Wall Street Folly

• Big Banks Mask Risk Levels
• Wall Street Bonus Tax Should Be Considered, Liu Says
• Los Angeles Faces Threat of Insolvency
• Hedge Funds Rose 2.7% in March, Strongest Month Since September
• Citi’s ex-grandees strain to keep cool
• Citigroup executives apologize for not averting financial crisis
• Judge Faults Prosecutors in ‘Squawk Box’ Case
• Tiger Woods Shoots His Best Masters First Round; Couples Leads Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Accounting games, Bank of America, Bob Rubin, Bonuses, Chuck Prince, Citigroup, Compensation, Goldman Sachs, Golf, Hedge funds, JP Morgan, Los Angeles, Morgan Stanley, Municipal debt, Tiger Woods, Windowdressing

• Opinion: Inside the Pelosi Sausage Factory
• Fate of Volcker Rule May Hinge on Dodd’s ‘Shall’ Becoming ‘May’
• Obama Pays More Than Buffett as U.S. Risks AAA Rating
• Greece’s Woes Will Keep Euro Under Pressure
• Citi to Double Team Helping Institutional Hedge Fund Investment
• Tiger Woods Is ‘Nervous’ About Fan Reception for Masters Return Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Barack Obama, Citigroup, Dirty politics, Fed, Financial reform; Warren Buffett, Golf, Greece, Hedge funds, Obamacaare, Politics, Sovereign debt; Euro, Tiger Woods

• Report Details How Lehman Hid Its Woes as It Collapsed
• British law firm cleared way for Lehman cover-up
• Lehman report lays wide blame for failure
• EU rebuff for Geithner over rules on hedge funds
• Obama Plans to Tap Yellen for Fed Vice Chairman
• AIG Said to Query Bonus Holdouts on Pay in Push for Concessions
• Reports: Tiger Woods likely to return from hiatus at Masters Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: AIG, Barack Obama, Bonuses, Compensation, Dick Fuld, Erin Callan, Examiner reports, Golf, Hedge funds, implosions, Lehman Brothers, Politics, Sports, Tiger Woods, Tim Geithner

Jimmy Cayne didn’t waste any time escaping to the golf course after the shareholder meeting where JP Morgan swallowed Bear Stearns. Here’s an excerpt from the Fortune Magazine interview with Cayne:

After the final shareholders’ meeting
in May, Cayne spent his last hours at Bear Stearns chatting with a few loyalists
who stopped by his lair to say their goodbyes. He took a call from Jamie Dimon,
the CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, who was checking in from Positano, Italy, to make
sure the shareholder vote went off without a hitch. Finally it was time for him
to leave his sixth-floor refuge at 383 Madison. But already things had changed.
For years on Thursday afternoons, Cayne headed off early to the East 34th Street
Heliport for the short $1,700 chopper ride down to the Hollywood Golf Club. But
since his retirement in January, some luxuries had to be eschewed. So he put on
his suit jacket, grabbed a freshly baked chocolate-chip cookie from his
secretary’s desk, and headed down to Vanderbilt Avenue. A car and driver were
waiting to take him down the Garden State Parkway to Deal and his next round of
golf. There would be no helicopter ride this day.

The rise and fall of Jimmy Cayne
- Fortune

Tags: Bear Stearns, Credit Crunch, Golf, Jamie Dimon, Jim Cayne, JPM Chase

Andrew Giuliani, son of Former mayor / former presidential candidate Rudy
Giuliani, was kicked off the Duke University golf team last February for reasons
that aren’t really clear, and he’s suing the school and the coach. 
Giuliani, a senior and an aspiring pro golfer, was illegally kicked off the team
in February without warning according to the law suit.  The
report was reported in the Duke newspaper, The Chronicle.  According to
the suit, Giuliani could be reinstated to the team only with written letters of
support from each team member, and the coach was said to be threatening to cut
anyone who provided that support.  The younger Giuliani hasn’t asked his
dad for support.   He told Newsday: "I love my father very much," …"I just decided not to ask him to get involved in the situation." 
According to the NY Post’s account:

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Golf, Legal, Rudy Giuliani

So why did Jimmy Cayne spend so much time on the golf course last year while his now departed Bear Stearns was sinking into the briny abyss?  This might help to explain it: The quest for eternal (or at least longer) life.  Turns out that those who play a lot of golf (and especially those with low handicaps) have a 40% lower death rate than others of the same sex, age and
socio-economic status according to a new study published in the
Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports.   Cayne’s handicap is 15.9 according to figures compiled by Bespoke Investment Group. Others angling for a longer life include former Merrill CEO Stan O’Neal (handicap 9.9), Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld (10.3) and Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack (17).  Interestingly, Merrill’s John Thain isn’t a golfer — according to an interview with the Financial Times last year: "I can’t play at all,"  "I never learnt.".  Perhaps he should take up the game.

This equates to a five-year increase in
life expectancy, scientists led by Anders Ahlbom and Bahman Farahmand at the
Stockholm-based Karolinska Institutet said. Golfers with a low handicap – a
measure of a player’s ability – are the best protected, they said.

“A round of golf means being outside for 4
or 5 hours, walking at a fast pace for 6 to 7 kilometers (3.7 to 4.4 miles),
something which is known to be good for health,” Ahlbom said in an e-mailed
statement. “People play golf into old age, and there are also positive social
and psychological aspects to the game that can be of help.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Bear Stearns, Dick Fuld, Golf, Jim Cayne, John Mack

Nothing gets between Jimmy Cayne and his golf game:  Not a day after he fired presumed heir apparent Warren Spector, Jimmy was swinging away, with one of his best scores ever:

While beating back a financial meltdown at Bear Stearns, its 73-year-old
chairman has surprised many by keeping a steady hand on both the office and his
six iron.

