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It’s all here — everything from how the crisis could affect global poverty to why a New York hedge fund manager seized a three-mast sailing ship.
Marcos Brindicci / Reuters
On Wednesday, Argentina made international news by defaulting on its debt. The nation of 41 million people failed to make a $539 million payment to bondholders before a deadline, triggering a ratings downgrade, a slump in Argentine stocks, and not a little bit of panic and confusion.
Argentina has defaulted on its debt on more than a half-dozen occasions over its history. But this time it's different, because nobody knows exactly what to do or how to resolve the situation, and lots of people are concerned that this could harm not only Argentina but the whole world economy.
How did Argentina get to this place?
A century ago, Argentina was one of the wealthiest nations on the planet, and considered a serious rival to the U.S. for economic dominance of the new world. The country had a fast-growing economy, agricultural abundance, and lots of natural resources. That didn't work out too well, however. Lots of reasons for it, but the end result is that while Argentina's GDP per capita in 1990 approached that of the U.S., by 2000 it was less than a third as much.
In the 1990s, Argentina borrowed heavily, issuing tens of billions of dollars in international bonds. By 2001, amid a recession, it became clear that the country couldn't keep up with payments and, in December of that year, the government defaulted on north of $80 billion in debt. It was — and still is — history's largest default by a national government.
This had many political and economic implications, but the main one is that the country was largely cut off from international capital markets, meaning it couldn't borrow any more money — or, if it did, it had to pay very high interest rates.
Globe Turner, LLC/Globe Turner, LLC
Argentina's president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, was elected in 2007 and is currently serving her second and final term in office. Her husband, Nestor Kirchner, was her predecessor in the office, and he soon realized that it would be very helpful to all sorts of things if the country could have credit again. So in 2005, his government offered holders of the defaulted bonds a deal: If they'd agree to exchange their defaulted bonds for new ones worth significantly less — like as little as a 30% in some cases — Argentina would promise to pay this time. It might sound like a crappy deal, but something is better than nothing.
In 2010, President Fernández returned to the negotiating table and make a similar offer to bondholders who didn't accept the original offer. Nine years into not getting paid proved enough for a lot of them. By the time the bargaining was done, more than 92% of all the original bondholders had agreed to the exchange. And since then, Argentina has faithfully been making interest payments on the debt.
The other 8%, known as holdouts, have received nothing. And the Argentine legislature passed a "lock law" making it illegal for the country to make subsequent offers to other bondholders. Basically, the 8% who didn't take the offer were frozen out.
Jorge Silva / Reuters
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The hedge fund titan’s Pershing Square Capital is set to conduct an IPO later this year, but industry insiders are worried Ackman is sabotaging its potential success with his increasingly bizarre public behavior.
Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters / Reuters
A little more than a week ago, in Manhattan's AXA Equitable Center, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman delivered a bizarre three-and-a-half-hour presentation building upon the case for his Herbalife short, a $1 billion position he's spent the better part of two years and $50 million defending.
The presentation fell flat not just with the media and institutional investors in attendance — Herbalife shares gained 20%, or more than $13, over the course of the day — but also with the handful of potential early investors in the IPO of Ackman's Pershing Square Capital expected later this year. They had come to see the road show before the road show, so to speak, and left, in some cases less than halfway through the presentation, with more uncertainty about Ackman than when they'd entered the auditorium that hot Tuesday morning.
Ackman now admits that the presentation was "bad" and a "PR failure." Had it been an isolated event, it wouldn't have been so bad. But as just the latest in a series of strange public appearances, among them a televised fight on CNBC with rival Carl Icahn, two instances of shedding tears, and a barely legal move to team up with the Canadian pharmaceutical conglomerate Valeant Pharmaceuticals to acquire Botox-maker Allergan, sources said that Ackman has dug himself a deep hole out of which to climb if he is to convince investors that he is fit to lead a public hedge fund.
"I'm just not aware of any situations where someone has tried to go public and had such bizarre behavior, so that's going to hurt the IPO," said Dan Weaver, professor of finance and an IPO expert at Rutgers University.
A representative for Ackman and Pershing Square declined comment for this story.
CNBC
Ackman, it could be argued, made his personal IPO to the world in 1995 when he and a Harvard classmate launched a very public bid to buy Rockefeller Center via their Gotham Capital investment firm. Though they lost the bid, Gotham went on to amass more than $500 million in assets in its first six years by making prescient investment bets, and later shorting bond issuer MBIA, among others.
