Category: Finance

Credit Suisse Helped U.S. Clients Hide Assets

I am pretty sure these clients were part of a jury, selecting the 2014 Swimsuit models for SI.

The report describes one instance in which a Credit Suisse banker “traveled to the United States to meet with the customer at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and, over breakfast, handed the customer bank statements hidden in a Sports Illustrated magazine.”

And then, the Goldman Sachs elevator,

One client also recalled, when visiting a Credit Suisse office, taking an elevator with “no buttons” that was “controlled remotely.”

→ The New York Times

Meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on September 16, 2008

Well, on September 16, 2008, Lehman was not that big of a deal :

Other than the CDS moves and the equity moves on the other broker-dealers, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, I don’t think that that is the real specter that’s casting some question over broader financial institutions. I think the Lehman situation, no matter what judgment we made this past weekend about whether or not to provide official-sector money, is not what is driving markets broadly outside of the investment banks. What’s driving the broader uncertainty are questions about institutions like AIG that were rated AAA, that were so strong that counterparties didn’t need collateral, and that were a certain bet to be a guarantor around stable value funds and all sorts of other products. If in a matter of weeks that AAA rating and that security could turn out to be worthless

→ Federal Reserve

Why WhatsApp Doesn’t Sell Ads

Back on June 18, 2012, WhatsApp’ founders/PR/younameit wrote this brillant statement about “Why [WhatsApp] [doesn’t] sell ads.”
Today, WhatsApp sold itself to one of the world’s largest advertiser.

Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

→ WhatsApp Blog

UBS Saved €2.5 Billion by Sending a Fax to Brussels

The process for alerting the commission of cartel activity may surprise you: Companies send a fax to Brussels. A dedicated “leniency fax”—the number is +32 2 299 4585, should you be needing it—is the only way, apparently, for the commission to record the official time and date of first contact with whistleblowers in cartel cases. Thus, UBS’s well-timed fax saved it the equivalent of $3.4 billion in fines.

→ Quartz