the finance industry / wall street

would love to punch the champagne drinkers in the face -- BUT WITH THAT SAID the troll inside me applauds

OTM

yeah you have to admire them. they should do coke too, though

I would love a glass of champagne now tbh

Pay a liberal arts grad to bring you one

I wish they would drive through the crowd in Bentleys shouting "Pardon me, but if you'd be so kind as to step aside, I've an appointment with the president of the federal reserve. Oh, and do you have any grey poupon?"

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/09/goldman_sachs_has_reduced_its.html

lmao, these guys,

Oh, and do you have any grey poupon?"

As if they'd ever touch that vulgar stuff!

It has also gone mostly cashless in the cafeteria and other areas, eliminating the need to pay armored truck companies to haul away the money.

fwiw this seems like an appropriate thread for our friend Alessio Rastani if u guys haven't seen him yet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC19fEqR5bA

feel like goldman sachs should mandate an iv drip and colostomy bag so that traders never have to leave their desks

There's some talk that that guy's a Yes Men-style satirist, but it's too hard to tell anymore.

Perrin takes note of the sneering at Wall St Occupiers:

The Times and others of their class despise democracy. Demonstrations count only in official enemy states. At home, it's unnecessary. Petulant. Naive.

How serious can these kids really be? They use laptops and iPhones to communicate and spread their message. If they were truly radical, they'd use cardboard megaphones. Hand signs. Smoke signals. Using The Man's technology is hypocritical.

http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-never-tells.html

For you fans in D.C.: he's moving there!

If Rastani is a satirist, he's built up a somewhat convincing web presence for his stock trading stuff (although I wouldn't put it past the Yes Men or other satirists to do that). Even if he's not though, who is he, exactly? Some trader? Being a trader doesn't make you privvy to any special or secret information, and a lot of traders are idiots. He might be right, he might be wrong, but why was he being interviewed exactly?

nah yeah rastani seems like the real thing

the telegraph has got to the heart of it: he's not a hoaxer, but he's kind of a fake:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8792829/BBC-financial-expert-Alessio-Rastani-Im-an-attention-seeker-not-a-trader.html

it's definitely a variation on poe's law

but I mean if you have ever read a book chronicling the lives of wall street traders (and yes, even w/ the bias), you'll know why he passes the sniff test; he's just parroting what every trader out there is thinking atm.

dude isn't really helping the cause imho

I mean as far as I can tell from what I'm reading, I could just as easily call myself a "trader" in the sense he means it, i.e. someone who sits in his underwear and buys and sells stocks from time to time.

boy, that video is a hit in lib blogs today.

does that surprise you

Not a bit.

ok now i'm puzzled by this guy

i guess he got what he wanted?

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiWlvBro9eI&feature=player_embedded#!

not him tho

really

Yes Men are smarter than this guy imo

if they pulled a stunt, it would be funny for one thing

uh huh, ok

not quite goin that far, but no, i mean--are you looking at these two dudes? this dude is not that dude.

They both have bushy eyebrows, crooked nose, funny accent. I smell a rat

was already talkin about him in the other thread

http://observers.france24.com/content/20101006-iran-youth-flirting-tehran-cars-traffic-jam-boys-girls-iran-zamin

Alessio Rastani, 33, is a London stock market trader of Italo-Iranian origin. He regularly visits his relatives in Tehran.

06/10/2010

he also has myspace and twitter accounts dating back more than a year

trust me dude, my experience with cloverfield has made me way too good at this shit

lol

Wow the Yes Men are so good at this, aren't they? You have to hand it to them.

l8r

You are a Yes Man, what do I win

Alessio Rastani = Sales ratio ANSI

makes u think

hmm yes

oh hey our boy

oh hey

http://www.leadingtrader.com/09/alessio-rastani-a-big-thank-you-from-alessio/

oh hey

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/nyregion/wall-street-occupiers-protesting-till-whenever.html?pagewanted=all

the perpetual snark the times levels at the protestors is kind of obnoxious

I dunno it's a little patronizing but fairly accurate when describing the mood. I find that 'hero' dude obnoxious.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/matt-stoller-occupywallstreet-is-a-church-of-dissent-not-a-protest.html

this is good

hate stoller on twitter but look fwd to readin this

glowing profile of eric schneiderman, the new york AG who opposed the $20 billion hush money settlement for the banks

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/nyregion/for-eric-schneiderman-new-york-attorney-general-some-notice.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/business/dexias-collapse-in-europe-points-to-global-risks.html

cool another bank gets bailed out because they made bad bets

Whole article worth reading, final page in particular

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-hazards-of-confidence.html?pagewanted=4&src=recg#

Soul searching

In an abstract sense, we know what roles financial institutions fulfil. In particular, (i) financial institutions avoid duplication both when monitoring loans and collecting information, (ii) they help to smooth consumption, and (iii) they provide liquidity.6 There are many enjoyable descriptions of some activities enacted in the financial sector that seem hard to reconcile with the laudable tasks thought of by economists. Moreover, knowing what the tasks of the financial sector are in theory does not tell us whether those tasks are fulfilled efficiently and at the right price. Nor does it tell us why the income earned by the financial sector has increased so much. As pointed out by Philippon (2008), in the 1960s outstanding economic growth was achieved with a small financial sector. Has it become more difficult to obtain information so that we now need to allocate more resources to the financial sector?

final paragraph does not go far enough, but it is still remarkable to see it published from this corner

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-do-we-need-a-financial-sector-2011-10