Category: Finance

Financial Apartheid

The increasing reliance on private, rather than public, markets creates a system of financial apartheid. Retail investors, and the mutual funds they depend upon, have fewer and fewer U.S. companies to pick from. Private equity firms get access to the future Facebooks and Googles of the world, and they extract all they can before exiting into what is left of the public markets.

→ Traders Magazine

The Hunt for Steve Cohen

Barai, Freeman, and Longueuil—who jokingly called themselves the Hindu, the Jew, and the Catholic—had been gathering, swapping, and trading on inside information since at least 2006, when they were all at other firms. They called their exchanges “data dumps” or “data smackdowns,” and Barai later told the F.B.I. that they’d mark them on their calendars as a “threesome” or as “don, sam, noah—sex.” They continued once Freeman and Longueuil joined SAC, in 2008, Freeman in the Boston office, Longueuil in New York. The trio developed a series of valuable sources who had contacts inside several tech companies. One, Freeman later told the F.B.I., was a consultant named Doug Munro, who ran a research firm called Worldwide Market Research and, according to both Freeman and Barai, had inside information on Cisco. Munro, they said, had an e-mail account called juicylucy_xxx@yahoo.com, and he’d send Barai an e-mail saying “lucy is wet” when he was supposed to check the account for new information. (Munro has not been charged.)

→ Vanity Fair

My Time at Lehman

I remember taking the subway home each night asking myself “What have I done today? What have I created?” And it meant that I couldn’t sleep well, I was embarrassed to tell people what I did, and I felt as though I personally owed every single person that I mucked over in the markets each day. The experience reminded me of one as a child when I unfairly sold some worthless items to neighbors at a stoop sale in front of our house in Brooklyn. When my parents found out that night, they made me go from home to home on our block returning the money.

→ Nick Chirls

Down Is a Dangerous Direction

CEOs and financiers were desperate to answer that question, for during those years of high productivity and low wages, immense profits and “returns” kept accumulating in brokerage accounts and banks. But a bank can’t keep its money in the bank. Under the pressure of those swelling piles of capital, the answer they offered to worker-consumers like Duane was: instead of paying you enough to buy what you produce, we’ll lend you the money.

→ Guernica