Archive - Jul 2009 - Story

Matt Goldstein over at Reuters may have just broken a story that could spell doom for if not the entire Goldman Sachs program trading group, then at least those who deal with "low latency (microseconds) event-driven market data processing, strategy, and order submissions." Visions of swirling, gray storm clouds over Goldman's SLP and hi-fi traders begin to form.

You wanted decals? Fine. Here are your decals.

Over the past two weeks many banks issued press releases and opened up the PR spigot to indicate just how stable they all are now that a few have managed to pay down their TARP commitments. This of course, is nothing but a complete farce, and simply yet another chapter in the "consumer confidence" game played by the administration and its financial underlings. In order to see just how much the banking system depends on the continued unlimited wallet of taxpayers and Geithner's printing presses, and how much certain law firms continue to depend on the somewhat less limited wallet of Wall Street, I present an October 31, 2008 letter recently obtained by Zero Hedge, in which Sullivan & Cromwell, Wall Street's #2 favorite law firm (or is that #1: I am sure Wachtell Lipton would have a few choice words with regard to that particular league table rating, although it may be hard pressed to match S&C's $241,975 in donations to the Democratic National Convention), goes to town to make sure that its well-deserving clients including Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, State Street and Wells Fargo get to not only have the taxpayers' cake (in perpetuity), but eat more and more of it each day.

After days of configuring, we've finally managed to get subscriptions working properly.  If you checked your email box you already know this because you likely received 900 emails at once as all the notifications queued up over the last week were batch-sent in one massive climax of SMTP server intercourse.

Sorry about the mess.

To configure your subscriptions, go to the "My Account" menu on the left and select the "Subscriptions" tab.

ETst

Hmmmmmmmmm

This is only a test.

• More on StevePerkinsGate: PVM taking a page from the oldest playbook in the world (FT)
• India joins China, Russia in questioning USD dominance (Bloomberg)
• Palin to resign as Alaska governor, will not seek reelection (WSJ) [not even worth discussing the Republican due diligence process]
• Ignoring prophetic predictors (Nader)
• Staffer at SEC had warned of Madoff (WaPo, h/t dartmont)

The chart below indicates that while the market is exactly where it was in early December 2008, the VIX has droped by almost 60%.

We are very pleased to offer Zero Hedge readers access to the RAN Squawk news feed. RAN Squawk delivers real-time voice and text based feeds targeted to the needs of traders, brokers and financial professionals.

Taibbi in his first TV interview since the "Squid" was let loose. Hat tip Calgary Schmooze

Failure Friday is early today: the first bank shooting green all the way to the grave is John Warner Bank, from Clinton, IL. Likely more to come today.

Tsk Tsk. Those pesky SPARCs. Anyone remember March 2007? In other news, Sky Net will be nominating a robo-president for 2012 shortly.

Shockingly, the 1% line hasn't been enough to get credit flowing in Euroland - interesting times in Euro long rates coming up.