April 2010
2 posts
WHILE CITIGROUP BURNED, BOB RUBIN JUST WANTED TO...
I also remember teasingly inquiring as to whether he’d flown in on a Citigroup jet again. (He’d called me from one in December.) “It’s one of the perks,” he replied a bit sheepishly.
Things were much more relaxed by the time I walked him back to the Ritz - which was along the way to my South Beach condo. When we passed a homeless man along the way he made a bit...
me: god this debate is making me so insane
pressler: which one
me: about goldman
pressler: which one
I am so over it
me: well, it's just shitty because no one seems to get that the SEC has been like systematically barred from enforcing any laws at all for the last 5 years
so it is like, you know, when a few kids die of alcohol poisoning at a "party school" and then suddenly the cops start citing
Goldman is just the first bar they raided
it may not be the most egregious
like, i remember at Penn.
Goldman would be Smokey Joe's, and Citigroup would be this place down at 44th and spruce called Murph's that let me in as a pre-frosh with an asian girl's ID
Raiding Goldman "sends a message" better that you're gonna start actually enforcing the law.
Get the message, stupid public!
February 2010
1 post
Greed & Fear & Mostly Loathing On Wall Street
My dispatch from a Wall Street Tea Party can be found on AOL Daily Finance or, if you prefer the unedited version — and GUESS WHO DOES — it’s after the jump.
People in The City deeply resent the way they’ve all been associated with the actions of the (as they see it) relatively small number of people involved in the shenanigans which led to the credit crunch. Most of...
November 2009
2 posts
October 2009
1 post
July 2009
1 post
So I started this other blog on this thing called...
Yes, I am officially that unemployed. I probably wouldn’t be driven to such a measure if I could figure out how to fucking “jump” a post on Tumblr. But also Matt Taibbi is over there, as it appears are many of the people with whom I once got paid to work at TIME and various other lofty media establishments. And there’s a guy who calls his blog “The Undersharer,”...
June 2009
5 posts
For those of you on Twitter...
skybarn:
brooklynmutt:
apsies:
kaytee:shorterexcerpts:
Change your twitter settings to say you are in the Tehran timezone, and change your location to Tehran.
Iranian censors are filtering by these settings to find dissidents, by doing this you can make things a bit more difficult for them.
done!
hello, what is wrong with these so-called “dissidents” that their twitter...
ABORT
Andrew Sullivan has been one of the most vocal advocates of a moderate, nuanced “appreciation of the shades-of-gray” approach to abortion policy, but he maybe should have hired a girl intern to screen those dubious “Personal Choice” first-person abortion stories he has been posting on his blog because I am pretty sure these ones are fake.
On that awesome book review written by that one...
skybarn:
craptheblog:
I still think the review should never have been published. It opens the door—especially because so many people think it’s so great—for Ad Hominem attacks on every novel, movie and restaurant review. Is there anyone less objective then an ex? What do I care if the ex of a writer is conflicted about the novel? It’s a distraction and it’s irrelevant.
Hey, Skybarn, you...
Crap Email Critical Readings
Crap Email From A Dude is back! And now on our brand-new Tumblr I am writing literary critiques of my favorites, starting with yesterday’s in which a lawyer emailed his ex-girlfriend’s co-worker after ten months of silence to find out how she was doing — and invite him to for a bout of “prowling/scamming/trollop hunting.”
At first glance Jared’s Crap Email to Tom,...
May 2009
4 posts
"actually, i was joking recently that i was never...
hell of a drug.
Rape Meme
I finally bothered addressing my haters on the Double X but I know the purists among you will want to read the unabridged version:
Linda Hirshman is a celebrated author, lawyer and philosophy professor. Lizz Winstead is a comedian and political satirist who co-founded the infallible Daily Show. I am a financial journalist who a few years ago was driven by financial necessity into the Hobbsean...
The latest answer to the age-old "more corrupt? or...
Today I’m with stupid so to speak.
(Yes it is a post about a report written by the Inspector General of the SEC but it is also the tale of two MINDBLOWINGLY RETARDED RETARDS with law degrees and better salaries than yours and that will make you feel better about all the neurons you kill off this weekend.)
