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New Financial Products Need New Regulation
December 23, 2008 @ 07:14 AM | By Greg MacSweeney

The crash of the financial markets and the pile up of investment scams have some people asking -- Where were the regulatory agencies in all of this? Commentator Amelia Tyagi says financial products need to be regulated as strictly as the drug, toy and cosmetic industries to prevent further meltdowns, in this American Public Media audio clip.

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Where Did the Bailout Money Go?
December 23, 2008 @ 07:03 AM | By Greg MacSweeney

Mad Money’s Jim Cramer discusses what happened to the bailout money on MSNBC and says that Hanl Paulson, Treasury Secretary, maybe didn’t even have a plan in place when he handed checks to all of the major banks. Cramer is astonished that there isn’t an investigation into what has happened to all of the money. And, surprise, Cramer is outraged.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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Former SEC Official/Madoff Relative Eric Swanson Said to Be A 'Straight Arrow'
December 19, 2008 @ 09:59 AM | By Penny Crosman

Stephen Labaton of the New York Times, in a well-researched article about Eric Swanson, the former SEC official who married into the Madoff family last year, Unlikely Player Pulled Into Madoff Swirl, says that the work Swanson did in the SEC's Madoff investigations was "relatively minor, and no evidence has emerged that Mr. Swanson did anything involving the firm after he became close to Ms. Madoff in the spring of 2006, current and former commission officials with knowledge of his work said in recent interviews."

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Is Mary Schapiro the Right Choice for SEC Chair?
December 19, 2008 @ 07:46 AM | By Penny Crosman

CNBC's Steve Liesman and Charlie Gasparino debated Barack Obama's choice of FINRA CEO Mary Schapiro as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in a Call of the Wild segment yesterday. "She's a terrible choice," said Gasparino. "She's a career bureaucrat. We need change...He should pick someone who is not a part of the bureaucracy." Liesman thought Schapiro might be able to draft better regulations. You can view the video here.

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TGIF: Introducing the Mactini, Dancing Startup Employees, Holiday Songs
December 19, 2008 @ 06:57 AM | By Penny Crosman

The rollout of an ultra-small laptop; a venture capital firm's holiday card.

The New Mactini

An ultra, ultra-small laptop.

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Madoff and the SEC: how could the Wall Street exec have fallen through the cracks?
December 17, 2008 @ 12:31 PM | By Melanie Rodier

SEC chairman Christopher Cox admitted the agency missed repeated opportunities to discover what may be the largest financial scam in history. He said he was "gravely concerned" by the watchdog's "apparent multiple failures over at least a decade" to thoroughly investigate allegations or seek formal authority to pursue them.

But just how could the agency have failed to notice the red flags for so long?

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Update on the Madoff Scandal (media roundup)
December 17, 2008 @ 09:44 AM | By Melanie Rodier

As the dust settles on the Madoff scandal, the SEC blames itself for a decade-long failure to investigate the Wall Street executive. Meanwhile, Madoff is scrambling to find any remaining friends to keep him out of jail. Here’s the latest media roundup on the scandal:

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The Latest on the Madoff Scandal
December 16, 2008 @ 10:13 AM | By Penny Crosman

As Wall Street tries to recover from the shock of the $50 billion Madoff Securities fraud case, new details are emerging about how the scheme worked, the federal investigation of Bernard Madoff and his firm, and how investors all over the world have been affected. The media usually benefits from tragedies such as these and surely some journalism career will be kick-started by Madoff's spectacular crash. Some of the most interesting stories we've seen this morning are these:

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How An Investor Relations Pro Stays On Top of Market Crises
December 15, 2008 @ 05:18 PM | By Penny Crosman

In these volatile times, how’s an investor relations pro to stay on top of fast-moving market news?

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Weekend at Bernie's
December 15, 2008 @ 09:23 AM | By Greg MacSweeney

OK, I wasn’t really at Bernie Madoff’s house, and my weekend wasn’t as funny as the 1989 film Weekend at Bernie’s, but everywhere I went this weekend people were talking about Berard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme. First, a father in my son’s Saturday morning ice hockey class mentioned the alleged fraud to me as we were chatting. Then, later that afternoon as I was sitting on a Polar Express train ride in Phillipsburg, NJ, I heard a couple of adults discussing Bernie Madoff across the aisle. (If the kids were discussing Madoff, I really would have been floored). By the way, the train ride is a lot of fun for the kids — hot chocolate, Santa, elves, music, silver bells, the whole nine.

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I Knew Bernie Madoff Was Cheating (Video)
December 12, 2008 @ 02:12 PM | By Greg MacSweeney

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Alleged smoke and mirrors from a Wall Street legend, Bernie Madoff, fooled many investors for a long time, but it seems that some knew he was cheating all along.

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Shock and Disbelief: Bernard Madoff Accused of Defrauding Clients of $50 Billion
December 12, 2008 @ 12:07 PM | By Greg MacSweeney

Bernard Madoff, the founder of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC and a former Nasdaq Stock Market chairman, was arrested and charged with securities fraud in what has beeen called by federal prosecutors as a Ponzi scheme that could involve losses of more than $50 billion.

