Che Chairs Douchebag Benefit, Won’t Give Back Bonus (UPDATED)
If good looks was a minute/ You know that you could've been an hour- Smokey Robinson, 'The Way You Do The Things You Do'
Che shirt and Western suit coat? You, my friend, have the fashion sense of a troll.
The man at the right in this photo is Gary Pasciucco, a former vice chairman of Morgan Stanley who now runs AIG Financial Products. That division is the prodigal arm of the insurer which guaranteed the credits swap that unraveled the global economy. Gary and his cronies will now receive millions in bonuses, even though you and I now own AIG. Yes, the politicians should be outraged. Yes, these corporate douchebags should feel such shame that thoughts of suicide are not foreign. But, America, this is a smokescreen! The bonuses are just a small slice of the hundreds of billions of wasted dollars you, me, everybody spent in the mad dash to prop up Wall Street greedheads.
Don’t let the witch hunt to catch these bonus boneheads and Bernie Madoff distract you from the real scandal. The people who got us into this mess are running the show! Timothy Geithner ran the New York branch of the Federal Reserve which signed off on these poisonous assets!
Sphere: Related ContentThe Incredible Santelli (UPDATED)
In the video, Jon Stewart descends with furious righteousness on the CNBC network. As we’ve covered already, CNBC is the forum for the disease which is strangling our economy. The network wants to define itself as the place where Wall Street is the victim in this mess. We all know that this is false. Wall Street created this mess, and it is we taxpayers who are bailing them out from their egregious losses.
Yet again, Jon Stewart stands as a bulwark of reason against those who wish to confuse the public with populist hokum. If only more media outlets distanced themselves from their corporate teet and gave the true facts of this crisis, we might be able to have some enlightened discussion instead of panic and partisan talking points.
Sphere: Related ContentBernie Madoff’s America
What goes up...
Bernie Madoff will spend the rest of his life in what appears will be a tough, maximum-security federal penitentiary. The man is, undoubtedly, a sociopath of the first order and if you have any doubt I urge you to read Vanity Fair’s well-researched article about his crimes and their victims. Madoff’s guilt is without doubt, and the pain of his victims is profound. The video below tells how some of the victims feel now.
Sphere: Related ContentIs CNBC The New Fox News?
Another week, another must-see video at CNBC. I always thought Fox was the out-of-touch, nutball network. No longer. Fox passed the torch to CNBC. The worst people in the world are no longer right-wing idealogues. Nope, they’re greedy capitalists who can’t stand getting blamed for anything. This week’s worst person in the world is CNBC’s Rick Santelli. Rick attempts in this clip to ignite a revolution amongst traders at the Chicago Board. Why are they outraged? They’re outraged because they have to pay for their neighbor’s mortgage. What do they want? They want the feds to bail them out.
Sphere: Related ContentBest Network Nitwit Interview
CNBC interviewed Nouriel Roubini, RGE Monitor, and Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan author. You need to watch this! These two are rightly famous because they both predicted the economic mess we are in more than a year ago. The reason we are in such a mess? Our banks were too big and too highly leveraged. Both of them state that we need to look at a completely new way of doing business, and we must start by ridding Wall Street of those who made the mistakes in the first place. This is the exact position we at Shambollocks! have taken since this crisis began.
Sphere: Related ContentYou Spoiled Gucci Brat
When I grow up, I want to be a sullen, good-for-nothing leech.
I don’t want people to think we at Shambollocks! want to pin the entire blame for our current economic crisis on rich, greedy white men. We were sure there were equally ugly rich, greedy white women out there to share their burden. And the New York Times found them! A group of beautiful young regressive females make up a support group called Dating A Banker Anonymous. They have their own blog (Warning- Do not read blog if you are prone to violent fits!). Their problems?
Sphere: Related ContentThe economic crisis came home to 27-year-old Megan Petrus early last year when her boyfriend of eight months, a derivatives trader for a major bank, proved to be more concerned about helping a laid-off colleague than comforting Ms. Petrus after her father had a heart attack.
For Christine Cameron, the recession became real when the financial analyst she had been dating for about a year would get drunk and disappear while they were out together, then accuse her the next day of being the one who had absconded.
Dawn Spinner Davis, 26, a beauty writer, said the downward-trending graphs began to make sense when the man she married on Nov. 1, a 28-year-old private wealth manager, stopped playing golf, once his passion. “One of his best friends told me that my job is now to keep him calm and keep him from dying at the age of 35,” Ms. Davis said. “It’s not what I signed up for.”