COME SEE WHAT EZRA KLEIN'S TWITTER IS CALLING...
A small irony at the network concerns the ambitious “I Am CNBC” promotional campaign that has been airing during commercial breaks all winter, for which each of the network’s thirty New York-based personalities filmed a thirty-second, black-and-white spot delivering a brief autobiographical monologue ending in “I am [name]. . . . I am CNBC.” We learn the sweet-faced Squawk Box anchor Becky Quick...
March 2009
8 posts
Well what a fascinating use of...
The UK’s organized crime authority is looking into whether AIG’s request that employees return bonuses amounts to “extortion.” I knew there was a reason I got into blogging. (Yes please add TPM to your RSS blah blah)
"…the eyes of the financial community—which, for...
the challenges of governing a plutocracy
I Heart Steve Liesman
Also: Michelle Caruso-Cabrera does not understand how CDOs work. She was just all “one mortgage defaults and then suddenly they’re worthless” etc. etc. Gary Parr, can’t you learn this woman something?
And another thing Barney!
Remember how you paid James Brown fifty grand so people would not get crazy and riot in the streets just because everyone was so afraid people would riot in the streets because rioting in the streets was what everyone else was doing? Remember how you didn’t even knew who James Brown was but you paid him off because you thought he might calm people down and counterproductive and irrational...
Ugh.
BARNEY, wtf. You have been watching the plutocracy conspire with wrongheaded contempt for Big Government to sow the seeds of this crisis for your entire fucking career. You sat powerless while Greenspan calmly told you the trillion dollars worth of systemic risk the Fed had so heroically averted by the LTCM bailout could in no way be taken as a sign of the moral hazards of allowing financiers to...
Cramer
Reaction to the inevitable requisite short-term reaction to the massacre that wasn’t a massacre but rather uneasy home viewing (presuming you still have a cable and/or high-speed internet-equipped home) (which is highly suggestive of a copper piping and window and furnace-equipped home) plus the requisite semi-informed cynicism perpetuated/embodied by Stewart (who didn’t touch on AIG...
Speaking of ladies!
How come nothing I seem to read about the new Neko Case album is by one of them? Like that Times Mag piece, “Wild Thing.” Although maybe the achievement of that piece is that the dude who wrote it was really old, and you could tell, and so it seemed just sort of, well maybe “distinctive” is how you’d put it, how little time he’d seemed to have spent trying to...
"One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s...
Oh yes how distinctive. It was not one of those cataclysmic “woman-made disasters” you are always hearing about Michael Lewis.
January 2009
6 posts
You're-a trashed, girl!
alexbalk:
I am at a bar where Cracker’s “Low” just came on I started ROCKING OUT. Please, help me.
Punitive Poetics I
I am going to admit it, I thought this poem had to be deliberately this bad to be this bad. You know, like, how bricks don’t generally glitter.
Wait, UNLESS she is talking about those glass bricks they use in South Philly Italian restaurants the mobsters sup inside of! (See what I did there?) Also, what a word: “sup.”
Sup Skinny Joey, Joe Soprano, Jolie-Pitt clan and the clans...
Holy shit that is like seven hundred billion...
Also: Ayn Rand seriously??
Uh, the fucking Yankees didn't blow up capitalism,...
Everything that is wrong with business journalism in one hysterically moronic graf
Even in a year in which the industry has lost the stock-market-value equivalent of the output of Africa, Wall Street will manage to pay out about half of 2007’s $28.7 billion total. This baffles civilians—but think of Wall Street as a talent business, not all that different from the movies or sports. The Yankees...
Do you think this is funny?
gallagheronpowerongardening:
I can’t grow on. I will grow on.
Brian Gallagher is a fucking genius.
"Can you write on your blog that this REALLY...
…I read it on Saturday and i kept saying ‘you stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, idiot moron fucks’”
CNBC Sucks and his snug boxer briefs are back from Australia.
(I am also semi-back from a mostly-local fortnight of sloth and sloshedness and I would like to say “slush” but actually just plain fucking ice.)
