Garmin is known for its GPS navigation systems, including mobile units consumers use while driving. The company might find a bright future in idiot-proof phone muters. Clip above.

(Pic: Chris N. on Flickr)

Raj Rajaratnam is the co-founder of the hedge fund Galleon Group. Last Friday, he was arrested and charged with the biggest insider trading scheme that Wall Street has seen in recent history. Let's briefly recap this spectacular criminal web!

• The SEC says that Rajaratnam used a vast web of inside informants at various companies to trade on them illegally using inside information. He and five others have been charged in this case, including two from another hedge fund and one IBM executive. Rajaratnam allegedly paid cash and favors to insiders in return for information, and made more than $20 million in profit on the ensuing trades.
• Rajaratnam himself (who claims he's innocent) is a Sri Lankan native who's been a fundraiser for causes there (including, allegedly, the Tamil Tigers, who are designated as terrorists by the US government). He's also the largest individual investor in Sri Lanka, and stocks there fell on the news of the charges.
• This is the largest insider trading case ever connected to a hedge fund. That makes the publicity-and-regulation-averse hedge fund world nervous. However, at least three former Rajaratnam colleagues are helping the government build its case against him.
• Incriminating telephone transcripts? This case has 'em! The best are tapes of Danielle Chiesi of New Castle Funds (pictured), also charged with insider trading in the case. She sounded less than innocent:
  
  
  
  
• Robert Moffat, a top IBM exec, was also arrested in the case, for leaking inside info. His arrest reportedly caused "cheering in the halls" by unionized workers.
• Anyhow, Rajaratnam's out on $100 million bail and he's supposed to be addressing Galleon employees in the office today, so be sure to email us and let us know what he says!

Their piece doesn't mention exactly when this financial miracle occurred — you'll just have to think back to that point earlier today when you suddenly felt your mind clear of all worries — but traders apparently donned their special Dow 10,000 hats to mark the occasion.

"Ten years ago, the first time I was handed a Dow 10,000 hat, I never suspected it would be a fashion staple," said Diane Garnick, who helps manage $413.9 billion as an investment strategist at Invesco Ltd.

Sadly the Dow 10K hats (we hope they're tucker caps) are already locked away again, as the Dow is currently around 9,990. And with the world suddenly feeling dark, cold and gloomy again, we can all understand the truth of this statement:

"A lot of people make fun of these milestones, but I think that it has an effect on psychology," said David Darst, the New-York based chief investment strategist at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, which has $1.4 trillion in client assets.

Whereas newspaper revenue was down nearly 30% in the first couple quarters of the year, analysts think it might only fall 25% in the third quarter. And the outlook only gets sunnier, according to the NYT:

[An analyst] said ad revenue would show a percentage decline in the mid-20s for the third quarter, about 20 in the fourth quarter, and next year, "more modestly negative, but still negative."

By god, come 2011 we could be staring at only single-digit quarterly declines on top of the catastrophic quarterly declines of the year before! Champagne? Anyone? How about you over there, the 35,000 laid-off journalists of the past year? Journalism jobs have disappeared three times faster than average jobs, according to a new report.

Adventure!

Finn Caspersen, a New Jersey heir and philanthropist, may have dodged up to $100 million in taxes via accounts in the tax haven of Liechtenstein, sources told the New York Times. Under scrutiny from the IRS, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Labor Day.

And now, amid a major federal crackdown on tax shelters, other tax dodgers face a wrenching choice: Hope they don't get caught and, perhaps, meet Caspersen's fate; or turn themselves in and pay their back taxes. They have a week to decide; the IRS will give them a sort of amnesty if they fess up by September 23, one week from now. Might as well act now, amid an economic collapse that has the fallen rich trying to reinvent themselves left and right. That sort of brutal redemption won't stay in vogue much longer.

(Pic via)

[via Business Insider]

A year later, we're looking at some of the characters of the fallen bank. And by we, it's, you know, the BBC, the New York Times, the Daily News (who has a surprisingly uplifting take), the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Telegraph, etc. But because the New York Times profile is exactly what you think it's going to be, we can go with that:

• There's Tom Ollquist, whose dreams of retiring and becoming a high school basketball coach have gone up in smoke, with the bank. "He now spends his days making cold calls and peddling bonds for a firm that few have ever heard of," the Times reports. Ollquist himself doesn't see it as so bad, as he does some serious Lady MacBeth-like handwringing:

  "I have blood on my hands," Mr. Ollquist acknowledges, fiddling with several bracelets he wears, each with its own sentimental story, before he quickly ticks off a list of other parties he thinks are even more culpable than salesmen like him for the meltdown: regulators, senior executives, rival firms and traders who believed that their elaborate computer algorithms insulated them from risk.

