Money and Finance
- Serving Life For This? - By Nicholas Kristof
So you’re a judge, and Sharanda P. Jones comes before you for sentencing for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. She’s a 32-year-old mom with a 9-year-old daughter and no prior arrests, but she has been caught up in a drug sweep that has led to...
- Fortune: Big Winner In Government's Jpmorgan Suit: A Hedge Fund
Found via Santangel’s Review. In a Wall Street vs. Wall Street fight, the NY AG Eric Schneiderman just gave hedgie Seth Klarman the upper hand. A hedge fund manager who made money betting against the housing bubble, and the terrible mortgage loans that...
- The Madoff Tapes - By Steve Fishman
One evening, my home phone rang. “You have a collect call from Bernard Madoff, an inmate at a federal prison,” a recording announced. And there he was. ...
- Is The Sec Fighting Last Year's War?
Thanks to Max for passing this along. Richard Bookstaber, veteran Wall Street risk manager and hedge fund manager, made a splash on the eve of the financial meltdown with the publication of Demon of Our Own Design, a book that warned the markets had grown...
- Dylan Grice: Nikkei 63,000,000? A Cheap Way To Buy Japanese Inflation Risk
Japan is no Zimbabwe. Neither was Israel, yet from 1972 to 1987 its inflation averaged nearly 85%. As its CPI rose nearly 10,000 times, its stock market rose by a factor of 6,500 … Regular readers know that I don’t generally make forecasts, but that...
Money and Finance
A Con Man Who Lives Between Truth and Fiction - By Andrew Ross Sorkin
Found via Santangel’s Review.
“I’m a proven liar. Don’t believe anything I say.”
That was what Samuel Israel III told me last week. He is the hedge fund manager convicted of running a $450 million Ponzi scheme who faked his own suicide in the summer of 2008 to avoid his prison sentence before turning himself in after a worldwide manhunt.
He was sitting across from me in the visiting center of the Butner prison complex, about 45 minutes north of Raleigh in eastern North Carolina. (Bernard L. Madoff is in the same complex.)
Mr. Israel, 52, who is serving a 22-year sentence, was wearing a tan prison uniform with his hair grown out, a mass of silver and brown curls sprouting from the sides of his bald head. (“I’m never going to cut it until I get out,” he exclaimed.)
I was there to talk to him because his story is a cautionary tale of the highly sophisticated, often endemic, fraud that still lurks on Wall Street. People I spoke with who dealt with him are still mystified about the breach of trust and how no one had a clue about his deception until it was too late.
………………
Related book: Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street’s Wildest Con
- Serving Life For This? - By Nicholas Kristof
So you’re a judge, and Sharanda P. Jones comes before you for sentencing for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. She’s a 32-year-old mom with a 9-year-old daughter and no prior arrests, but she has been caught up in a drug sweep that has led to...
- Fortune: Big Winner In Government's Jpmorgan Suit: A Hedge Fund
Found via Santangel’s Review. In a Wall Street vs. Wall Street fight, the NY AG Eric Schneiderman just gave hedgie Seth Klarman the upper hand. A hedge fund manager who made money betting against the housing bubble, and the terrible mortgage loans that...
- The Madoff Tapes - By Steve Fishman
One evening, my home phone rang. “You have a collect call from Bernard Madoff, an inmate at a federal prison,” a recording announced. And there he was. ...
- Is The Sec Fighting Last Year's War?
Thanks to Max for passing this along. Richard Bookstaber, veteran Wall Street risk manager and hedge fund manager, made a splash on the eve of the financial meltdown with the publication of Demon of Our Own Design, a book that warned the markets had grown...
- Dylan Grice: Nikkei 63,000,000? A Cheap Way To Buy Japanese Inflation Risk
Japan is no Zimbabwe. Neither was Israel, yet from 1972 to 1987 its inflation averaged nearly 85%. As its CPI rose nearly 10,000 times, its stock market rose by a factor of 6,500 … Regular readers know that I don’t generally make forecasts, but that...