Wall Street Folly

The new season starts this Sunday! Here’s a little season teaser from USA Today: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Entertainment, TV

Tags: comedy, Entertainment, Humor, Long Island, New York, secession, The Daily Show, Videos

Turns out that Strip Clubs aren’t recession resistant.  Like most other businesses in this economic downturn, they’ve been squeezed.   So how are they making sure that their bottom lines don’t sag?  They’re cutting costs and getting creative…. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Credit Crunch, Entertainment, recession, Strip Clubs, Strippers

The talented guys at JibJab have been busy, putting together their latest equal opportunity poke-funfest campaign masterpiece

Tags: Entertainment, Politics

Remember that Steve Ballmer egg throwing incident that happened a few weeks ago at a Hungarian university?  Well now there’s an online game where you can see if you have better aim at the Microsoft CEO than that pathetic, throws-like-a-girl student.

Tags: Entertainment, Microsoft

Apparently rapper 50 Cent requires that concert promoters stock his dressing room with the forbidden by law Cubans….
Cuban Cigars For 50 Cent! – TheSmoking Gun

Tags: Cigars, Entertainment, Music

Merle Hazard, country singer, meets famed economist Arthur Laffer. Laffer gives Merle the idea for a song, "In the Hamptons." "In the Hamptons" is a parody of "In the Ghetto," made famous by Elvis Presley and written by Mac Davis…..

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Tags: Credit Crunch, Entertainment, Hamptons, Music

Here’s the video of another Wall Street Boxing Charity Championship featured fight that took place last week in NYC’s Hammerstein Ballroom. This one is between Rockefeller & Co’s Louis "El Guapo" Sobong and American Technology Research’s Brian "Too Sharp" Tack.  Brace yourself for the shrieking woman cheerleading and shouting out directions at the top of her lungs to Sobong, and be prepared to adjust the volume. Otherwise, you, like us, might feel urge to become violent by the end of the tape.

You can find another featured match of Bear Stearns’ Josh "The Matrix" Weintraub lay waste to Goldman Sachs’ Shane "Second Coming" Kinahan here.

Tags: Entertainment, Philanthropy

"Don’t fuck with the Bear!!!" yelled Weintraub after claiming victory over his Goldman Sachs nemesis in less than one round at the Extell Wall Street Boxing Charity
Championship.   Here’s the blow by blow action as it went down on the evening of November 1:

Tags: Bear Stearns, Entertainment, Goldman Sachs, Philanthropy

Wall Street pros will step out of the trading ring and into the boxing ring tonight for charity.  Sixteen of Wall Street’s finest, all men, will duke it out at the Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC.  Judges for the brawls include former heavyweight champions Larry Holmes and Lennox Lewis……

When Josh “The Matrix” Weintraub
[pictured at left] of Bear Stearns Cos. steps into the boxing ring tonight, he
will have 130 supporters in his corner as he fights Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s
Shane “Second Coming” Kinahan in a charity match.

Weintraub and Kinahan are two of the 16
Wall Street professionals — all men — who have trained since August to beat
each other up in a series of three-round bouts. Almost 800 friends, family,
colleagues and guests paid as much as $800 apiece to watch and dine on beef
tenderloin and Guinness ice cream.

The first Extell Wall Street Boxing Charity
Championship will raise money for organizations including the Prostate Cancer
Foundation and Hedge Funds Care, a New York-based group that combats child
abuse. Tuesday’s Children, which helps families of Sept. 11 victims, and Say Yes
to Education, which aids inner- city school kids, also will benefit from
tonight’s black-tie gala at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan.

“It seemed a great way to contribute my
time and energy to help the community and at the same time do something I like
to do,” said Weintraub, 37. The mortgage bond trader, who sold tickets to
friends and colleagues, is raising money for the Valerie Fund, an organization
that aids children with cancer. “The night will be full out.”