  
  

• Then there are the assholes who survived because they were smart enough to stash their cash in a mattress and leave it there: "The luckiest, like Ken Linton, a former Lehman trader, made enough money during the boom years to avoid having to think about their next paychecks. He spends his time flying jets."
  
  
• Women, of course, are screwed, or the Times lets the one post-Lehman interviewee they have project the idea as such: "...There are those like Leslee Gelber, who is out of work, professionally adrift, and fearful that Wall Street will bounce back without her."
  
  
• And then there's the fall-from-grace-into-blue-collar-America story we know all too well: "Jeff Schaefer, a former managing director, for instance, now owns a car wash and gas station in Florida." Oh, and this, the ultimate buck-passing of culpability: we did it due to the demand of our services. Which is akin to smoking crack because it needs to be smoked.

  "How do you blame us? A lot of what we did from an origination standpoint was based on investors' appetite," he says. "Do you think we would just go out and say, ‘I think we're going to do $100 million in no-doc loans?'"

So, people who've fallen from opulence into the struggles of your average American. They're sad in only one regard: the loss effect of someone who goes from having potentially tens of millions of dollars to millions of dollars carries a heavier psychological weight than the person who has nothing but money problems their entire life. Then again, not to throw populism in the mix, but (A) they're not in Darfur and (B) why isn't the Times profiling the janitors at Lehman who smiled at the assholes that would walk in every day, who proceeded to destroy a pension they worked double-digit years earning?

We know these stories, we've heard them too many times before, and they've been told in far more interesting ways already. There's one part of the Times piece that's particularly poignant, however, where the future of America's banking fuckups are found.

There's this:

He says he will steer his oldest son, who just left for college, away from a Wall Street career. The Street, he says, no longer offers the opportunities it once did.

and this:

He also still encourages his college-age son's goal of becoming a trader, a dream hatched in visits with his father to Lehman's mortgage desk in New York.

Guess which quote belongs to who: the guy who passes the buck doing the moral hand-wringing, or the guy just passing the buck, writing off his experiences as a result of the demand. No, really: just guess.

"Cautiously, Small Investors Edge Back Into Stocks." Here's some news for you, small investors: you're screwed either way. If you really had balls you would have bought heavy into stocks the whole time they were cratering. If you were incredibly prudent you would have plowed it all into CDs and bonds and been satisfied with slow and steady. But, "Cautiously," you edge out just far enough on the plank to see what's going on in the wild seas, and woops—get pushed right off by all the other suckers crowding on that same plank with you.

I don't really know much about stocks.

Another thing I don't know much about: the art market. What's this we hear about auctioneer Phillips de Pury & Co. adding 18 new sales of contemporary art in the coming year? I would swear it's some sort of hunger-crazed rat burrowing into my ear canal in desperate search of food now that all the edible scraps have been snapped up by unemployed human hobos, but no, it says it right there in the WSJ. And furthermore the head of this alleged auction house is named "Bernd Runge" and he calls himself an "art virgin" and he says he wants to sell this art, including some about "Sex," to people who haven't even bought art before? We have a name for those people: "Suckers," we call them, and their preferred form of "art" is colorful marker drawings of their own name by Chinese men sitting on stools in Times Square, okay. Just forget it, "Bernd." We remember what happened last time a bunch of idiots started bidding and bidding on dumb art: Damien Hirst.

The new census tells us something a little different, you snake oil salesmen. It tells us we won't be buying many stocks or art or anything else from "Bernd," because one in five kids under 18 live in poverty, and our median household national income has fallen to barely over $50k. That's not even enough to buy Damien Hirst's left nut, the one without the diamonds on it.

Never forget that we are all financially illiterate.
[Pic: Flickr]

Now that Leibovitz is undeniably in default on the loan, it seems like declaring bankruptcy is her only option. And even if she doesn't want to do that, Art Capital seems ideally situated to force her into bankruptcy. But to judge by Art Capital's silence and Leibovitz's hopeful noises about "resolv[ing] this matter," it looks like neither party wants bankruptcy. Why not?

