Why is it that people are prepared to believe absolutely anything about Goldman Sachs? The bank is the subject of another duffing-up in Harper’s Magazine, along with the rest of Wall Street, for apparently forcing up food prices. No idea how, and no mention of any “great vampire squid”.
And reports are circulating that Goldmans, with the usual luck of those whom Satan takes care of as his own, managed to offload most of its BP shares just ahead of the oil spill in the Gulf. “Never bet against Goldman Sachs, as time and again the firm gets it right and surprises on the upside,” says one commentator, pointing to the bank’s improving share price.
“We did sell some positions, close some positions, two days before the explosion on the rig,” says an insider. But these were simply the majority of its holding in two funds on the asset management side, not its proprietary trading activities. “We still have a large holding in BP.”
The burden of high office
Today is the first Budget for Justine Greening, the MP for Putney and the new Economic Secretary to the Treasury. She should know her way around — she is a former PricewaterhouseCoopers accountant. But I hear Greening is finding one aspect of the job a strain. She is quite slight, and has been heard to mention the weight of the two red boxes with which she is entrusted and the difficulty of carrying one at the same time as a handbag.
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The boxes are lead-lined and apparently are designed to survive an encounter with a steamroller. And Greening has been told she can’t take them home with her on the District Line.
• I am sorry to report the death of one of the original characters of the gilts market, Adrian Ireland.
In the days when everyone operating in the market had a nickname, his was “The Beanpole”.
Brian Winterflood rings with the news. He hired Ireland from UBS to work for him.
• Spotted, on his travels, in Rotorua, New Zealand, by the financial blogger Chris Dorman and posted on his website DebtRevulsion.com. The Theory of Black Swan Events was developed by the economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He argues that banks and other financial firms are vulnerable to hazardous events that cannot be predicted and, therefore, are exposed to losses beyond those predicted by their internal models. This helps to explain the financial crisis. I had no idea that the real things were dangerous as well.
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In the blue corner
Anthony Giddens
A familiar name reappears — Benjamin Cohen, creator of the social website sojewish.com and the subject of Radio 4’s I Was A Teenage Dot-com Millionaire. Which he was, very famously, for a nanosecond ten years ago. Once dot-com mania was over, he got out with about enough for a deposit on a house. Cohen said he recalls being “hounded” by the press for interviews. My recollection is that it was the other way around, Benjamin. We’ll have to agree to differ.