(If you’ve emailed or texted and I haven’t...
December 2008
26 posts
Boner Diplomacy
In Afghanistan, “Whatever it takes to make friends and influence people — whether it’s building a school or handing out Viagra.”
Heh. →
peterfeld:
If no one in the business can figure out how to make a decent return on the talents of the people I listed above — along with Moe, of course (whom I omitted only because she seems to be getting good work lately) — then the Internet and we who read it are in sad shape.
“Seems” = ugh well whatever.
Support your Gawkers →
alexbalk:
peterfeld:
…And do we not notice that almost all of our favorite “golden age” ex-Gawker writers are unemployed or underemployed, despite having had that great platform and wide audience? Don’t we want to live in a media environment where people like Balk, Pareene, Choire, Emily, Sheila and Jesse can get decently paid for doing what they are so good at?
I think I speak for all...
I command you to read this. →
(via alexbalk) Jim Newell.
Wait, I Can't Believe I Just Wrote An Entire...
Uh, how I overcame the adversity that was growing up next door to a cat restaurant:
“Cats have a strong flavor. Dogs taste much better, but if you really want cat meat, I can have it delivered by tomorrow,” said the butcher, who gave only her surname, Huang.
It was just this attitude that outraged about 40 cat lovers who unfurled banners in a tearful protest outside the Guangdong...
Good news!
Adam Smith predicted everything! If we could only get ourselves a “Lost Decade” like Japan.
But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.
That and how I met...
I Hate To Say I Already Hate Obama's Economic Team...
I guess I am just a hater that way.
If any regulatory body involved in this disaster has been a more abysmal failure than the SEC, it’s the “self-regulator” that was supposed to monitor all those concerns regulators had so steadily deregulated out from under them over the past ten years: mind-blowing overleverage and the attendant counterparty risk, unbridled short-selling,...
What He Said
Dear Moe, I just found out that MoveOn.org was asking for nominations on what its goals should be for 2009. I registered as a user, but for whatever reason cannot browse to the page that will allow me to nominate a goal. As can be expected, liberals put up all sorts of stupid leftist platitudes like peace on Earth and social justice. Give me a break. If you have a big mailing list or...
"The comfort of a knowledge and I'll rise above...
Letters To Cleo seemed nineties enough in the nineties, but their hit song is so imbued with self assurance and millennial venture capitalist jargon it could have been written by Princess Stephany herself! I am seeing them tonight with Doree and Pressler, developing…
Socialism with Chinese* characteristics
*19th century railroad worker:
“To be blunt about it, we manufacturers profit off the workers,” he says. “The only profit we make is on how low we can push the price of labor.”
Favreau's Sexist Photo Is No Laughing Matter →
doree:
thepoliticalpartygirl:
by Dee Dee Meyers
“What’s bugging me is his intention. He isn’t putting his hand on her ‘chest,’ as most of the articles and conversations about the picture have euphemistically referred to it. Rather, his hand—cupped just so—is clearly intended to signal that he’s groping her breast. And why? Surely, not to signal he finds her attractive. Au contraire. It’s an...
Feminebriationism…and Fukuyama!
More self-pimping re self-medicating from XXF:
“Trust” — the mystical ingredient that prompts people to shovel their driveways and pick up litter and correct inaccurate Wikipedia entries, join bowling leagues and not cheat on their taxes…is largely what my generation is trying to replace when we get bombed.
"I Find It A Bit Ridiculous Actually, Almost Like...
The economy, s…
doree:
Moe’s report from the Winter Wonderland Ball at the New York Botanical Garden, in the Observer:
“There is this weird schizophrenia at events like this,” mused Margherita Missoni, the model-actress and heir to the Italian fashion house, who was standing nearby waiting patiently for the throng to clear the way toward the ballroom. “We know it’s happening, but obviously it...
"Ultimately, to adopt Tkacik’s philosophy of sex...
Someone defended me a lot more articulately than I did myself over that thing about “empowered” binge drinking that New York published today so I’m just linking that here. But in case you were wondering, I still, sometimes, feel pain.