After closing Gotham and striking out on his own with the founding of Pershing Square in 2004, Ackman took on such high-profile targets as Wendy's and, no pun intended, Target. Later came activist stakes in Canadian Pacific Railroad, J.C. Penney, Borders, and Allergan, among others, some of which he publicly won big, such as the $800 million he made off of Canadian Pacific, and some of which he lost even more publicly, as with J.C. Penney, which lost thousands of jobs and his fund of $500 million under his watch.
Ackman is perhaps known best, if not admiringly, for his attacks on nutritional supplement company Herbalife, calling it a massive pyramid scheme and crying fraud over its practices of targeting mostly poor minorities with its health and weight-loss regime for the last 18 months.
In addition to Icahn, Ackman's Herbalife zeal has also pitted him against well-liked and well-respected investment banker Ken Moelis. Moelis served as an early adviser to Herbalife after Ackman took his stake, and went so far as contacting Ackman's clients and telling them to pull their money out of the hedge fund. Incensed, Ackman publicly attacked Moelis around the time of the pricing period for the IPO of his eponymous Moelis & Co., boutique investment bank and has spent the last few months going after him in the press, going so far as to call his firm "not a real investment bank" during last week's presentation.
Ackman's attack on Moelis is not exactly a smart move ahead of his own fund's impending IPO, said one hedge fund manager who requested anonymity.
"If he's worried about his own IPO, attacking the biggest private investment IPO when it happened was not exactly sensible," this manager said. "Moelis has more access to rich people and people who buy IPOs and who price these things than anyone in the country, and it's just nuts to attack him."
A representative for Ken Moelis had no comment on Ackman.
The brand modified its “I Will” motto for women to “I Will What I Want.” Under Armour has hired at least four women to VP roles and higher since 2012, though none serve on its board or executive team yet.
Right before Under Armour Chief Executive Officer Kevin Plank took the stage today at a splashy launch event for the company's women's business, the brand played a video.
Footage of Under Armour-clad athletes was interspersed with clips from Anchorman and The Wolf of Wall Street, including Matthew McConaughey's iconic chest-thumping scene. Mashed in were portions of Plank TV interviews defending the company after its Sochi speedskating suits came under fire this winter. "There's no greater story than a comeback," a voice proclaims. In one scene, a CNBC anchor exclaims, "Under Armour changed my life." ESPN's Sage Steele then introduced Plank, clad in jeans and a blazer, to a roar from the crowd, not unlike a sporting event.
It was the bro-iest that a company known for its macho image got during the day as Under Armour worked hard to share the message that it's very much a brand for women, too. The company unveiled a powerful new TV ad starring Misty Copeland, the first African-American soloist for the American Ballet Theatre in 20 years, which is already starting to go viral. It's the first part of Under Armour's new $15 million marketing campaign — the most the company has spent to date on an ad push for the women's side of its business.
"There is a new way Under Armour is going to speak to female athletes and create a voice for athletic females," Plank said at today's event in Manhattan. "So today we are starting that conversation and positioning our women's business to equal or surpass our men's business in the future...that is the march we are on today."
It's a major move for a brand that has been on fire for the past few years. Plank noted that Under Armour just reported its 17th straight quarter of 20%-or-higher growth, an accomplishment earned by just four S&P 500 companies. But while Under Armour brought in $2.3 billion in sales last year, only $500 million of that came from its women's business.
Skier Lindsey Vonn in a new Under Armour ad.
Under Armour
Under Armour is trying to reach active women who are into spin, kickboxing, barre and other studio classes, making Lululemon its most obvious competitor, given Nike's focus on athletes. Under Armour even talked about a "Womanifesto" today that's guiding its marketing — bringing to mind "the Lululemon manifesto."
The company's female push comes at perhaps the lowest point in Lululemon's history, with last year's sheer pants fiasco resulting in the loss of its CEO and some credibility. This year, sales growth is muted and rumors have swirled that controversial founder Chip Wilson may attempt to buy out the company.
Still, it's been a tough slog for Under Armour, which was founded by a former University of Maryland football player, to figure out what women want, as Matt Townsend of Bloomberg News pointed out early last year.