One reason can be found in this interview Reuters' Felix Salmon conducted with Art Capital's CEO Ian Peck back in June, in which Beck revealed his fear of what bankruptcy judges can do to his finely calibrated deals:

Peck is pretty puritanical about bankruptcy — he won't lend to people who have declared bankruptcy in the past, and he's afraid of what might happen to his liens in bankruptcy court, so he wants to avoid that if at all possible.

Right now, Peck can claim ownership over Leibovitz's photo archive, which he values at $50 million, and her homes in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and Greenwich Village, as well as 12 percent interest on the loan and 25 percent commission on the sale of the archive. If she files for bankruptcy, a judge could muck around with those numbers, reduce the interest rate, and cut him out of the commission. That sort of uncertainty is what he means when he says he's "afraid of what might happen to his liens." So if Leibovitz actually appears to be making movement toward finding an angel to help refinance the deal and pay off Art Capital everything it's entitled to, Peck might prefer to give her some time to work it out over throwing the bankruptcy switch and putting everything in the hands of a judge. Who might that angel be? Goldman Sachs is one of the financers of the Art Capital loan, and it has said it would like to find a way to refinance and help Leibovitz escape Art Capital's clutches.

But there is an upside to bankruptcy for Art Capital: it would free them up to sell the archive. It's important to note that, according to the terms of Art Capital's loan, it is already entitled to sell the archive and the homes right now, and has been for some time. There are two potential reasons that it hasn't: Either no buyer would plunk down the cash for the rights to the photos when the deal is surrounded by litigation, or Art Capital vastly overestimated the value of the archive and no bidder will come near the price that Art Capital needs to recoup the loan. If it's the former, bankruptcy would clean up the legal mess and allowing Art Capital to sell it by offering any buyer a free and clear title on the archive.

But there's another way to clear up the legal mess: Clear up the legal mess! If Leibovitz and Art Capital can come to terms and settle their claims and sell the archive outside of bankruptcy, both could benefit—Leibovitz wouldn't be bankrupt, and Art Capital would get everything it thinks it's owed. Alternatively, if Goldman Sachs or someone else is stupid enough to come along and take over the loan and pay off Art Capital enough to make it happy, then everybody still wins.

A potential monkey wrench would be if one of Leibovitz's other creditors files a petition for involuntary bankruptcy against Leibovitz before she and Art Capital can work it out — and we know that at least one creditor has been contemplating such a move for months.

Badly. Not only was the SEC never able to get an accurate measure on the size of Mr. Madoff's penis, but they also weren't able to catch him after crossing the trail he left several times over a period of time lasting about 17 years. The Wall Street Journal tears into it, teeth bared, as the report more or less implicates the SEC as the Keystone Cops of American Finance. Among the better ones:

• "A May 2003 email from a hedge-fund manager citing 'indicia of a Ponzi scheme,' but the agency months later decided to pursue a different allegation because that's where its expertise lay."
  
  
• In 1992, the SEC looked into two Florida accountants who were getting money to Madoff. They punished the accountants, but not Madoff.
  
  
• 25 people invested with Madoff after the SEC issued a report saying there was no reason to believe Madoff was a crook. Whoops!
  
  
• In May, 2003, a hedge fund manager tipped off the SEC to Madoff's Money not adding up. The SEC senior examiner in charge chose to look at abusive trading practices (called "front-running") instead of the questions raised by the SEC tipster because that's where the senior examiner's "team's area of expertise led." In other words: the senior-examiner thought he'd further his own career by pushing forward on a line of inquiry he knew he could handle as opposed to something he'd have to call in help for. Whoops.
  
  
• A routine examination of a hedge fund called Renaissance Technologies, run by a guy named James Simons, yielded internal emails wondering whether or not Madoff's money was real. These emails led to a 2005 SEC investigation of Madoff's funds.
  
  
• My favorite: an anonymous complaint registered with the SEC suggested "a scandal of major proportion." The SEC looked into it, by calling Madoff's lawyer about a specific investor. They asked, he denied, and they dropped it. Wow.

So! To sadists, schadenfreude enthusiasts, and to those of you who fetishize and enjoy the fuckups of an overinflated bureaucracy, of fraud perpetrated in proportions otherwise unseen, and of people losing millions and millions of dollars, the entire thing will make a great read, and can be downloaded here. To those of you who lost any amount of money to Bernie Madoff and have dutifully paid taxes assuming that one day that money would go to protect you in the event of something like this, uh, yeah, you're not gonna be happy.