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Pink slip parties are all the rage on Wall Street (audio)
December 12, 2008 @ 11:26 AM | By Melanie Rodier

The newly unemployed in the financial industry are flocking to Wall Street "pink slip" holiday parties to network with other job seekers and recruiters, and maybe find a new job.

At one such party, laid-off Wall Streeters wore pink glow-in-the-dark bracelets, while recruiters wore green ones, according to this MarketPlace segment.

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TGIF: How to Commute Home in Style
December 12, 2008 @ 07:29 AM | By Penny Crosman

Elevators, escalators, subways, buses and trains are boring. Here’s a better way.

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Treasury on Hot Seat Over TARP Execution
December 11, 2008 @ 08:39 AM | By Greg MacSweeney

Two-and-a-half months after Congress gave Henry Paulson $700 billion, lawmakers made it clear today they're having second thoughts. The occasion was a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee. Members gave assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari, the TARP czar, a grilling.

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Meet your (next?) boss
December 10, 2008 @ 04:38 PM | By Melanie Rodier

With banks continuing to announce massive layoffs and the financial crisis set to last well into 2009, financial workers are increasingly looking for virtual places to discretely network, share bad news and further develop job skills.

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The Walking Zombies of Wall Street (video)
December 10, 2008 @ 08:46 AM | By Greg MacSweeney

WSJ's Dennis Berman tells colleague Evan Newmark that although tens of thousands of people have managed to hold on to their jobs, there isn't much work to go around. Instead, he says, Wall Streeters are working to appear busy. Really? Well, maybe in certain parts of the business. But after speaking with many CIOs and other technologists, they are up to their eyeballs in work and planning for 2009. And many are still trying to figure out how to complete all of the projects (which haven’t been reduced) with a smaller budget and skeleton staff.

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Fresh Evidence That Collateral Management’s A Hit This Year
December 09, 2008 @ 03:19 PM | By Penny Crosman

We just got off the phone with John Wisbey, CEO of Lombard Risk, who told us his company has won seven new customers for its Colline Collateral Management software in the last six months. “We’re finding this year a very exciting year,” he says. This jibes with interviews we did recently with sell-side and buy-side firms that were upgrading their collateral management systems. “People are definitely interested in this. Although firms are cutting back, they’re not cutting back on reducing credit risk.” They are trying to manage credit/counterparty risk and liquidity better.

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What’s Needed to Parallelize Wall Street Apps, According to Intel
December 09, 2008 @ 09:50 AM | By Penny Crosman

At an Intel event last night, senior research specialist Mikhail Smelyanskiy noted that although standard server hardware is becoming increasingly multi-core, a lot of existing code on Wall Street was written for single cores, and IT people on the Street tend to lack parallel programming skills. (So although servers are getting faster, Wall Street applications aren’t equipped to take advantage of the better performance.) Specialized accelerators, such as the IBM Cell, the Nvidia Tesla and ClearSpeed’s FPGA board are “hard to program and require algorithm changes and explicit memory management,” he said. (Of course, it is in Intel’s best interest to dismiss the competing hardware accelerators and push the idea of redesigning applications to take advantage of Intel’s multi-core architecture.)

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“You’re Fired” -- Banks Aren’t the Only Ones Downsizing
December 05, 2008 @ 08:12 AM | By Penny Crosman

A cash-strapped family makes a tough decision.

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Mumbai Financial Firms, Technology Providers Incensed After Attacks
December 05, 2008 @ 07:52 AM | By Greg MacSweeney

Last week's terror attacks rocked the Mumbai business community. Niraj Sheth, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, speaks with Tata Consultancy Services’ CEO S. Ramadorai and Ashok Wadhwa, CEO and managing director of Ambit Corporate Finance Pvt. Ltd., about how they are taking action to ensure Mumbai is both safe and business-friendly.

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BofA/Merrill to Shed 30,000 Jobs
December 03, 2008 @ 09:34 AM | By Penny Crosman

In a CNBC report last night, reporter Charlie Gasparino said the Bank of America/Merrill merger is likely to result in the loss of 30,000 jobs. In a related article, Gasparino wrote:

"As of yesterday, sources were saying that layoffs could total at least 10,000 and would start before the end of the year.

"But Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis wants to wring out $7 billion in savings from the merger over the next few years, so the total number of jobs lost could be closer to 30,000, they said.

"Some of these job cuts could be through attrition or the sale of some businesses. But the heaviest cuts will probably come in the investment banking business, which has dried up during the current credit crisis."

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Wall Street's Said to Be Hiring Female IT Workers
December 02, 2008 @ 09:57 AM | By Penny Crosman

We came across a surprising blog this morning on the Harvard Business Review site that said Wall Street leads other industry in hiring female technology workers. The blog, Women Technologists on Wall Street, stated that 34% of new technology hires in the financial sector are female, compared to 25% of technology hires overall. "Women in tech in finance love their jobs and feel rewarded for their efforts, yet all too often their careers become stalled," reported the author, Silvia Ann Hewlett, president of the Center for Work-Life Policy.

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