It is good to be the king. It is even better to be Larry Ellison.
Most of us spend much of our lives thinking that we should do the right thing, or worrying that we didn’t do the right thing, or trying at long last to finally do the right thing. Mr. Ellison, the fifth-richest person in the world and the chief executive with the highest total compensation in 2013, appears burdened by no such concerns.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, likes to say that one of the keys to investing successfully is properly anticipating your regret.
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.”
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
The bankruptcy automatically terminated the swap. Under the contract, the university was required to pay a $25 million termination fee to the now-bankrupt bank.
But at that point, there was one upside. Interest rates were volatile, but had not yet plunged. The swap was not yet deep underwater. The university was out of a gamble that looked increasingly precarious.
And last but not least,
In a decision that is still not clear, university officials decided to find another bank to provide a swap with the same terms. Deutsche Bank agreed to pay the university $31 million to reissue the swap – which officials now estimate will produce $123 million in losses in coming years.
Abnormal Capitalist 