The index is actually "in a sales process... earlier stage," Carney reports. If someone completes a buy of the index, it certainly won't be for its informational value; the Dow was born 113 years ago with just 12 stocks and still has just 30. It's been surpassed by several indexes tracking thousands of stocks, weighted to reflect reflecting the entire market.

No, the Dow's value is in its media ubiquity — in newspaper, television and radio reports, even online, it remains the favored way to summarize market gyrtions. The free branding is of limited use to Murdoch and his also-ran Dow Jones Newswires, and would be worth more to competing financial information services like Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters. But if they buy and rename the index, it will inevitably become less popular. If CNBC or the New York Time is going to have to introduce readers to a new index, why not switch to a high-fidelity one not run by a direct competitor?

So the DJIA might go to a Bloomberg-type company, or just sell for cheap as a free advertising play — "OfficeMax Industrial AverageTM" here we come! But the real competition will be in the scramble to replace the average. S&P 500? Wilshire 5000? Russell 3000? Whatever, so long as business news is just that much more boring.

Granted, Sheila McClear wrote about this last year, Matt Harvey did this at the New York Press back in January, and in what reads less like a party report and more like Heart of Darkness: NYC '09 Edition, Jenna from Jezebel channeled her inner Josef Conrad to dive headfirst into the New and Improved FMF earlier in the week. I would recommend reading her piece, first, but it's kind of terrifying.

But maybe the Times discovered something different in their findings, maybe they found something to like about this entire enterprise. After all, this is the Sunday Styles, a section of the New York Times almost entirely devoted to attempts at instilling an inferiority complex in the hoi polloi. Maybe they saw it through a different, less cynical lens, one that cynics can't permeate.

Or not. Try this on for size:

"From my experience, I've dated lawyers and doctors and they're nice; I just prefer finance," Ms. Yanush said, before applying a fresh gloss of candy-apple-red lipstick in the ladies room. "My girlfriends who are in long-term relationships with finance guys are very happy."

Or this:

Alan Nieves, 24, a derivatives salesman for an investment bank, confirmed that when it comes to who attracts whom, "There's a system in place and that's how it is," adding, "It's the New York scene."

Or this:

A 25-year-old financial analyst who was double-fisting glasses of Johnnie Walker Black, said that identifying yourself as a banker ("dropping the banker bomb" as he put it) had traditionally been a potent lure on the dating scene. "As the recession got worse, the magic bullet lost some of its mojo," said the analyst, who asked not to be named to protect his employer, a private equity firm, from the publicity associated with the evening. "All my paralegal friends were suddenly getting dates and my banker friends weren't." His own social life, at least, did not suffer because of recession, he said, but he still didn't see the potential to meet someone special this night. "Let's just say I'm not going to find my future ex-wife here," he said.

The lovely thing about Times writer Katherine Bindley's report is how hard she struggles with not writing something along the lines of DICKBAGS, MANY OF YOU, especially when she takes to quoting to invitation: "'We are here to announce the balance is restoring itself to the ecosystem of the New York dating community,' the party organizers said on their cheeky Web site." Somewhere, buried deep within the confines of the Sunday Styles editorial bullpen, there has to be a style guide filled with euphemisms like "cheeky" their writers are forced to use in place of designations like "goddamn ridiculous." It's probably a great read.

Meanwhile, in two separate apartments buried deep within Murray Hill, a second or third walk of shame/point of pride is being recounted to a group of well-to-do bankers or fashion workers. Soon, they will marry, and one day, after appearing in the Weddings & Celebrations pages, spring forth children from their loins. And when asked where they met by their children one day, they can point them to this website, and tales of double-fisting Johnnie B. and laughs about lying on the application will ensue. Possibly followed by a moment of very loud, silent disquiet.

Banker Seeks Beauty: Must Be Upbeat (Like the Economy) [NYT]

Doped Race Horses, Ozwald Boateng & Gluten-Free Vodka: Last Night Finance Guys Showed Me The World [Jezebel]

In December, Leibovitz borrowed $24 million from Art Capital Group, which makes its money by loaning artists cash and taking the rights to their work as collateral. When the artists fail to pay up, as artists often will, Art Capital sells the art to recoup. The loan isn't due until next month, but last week, Art Capital preemptively sued Leibovitz, claiming she was refusing to cooperate with the sale of her collection of photographs and homes in Greenwich Village and Rhinebeck, N.Y. The only way she will possibly be able to pay back the $24 million, Art Capital says, is by selling her homes and her catalog of photographs.