In the past decade, Under Armour ads have typically conveyed the decidedly tough-guy image the brand was built on, beginning in 1996. They feature gritty athletes in dark industrial yards or dimly-lit concrete gyms, running and lifting weights to a marching drumbeat, sweat pouring down their brows. Some form of the brand's "Protect This House" tagline makes an appearance: "Will you protect this house?" someone, usually a man, growls. (Its global motto is chanted in response: "I will. I will.")
But the company has been making strides towards a more female-friendly Under Armour thanks to Leanne Fremar, the executive creative director for the women's business who was brought on from Theory in November 2012. Since then, she's added other women to Under Armour's executive roster: Monica Mirro, vice president of sales, from SPANX; Heidi Sandreuter, VP of women's marketing from PepsiCo; and Susie McCabe, senior VP of global retail, from Ralph Lauren.
That's a big change for Under Armour, which is still heavily run by males. All eight people on Under Armour's executive team, as listed on its website, are men. The nine people on its board of directors are also all men.
Along with Copeland, Under Armour's new campaign includes skier and longtime Under Armour spokeswoman Lindsey Vonn, professional soccer player Kelley O'Hara, and tennis player Sloane Stephens.
Under Armour "saw a sea of sameness in the competition," with pat-on-the-back, or "you go, girl" messages, Sandreuter told BuzzFeed today. By modifying the "I Will" motto to "I Will What I Want," Under Armour is attempting to recognize women for living as they choose, she said.
"We want to show we're not just for the boyfriends, or sons, or husbands, that we get what makes them tick and it's this determination and dedication to live life on their own terms and to tune out the voices that surround them," Sandreuter said at today's event. "It's different for men, because the way they live their lives isn't a daily topic of conversation like it is for women."
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Overdraft and non-sufficient fund charges are by far the biggest checking account fee, making up more than half of the average monthly fees charged.
carnagenyc/Flickr / Via flic.kr
Overdraft fees for ATMs and debit cards make up more than one half of the total monthly checking account fees consumers face, according to a new analysis published by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.
The Bureau published research today showing that overdraft fees are a big revenue source for consumer banks, that young people pay them disproportionally, and that, since customers tend to return to positive balances quickly after going negative and incurring a fee, they function as very high-interest loans.
The Bureau looked at a sample of customers at large banks, about 2 million accounts, between January 2011 and June 2012. In those accounts, checking account fees averaged $9.87 a month, and $5.21 were for overdraft and non-sufficient funds fees. The next largest monthly fee, on average, was a $1.28-per-month. For accounts that had opted into overdraft protection for ATM and debit card transactions, the average overdraft fee was over $21.61.
Even among accounts that hadn't opted into overdraft protection, the average fee was $2.98, which can be incurred from overdrafted money transfers for bounced checks. In 2010, the CFPB mandated that customers be able to choose to have overdraft protection, instead of being automatically opted-in to the service.
"Despite recent regulatory and industry changes, overdrafts continue to impose heavy costs on consumers who have low account balances and no cushion for error," the CFPB's director Richard Corday said in a statement, adding, "Overdraft fees should not be 'gotchas' when people use their debit cards." The Bureau is considering new rules "to improve consumer awareness of overdraft costs and restrict how banks can debit transactions and impose fees," Bloomberg News quoted a senior official saying.
While overdraft and non-sufficient funds fees are high — they brought in some $32 billion in revenue for banks for banks in 2012, according the research firm Moebs — they are largely concentrated among a small portion of checking account holders. The CFPB said that the 8.3% of account holders who overdraft more than 10 times a year make up 73.7% of all overdraft fees. Meanwhile, 70% of account holders in the study did not overdraft at all. A study released last month by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that the median overcharge fee is $35. As banks have been squeezed by low interest rates, they have moved away from offering free checking accounts in order to bolster their revenues.
Overdraft fees are similarly concentrated among young people. Whereas 72.4% of checking account holders between 46 and 61 and 84.6% of checking account holders between and 62 have no overdrafts, the number was only 61.5% among 18 to 25 year olds. Among that group, 23.8% had three or more overdrafts. The group of 10.7% with ten or more made up 68.4% of the overdraft fees paid by young people.
Banks are also able to amp up fees depending on how long a customer has a negative balance in their account. Pew found that more than half of overdrafts cost customers between $30 and $99.99, despite the median fee being $35. That's because they pile up multiple fees for staying overdrafted.
