibly expensive hiring of Hill+Knowlton Strategies to write the shit she wanted to put (under other peoples’ names) in newspapers and student blogs about how pathetic UVa’s president was.
If UD‘s laughing at this dupe (recall that UVa only avoided paying the firm’s obscene bill – over $200,000 for… what? – by getting some rich guy on the board of visitors to pony it up), imagine how the guided communications consultant is splitting its sides.