Cayne, who golfs several times a week, had to take a full three-week sabbatical
from the game to spend up to 16-hours daily at the office as his firm’s crisis
peaked this past month.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Bear Stearns, Golf, Jim Cayne

Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne has received a good deal of unwanted negative publicity lately with the implosion of two Bear Stearns hedge funds stuffed with subprime debt and the revelations that while they were erupting in flames, he was busy fiddling with his putter on the golf course.  Now there’s possibly more:  While there doesn’t seem to be much evidence– at least yet — Cayne’s golf scores are being probed to see if cheated to give himelf a win at a July 4th tournament at his Hollywood Country Club in Deal, New Jersey.  CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino came out with the story after the market closed on Friday.  Kinda sounds like a witch hunt to us, but who knows?:

The Hollywood Golf Club president Harvey
York has formed a three person committee to examine a complaint against Cayne,
according to CNBC reporter Charlie Gasparino.

He told Gasparino that allegations of
cheating occur all the time. York said the committee has thus far found no
confirmation of cheating on Cayne’s part.

"What’s different with this case? The
guy is a public figure," said York.

Gasparino reported on CNBC that "this
is a single allegation. I’ve known Cayne for a long time, he’s a straight up
guy. But the long knives are coming out against him because of his troubles at
Bear Stearns."

CNBC’s Gasparino: Bear’s Cayne Probed Over Golf Scores – CNBC.com

Tags: Bear Stearns, Golf, Jim Cayne

Never mind that two of his firm’s hedge funds were melting down.  Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne didn’t let that little inconvenience interrupt his busy golf schedule:

In the summer, Mr. Cayne routinely hops a helicopter from Manhattan to the Hollywood Golf Club in Ocean Township, N.J., where his pilot has permission to land on the grounds. According to scores posted on an online golf database, he continued to do so through the weeks in June when his firm was struggling to keep one of its mortgage securities funds afloat.

On June 14, the day when Bear Stearns reported a 10 percent drop in its operating earnings for the second quarter, Mr. Cayne played a round and shot a 96, his scores on the online database,
GHIN.com, indicate. The next day, a Friday, he played again.

On Thursday, June 21, as several big banks pressured Bear Stearns to increase the collateral on loans they had made to its sinking fund, Mr. Cayne was back on the course. That day, he shot a 98.

The next day, in the biggest rescue of a hedge fund in almost a decade, Bear Stearns pledged to put up $3.2 billion to bail out its fund. (It later said that $1.6 billion would suffice.) Then the remarkably consistent Mr. Cayne played golf, shooting a 97.

And while we’re on the subject of Bear, the New York Post notes that the imploding Bear funds’ manager Ralph Cioffi was another Wall Streeter who had gotten the Hollywood bug:

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Tags: Bear Stearns, Golf, Jim Cayne

The game of golf has long been a part of Wall Street.  Deals get done over golf.  Competitions get played out.  And some people relax with it.  The Wall Street Journal suggests that for some, it’s an addiction.:

Most golfers, far from being ashamed of our
addiction to the game, actually seem to be rather proud of the fact. We brag
about playing in winter storms, mock confess that we spend way too much time
watching reruns of 1960s matches on the Golf Channel and claim that we want to
be buried in a golf-themed casket (one popular model available online, with an
early morning course scene painted on the side, is called "Fairway to
Heaven").

But I sometimes wonder whether, just maybe,
we should take golf addiction a little more seriously. At one time or another,
I’ll bet that most avid golfers have felt the tug of golf’s dark side: the
stolen round that really wasn’t much fun because we know we should have been
spending that time with our family, the black mood that didn’t lift for days
after an especially egregious round.

The Golf Nut Society — yes, there is such an organization, whose tongue is
supposedly in cheek — celebrates instances of obsessive behavior that in other
contexts might seem pathetic. The current "Golf Nut of the Year," for
instance, played 36 holes a day on the honeymoon of his doomed first marriage.

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Tags: Golf

A few weeks ago we showed you the Segway scooter for golfers.  Now you can see it in motion.   These things really do zip along the golf course.  The first video is 21 seconds long, the second one below is 28 seconds.

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Tags: Gadgets/Tech Toys, Golf

Gizmodo tells us that the folks at Segway have introduced a golf version of their scooter.   Pricing isn’t yet available.   We sure hope this version of the Segway scooter has fewer problems than the consumer version that was recalled in September (all 23,500 of them!)

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Tags: Gadgets/Tech Toys, Golf

If you live in the New York City area or New Jersey, you play golf, and you’re not put off by a $175k initiation fee ($75k for national or international members) along with a $10k annual dues, you might check out the recently opened Bayonne Golf Club if you haven’t already.  The fairways are "sculpted on mounds of sludge dredged from New York harbor’s shipping channels (doesn’t that sound appealing?), but really, it’s supposed to be a great course(so sayeth the Associated Press story, see below).  According to the website:

Designed to emulate the look and feel of the legendary links courses of Scotland and Ireland, Bayonne Golf Club is a special retreat for the passionate golfer–just a few miles from the southern tip of Manhattan–that will play like an American cousin to Royal County Down, Turnberry and Ballybunion.

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Tags: Golf