Stonecutters Celebrate Annual Circle Jerk
![I [Heart] Secret Societies](http://www.shambollocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/kappa-beta-phi.jpg "kappa-beta-phi")
I [Heart] Secret Societies
While we in Chicago froze our asses off and pushed around our busted vehicles, the Douchebags of the Universe who make up Kappa Betta Phi held their annual secret handshake convention at the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue in the NYC last week. Their HS newspaper, the Wall Street Journal was there. Surely, with all the extra peripheral damage that Wall Street has wrought of late, there would be a little more solemnity accompanying the “Thank you sirs, may I have another”, right?
“I feel like the mayor of New Orleans after Katrina,” quipped Alfred E. Smith IV, the group’s leader, or “Grand Swipe,” at the opening of its annual black-tie dinner last week. “Today, the FBI put out a warning that Al Qaeda was planning an attack to cripple the U.S. economy,” inductee Martin Gruss joked later in the evening. “I’ve got news for them, Congress has already done that.”
Um, no. Difference between you and Mayor Nagin, shitbag? Mayor Nagin was thrust into a NATURAL disaster for which he got very little assistance. You, you unctous waste of carbon, CAUSED the disaster and received TONS of federal assistance. What you should feel is the tightening of a noose around your neck. Al-Qaeda would slap themselves over the top of their heads in luck if they could even do a tenth of the amount of damage you yes-men did by just not knowing what the the f#ck you were doing. And Marty, yeah, let’s blame Congress for that. Just like you blamed the girl for the rape and the black kid for not getting into that grad program, right?
My God, they’re so full of themselves they invite the press to come and watch the show! This is America, people. Front and center. These are the people who are the problem. Bill Murray was right in Rushmore. “Keep the rich kids in your sights, and take them down.”
And all of you, all of you high on change- guess who didn’t attend? BO’s nominee for the SEC, Mary Shapiro. This is who BO assigned to watch the hen house, a member of this secret fraternity of financial sociopaths. BO, we said earlier, nobody involved with this mess gets to clean it up. President-elect Obama, cut them off. We wish to no longer be taken advantage of by these arrogant, greedy bastards.
They ended the night with a rendition of ‘American Pie’. It included the line- ‘Bye, bye, my slice of the pie’.
Shut down that stove, BO. Let’s make sure the next time they want dessert, they foot the bill themselves. 
How To Lose 300 Million Euros
The car you buy when it's time to trade in the first wife.
Listen my children and you will hear a story of how really rich men lost tens of millions of euros, and how one man last hundreds of millions of euros. Our story today comes from Ivan Krstic.
Three years ago, it looked like Volkswagen was going to get sold- possibly to a foreign automaker. Porsche stepped in and began buying up shares of Volkswagen. Porsche bought and bought. Everyone thought Porsche was going to buy VW, but Porsche didn’t say boo. As Porsche bought stock, the remaining shares of the stock rose. At some point, some people saw the high price of VW shares and figured it would be too expensive for Porsche to buy the company. The only place for VW shares to go was down. These people and hedge funds shorted VW stock. They shorted a lot of it.
Here’s how shorting works. Say I own shares in Google at $100 a share. You borrow 100 shares of my Google, and agree to return it to me in six months. Now, once you get your hands on my Google, you sell. Six months later, if the stock drops to $50, you buy back the 100 shares, return it to me, and pocket a cool $5,000 profit. Sounds pretty sweet, right? But what happens when if the stock goes up? Well, then, Sheen, you’re on the hook for getting me back those hundred shares in six months. Now you know why lots of traders do blow.
Meanwhile, back at the bauernhof, Porsche saw that VW was being shorted. So Porsche bought the shares that the shorters sold. All of it they could find. On October 26, Porsche announced they owned 75% of VW’s stock, nearly all of the company shares that were available.
The shorters were screwed. They needed to get those VW stocks back to the people who loaned it to them. But since Porsche owned the great majority of shares, Porsche could basically set the price. By October 28, shares of VW had risen from under 200 euros to over 1,000. They call this a short squeeze.
German multibillionaire Adolf Merckle bet wrong. He lost anywhere from 100 to 300 million euros. Last Monday, Adolf threw himself under a train.
Porsche made anywhere from 30-40 billion euros on the short squeeze. For reasons of comparison, in 2006 Porsche’s entire revenue was slightly over 7 billion.
Porsche, truly except no substitutes.
O'Hare Arpt., IL