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Tags: Culture, Entertainment, Philanthropy

OK, it’s not Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn or Boone Pickens.  But here’s Alexis Glick’s somewhat giggly yet probing Fox Business interview with the famous Naked Cowboy. So how did he decide to become a nearly nekkid crooner?  And more importantly, how much does he make?  For his crooning in Times Square alone, if he had pockets he’d be filling them with around $250K / year.  And then there are the royalties.  Even Alexis’ on air associates Peter Barnes and Eric Bolling were impressed…

Tags: Entertainment, Fox Business Network

Can Mark Cuban dance?  We’re all gonna find out on this season’s "Dancing With the Stars". The latest cast was announced yesterday and it included the always outspoken billionaire / Dallas Mavericks owner, even after his having undergone recent hip replacement surgery.  Rumor has it he taught disco dancing in college though, so maybe he really can dance.  According to the Dallas Morning News:

He’s our first billionaire!" is how
the show’s host, Tom Bergeron, preferred to put it.

Hey, Tom: Don’t be fooled by the hip
replacement. Cuban isn’t simply Warren Buffett with an attitude.

You TV types have no idea what you’ve
gotten yourself into this time. On American Idol, they occasionally toss Simon
Cowell a no-talent schlub he can eviscerate, just to keep his teeth sharp.

If that’s what they intended in Cuban’s
case, they need to know that the intended sacrifice will bite back.

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Tags: Entertainment, Mark Cuban

Hedge fund managers have a taste for the best.  So it’s not all that unusual that they pony up for the best booze.  Dan Dorfman chronicled a recent dinner at Chinese restaurant Tse Yang where six unnamed hedge fund BSD’s ponied up for $800 shots of a rare cognac: 1863 Hardy Perfection:

The general manager of Tse Yang, one of the
city’s leading Chinese dining spots, Alan Chan, can attest to that with great
authority. A little over a week ago, six hedge fund managers had dinner there
and decided to end the evening with an after-dinner drink, which in most city
restaurants, I’m told, on average runs between $7 and $15.

Tse Yang, off Madison Avenue on 51st Street near the Helmsley Palace, draws a
sizable Wall Street and corporate crowd and includes among its after-dinner
drinks a $15 Delamain XO Cognac.

Alas, that wasn’t exciting enough for our six managers. Their choice: an 1863
Hardy Perfection, distilled from grapes harvested just before the phylloxera
plague wiped out virtually all of Europe’s native vinestocks. A 1.25-ounce shot
of this vintage cognac ran each of the managers $800, making for a $4,800 tab
for the round.

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Tags: Culture, Entertainment, Food/Drink, Hedge funds

YouTube’s got a bunch of recent Wharton Follies’ videos up.  Sadly, this batch is pretty disappointing.  Here are a few of them:

Snakes at Au Bon Pain:

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Tags: Entertainment, MBA

Back in the day it was business as usual for brokers to throw expensive entertainment at their customers.  Heck, we got to go to the Superbowl, were flown to ski and golf outings at fancy resorts, regularly went to the most expensive restaurants, and attended sold out shows and concerts with nearly front and center seats all compliments of our friendly brokers.  And that was just the tip of the iceberg.  But those days (and some of those firms) are long gone.  *wistful sigh*.  On Monday the SEC slapped Jefferies & Co with $9.7 million in penalties for plying Fidelity traders with goodies:

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the industry regulator NASD said Jefferies, a middle-sized investment bank, hired Kevin Quinn as an executive vice-president in 2002 and gave him a $1.5m annual travel and entertainment budget to boost their institutional business.

He used the money to court five Fidelity traders, paying for private flights to Turks and Caicos, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, as well as vintage wines, golf outings, and trips to Wimbledon and the US Open tennis tournament.

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Tags: Culture, Entertainment

Move over Aleksey Vayner, investment banker wannabe / legend in  his own mind, and pub crawling, high living 23 year old investment banker AJ:  Coming soon from the producers of "Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, we’ll soon have some more young Wall Streeters on film to possibly ridicule. This is thanks to the new HDTV documentary series "Wall Street Warriors", premiering on INHD, "a little-seen high definition cable network" starring a group of young, self-promotional, high-living Big Swinging Dick wannabes plucked from Trader Monthly’s "30 Under 30". 