But the Art Capital deal wasn't so much a loan as a debt consolidation. Leibovitz has taken out nearly a dozen loans on her homes in the last 15 years, according to mortgage documents on file at the New York City Department of Finance, and the deal with Art Capital consolidated them all under one handy debtor. According to a December 2008 mortgage document dated the same day as the loan from Art Capital to Leibovitz, Art Capital took over $15.5 million worth of various mortgages on Leibovitz's Greenwich Village and upstate New York homes. It was that $15.5 million worth of debt, one imagines, that drove Leibovitz into the arms of Art Capital.

Which is why it's stunning to discover that she owed half of it to Condé Nast, which pays Leibovitz a reported $2 million a year to take pictures. One of the well-known perks of being a star talent at Condé Nast is low-interest mortgages guaranteed by the magazine giant's owner, Si Newhouse. According to this 2006 New York Observer story, more than "twenty Condé Nast executives, editors and even a couple of writers" have been loaned money to purchase homes by the company.

In Leibovitz's case, two of the loans she has taken out over the years were from a company called Rhinebeck Properties LLC which, according to this document that handed over Leibovitz's debt to Art Capital, is based at Condé Nast's famous 4 Times Square address. The document is signed by John Bellando, Condé Nast's chief operating officer. Another person who's benefited from a Rhinebeck Properties mortgage is Condé Nast editorial director Tom Wallace.

Rhinebeck Properties held two mortgages on Leibovitz's homes: A December 2006 mortgage for $2.5 million on her Greenwich Village townhouses, and a November 2006 loan of $4.7 million on her home in Rhinebeck, N.Y. All told, when Leibovitz did her deal with Art Capital late last year, she owed Condé Nast a total of $6.9 million—nearly half of her $15.5 million in outstanding debts.

All of this raises some questions: If the debt on Leibovitz's homes amounted to $15.5 million when she went to Art Capital, why did she seek $24 million from them? She's been sued by creditors, but the amounts—$700,000 or so—are no where near the $8.5 million cushion Leibovitz sought from the deal. And given her $2 million salary, she presumably wouldn't need it to live on.

And why was she driven to desperation if half of her money problems—or the ones we know about—came from money she owed to the people who celebrated her and paid her $2 million a year? Was Uncle Si—who's been listening to the advice of McKinsey consultants of late—calling in his generous loans? The smaller of the Rhinebeck loans carried a forgiving 5.4% interest rate. And it's hard to imagine they'd be hounding her for missed payments. Leibovitz owed about $8.6 million to other, not so cozy creditors. That's not a problem we'd like to have, but for someone in her position, it seems like the sort of financial problem that could be managed short of putting everything you own in hock.

There are more unanswered questions. Art Capital seems to think it is the sole lienholder for all of Leibovitz's properties, but we can't find a document showing that Condé Nast assigned the $4.7 million mortgage on her Rhinebeck home to them. And it's unclear from the documents whether, when it assigned over the smaller mortgage to Art Capital, Condé Nast was actually paid the balance or simply forgave the loan.

We contacted Leibovitz's spokesman for comment, and he referred us to a statement from Leibovitz calling the claims in Art Capital's lawsuit "false and untrue." A spokeswoman for Condé Nast didn't return a phone call, and a spokesperson for Art Capital had no immediate comment.

Pic, of Newhouse and Leibovitz at this year's National Magazine Awards, via ASME.

Reports the New York Times:

Though it has been known for months that billions of dollars were spent on bonuses last year, it was unclear whether that money was spread widely or concentrated among a few workers.

The report suggests that those roughly 5,000 people - a small subset of the industry - accounted for more than $5 billion in bonuses. At Goldman, just 200 people collectively were paid nearly $1 billion in total, and at Morgan Stanley, $577 million was shared by 101 people.

All told, the bonus pools at the nine banks that received bailout money was $32.6 billion, while those banks lost $81 billion.

Big Banks Paid Billions in Bonuses Amid Wall St. Crisis [New York Times]

Reports the Wall Street Journal:

The congressional investigation appears to focus on whether internal communications, such as email, show bankers had private doubts about whether mortgage-related securities they were putting together were as financially sound as their public pronouncements suggested.