When Timothy Sykes arrived for lunch at the Spotted Pig on Oct. 15—his sixth visit to the West Village gastro-pub in as many days—he was still a little drunk from the night before. Mr. Sykes is 25, a multimillionaire and the manager of his own hedge fund. He had been out until 6 a.m., he explained, dancing with some models at Tenjune.

“I really wanted to be sober for this,” he said, ruefully but not apologetically, a black baseball cap from his brokerage house pulled low over his eyes. Why? “I’m attention-starved. I really love talking about myself.”

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Tags: Culture, Entertainment, Lifestyle

Entourage, meet Gordon Gekko: "What if the guys on ‘Entourage’ grew up?".  According to Doug Ellin, the producer of HBO’s "Entourage", they’d land on Wall Street.  And that idea has sparked a new show that’s coming to HBO:

"Entourage" creator-exec producer Ellin is writing an untitled half-hour he described to Daily Variety as a "mature version of ‘Entourage’ set on Wall Street." The action revolves around a fortysomething hedge fund trader and his circle of guy pals.

Project is the first to emerge from Ellin’s overall development deal with HBO, which renewed "Entourage" for a fourth season last month.

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Tags: Culture, Entertainment

Last week the Times of London told the tale of a group of Commerzbank employees on a Thames cruise who got a bit rowdy, engaging in "various forms of exhibitionism".  This week they flesh the story out:

Ten days ago, the bank treated employees to a mid-summer jolly and organised a cheery trip on a pleasure cruiser down the Thames.

Everyone was in high spirits, but few expected the party to kick off so fast. By 6.30pm a group of men, who had better remain nameless, started dropping their trousers, loudly comparing each other’s underwear.

Apparently another few bottles of champagne failed to relieve either the heat or the boredom, so the remaining clothes came off and the men started comparing their, er, appendages. The captain stepped in, demanding they get dressed and they responded by throwing empty bottles at passers-by. The river police were called and the bankers removed.

Next up, the Christmas party.

Vicars and false starts – Times of London

Tags: Banking Culture, Commerzbank, Entertainment

CNBC’s Joe Kernen may be able to talk about Aquaman’s grosses without having to explain that he’s joking: although there are significant hurdles to overcome and it may still be a longshot, Aquaman the movie might actually get made. Maybe.  Unless they’re joking.

"Aquaman," one of Hollywood’s hottest inside jokes, might make the move from fiction to reality. As a key plot line in HBO’s "Entourage," the "movie" directed by James Cameron shattered box-office records (a feat that got it a real ad in Variety), turned an unknown actor into a $20-million movie star and sparked a fight over a sequel.

But now, informal talks have been launched about the feasibility of making a real Warner Bros. "Aquaman" movie. In one of the strangest twists of this life-imitating-art tale, the talent agent at the center of the informal "Aquaman" talks is Ari Emanuel, the brassy Endeavor partner on whom "Entourage" agent Ari Gold is based.

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Tags: Entertainment

From the Times of London City Diary:

WHAT on earth happened on board the Thames cruiser hired by a bunch of dealers from Commerzbank last week? I hear lurid tales of bottles being thrown, various forms of exhibitionism and a trip cut short by an outraged captain.

Sounds like a normal bond dealers’ night out, then. Though I hear talk of arrests, the Met has no record of the incident. The bank itself is clamming up, although I hear an investigation is under way. “We don’t comment in detail on any internal events at the bank,” says a mouthpiece.

City Diary: Mystery Cruise – Times of London

Tags: Banking Culture, Commerzbank, Entertainment

At least they’re  not taking all of the fun out of doing business on Wall Street.  It sounds like if you’re a heavy hitting client that you’ll still be able to be entertained in style under the new NASD and NYSE entertainment and gift rules.  The new rules require member firms to put together written policy of what entertainment is appropriate and come up with ways to enforce those policies.

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Tags: Entertainment, NASD, NYSE

The NYSE has decided to set client entertainment guidelines for Wall Street firms, but they’re not going to set dollar limits or decide on which venues are appropriate (like strip clubs).  They’re leaving those details up to the member firms.

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Tags: Entertainment, NYSE