According to people familiar with the matter, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations also has issued a subpoena to Washington Mutual Inc., a Seattle thrift that was seized by regulators in last year's financial crisis and is now largely owned by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

It looks like welfare-queening your way to $11.4 billion in bonuses has its disadvantages, doesn't it? Typically sympathetic politicians are eager to put on their sheriff's hats for such things, apparently.

Senate Probes Banks for Meltdown Fraud [WSJ]

The documentary, titled Trader: The Documentary, has become legendary over the years with finance people clamoring to see it, some paying hundreds of dollars online for VHS copies, in the hopes that they might glean some savory nugget of trading wisdom from Jones.

Here's the description of the film written on the back of the box that the VHS tape came packaged in:

Is financial trading an art, science, profession or out-and-out gamble? If you're interested in money and you want to know what it's really like on Wall Street, this is the video you, your family, your colleagues and your friends should own. Filmed before Wall Street's October 1987 crash, TRADER is a riviting one hour documentary of a fascinating man, Paul Tudor Jones II. It delivers a rarely seen view of futures trading and explains the workings of this frantic, highly charged marketplace. It gives viewers an inside look at his estate in Virginia, skiing in Gstaad, his New York apartment. It also examines Jones' prediction that America is nearing the end of a 200-year bull market. If he's right – and he almost always is – this country and the world are about to experience economic changes of unprecedented proportions.

Here's the first part of the film, which is broken up into seven YouTube videos. They're pretty fascinating to watch, especially knowing all that we know now.

via Poor Taste via Soup

Stung by the recent populist uprising against their firm, Goldman Sachs relented to allowing a dreaded journalist, New York's Joe Hagan, inside of their hallowed halls and access to one of their top executives, Goldman chief-of-staff John Rogers. In his massive piece Hagan rehashes much of what took place in recent years that has led the firm to this point, but perhaps the most interesting aspect of the piece were the last two pages focusing on how the bad publicity is affecting the firm and the attitude those inside of Goldman's cultish bubble have towards their firm's tarnished reputation.

Historically, Goldman has been able to translate its reputation into financial leverage. "It's the difference between charging 3 percent on a deal and 4 percent on a deal," says a person who has dealt with the firm. Over time, that difference has added up to the edge Goldman has over its rivals. It also helped the firm attract the best talent-the "chosen ones," as one former staffer put it, who thought of Goldman as a higher calling and had an eye toward a future Treasury post.

Now that the firm is viewed as a virtual rogue state with interests contrary to the greater good, Goldman might attract a different breed of recruit-less Robert Rubin, more Gordon Gekko. Or fewer recruits in general: A human-resources executive at Goldman Sachs, Edith Cooper, says she counted about 20 percent fewer people at recent on-campus recruitment seminars. A Wharton graduate who interned at Goldman Sachs says many fellow finance majors are looking elsewhere. "Before, it had this aura: finance, Goldman," he says. "[Now] it seems to be a little less the case."

Even in Washington, a town populated by tainted whores, Goldman Sachs is currently the one tainted whore nobody wants to get caught in bed with.

Out of political necessity, all of Washington appears to be turning a cold shoulder toward Goldman. A senior Obama-administration official close to Tim Geithner declares that "Goldman has left the building." Onetime Goldman lobbyist and now Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson has taken a public beating for his connection to the firm. And John Thornton, a former president at Goldman Sachs, was passed over as ambassador to China because his relationship to the firm "concerned" the Obama administration, says a person familiar with the situation. "It used to be if you were a senior Goldman person and you were considered for a position, you'd have an advantage," this person says. "Now it's clearly a disadvantage."

So how are the executives at Goldman taking all of this? Well, as long as the fat bonus checks keeps coming, they really don't give a shit.

In the end, Goldman's reputation is a luxury they may well be able to do without. Robert Rubin has been privately critical of how the firm has handled the threats to its prestige, and Rogers recently addressed the firm's reputation in seminars with Goldman staff. But a person who frequently talks to senior executives at Goldman sums up the company's attitude this way: "If we can push the envelope without D.C. punishing us, we don't care about our Main Street reputation." (CEO Lloyd) Blankfein in particular is said to be dismissive of the firm's critics. According to a person close to him, the CEO believes Goldman's internal problems will disappear once compensation comes back. In other words, money will solve everything.

And the world spins madly on.

Is Goldman Sachs Evil? Or Just Too Good? [New York]