The CFPB's study found that more than half of account holders who overdraft come back to positive within three days. "Some consumers are essentially paying $34 – which is the typical overdraft fee – to have the bank spot them less than $24 for just a few days," Cordray told reporters. "If a consumer were to get a loan on those terms, that would equate to an annual percentage rate of over 17,000 percent."
Susan Weinstock, who runs Pew's consumer banking programs, told reporters last month that the CFPB should improve disclosure of checking account fees, "The CFPB should ensure all overdraft options are laid out and consumers can make a clear choice."
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The new Common Application, which launches tomorrow, can’t have a repeat of last year, when it was full of glitches and crashed frequently, if it hopes to maintain its hold on the college application world.
glegorly/glegorly
The Common Application, which allows students to file college applications electronically, has promised that when it launches its new version tomorrow, things will be different: no more crashes, no more endless loading screens, no more frantic, angry teenagers. And that better be the case, because if those same glitches are repeated it could spell the beginning of the end for the Common App's near-monopoly on the electronic college application system.
A year ago, on the first day of what was being called the "Next Generation Common App" thousands of anxious high school seniors logged onto the new system, only to have it promptly crash — and that was only the beginning of a disastrous year for the country's largest electronic college application system. It was plagued by so many glitches, crashes, and timeouts that it forced dozens of colleges to push back deadlines and waive application fees. Payments weren't processed; recommendations couldn't be uploaded; essays on meaningful life experiences vanished.
Common App's executive director of 10 years, who had led the non-profit to its near-monopoly status, was fired as a result. The mass panic created by the technical problems even spawned its own Twitter account, @CommonAppProbs, and thousands of angry Tweets from teenagers.
Argentina defaults on its national debt but at least the man delivering the news looks nice.
Kicillof was made economy minister late last year by Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and tasked with renegotiating his country's national debt, which is mainly owned by overseas bondholders.
Despite Kicillof's efforts, Argentina was declared on Wednesday to be in default by debt rating agencies. The South American country says the US hedge funds who are refusing to accept a pay cut are "vulture funds", preying on a struggling nation. The US hedge funds think Argentina is a financial basket case and want their money, even if that means the Argentinian economy will suffer. The hedge funds won.
Marcos Brindicci / Reuters
A new study by the Government Accountability Office said that large banks were able to borrow money for less during the financial crisis because investors thought the government would support them, but that the funding advantage “may have declined or reversed.”
Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, who requested the study.
Matt Sullivan / Reuters / Reuters
A long awaited study by the Government Accountability Office has concluded that the ability of the largest banks to borrow money for less because investors think the government will bail them out if they run into trouble "may have declined or reversed."
The much anticipated report is part of a long debate swaying in policy and academic circles over whether recent regulatory reforms have been successful in eliminating the expectation that the government will stand behind the largest banks in the case of their failure. Many analysts have pointed to large banks being able to borrow for less before and during the financial crisis as evidence that investors expected them to be bailed out, which would then constitute an implicit taxpayer subsidy reserved for the largest banks.
Those expectations were ratified in 2008 and 2009, when the Treasury and Federal Reserve moved heaven and earth to rescue the largest banks with hundreds of billions worth of loans, equity investments, and explicit guarantees of some of their debt.
Regulators have "made progress" in writing the rules mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill, which attempted to set up a system where a large bank could be wound down without threatening the wider economy or requiring taxpayer support, Lawrance Evans, a director at the GAO, plans to say in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee later today. He said that market participants the GAO spoke to "believed that recent regulatory reforms have reduced but not eliminated the likelihood the federal government would prevent the failure of one of the largest bank holding companies."
"The GAO report confirms what we have seen in many recent studies: any cost of funding differential large banks once had has been dramatically reduced if not eliminated," the Financial Services Forum, a bank trade group, said in a statement. "These differences have nothing to do with the expectation of a bailout, but are due to the fact that investors place great value in stability, diversification and liquidity. It is also critical to consider this issue in the context of the many new regulatory costs borne by the largest banks, including much higher capital and liquidity requirements."
Last year, a Goldman Sachs study concluded that the six largest U.S. banks had a "slight funding advantage" from 1999 until 2007, and that that advantage got significantly larger during the financial crisis. Goldman, however, said that the largest banks had a only a small disadvantage in funding costs from 2011 through early 2013.
The GAO analysis was consistent with that view. Evans said that the GAO's study "suggests that large bank holding companies had lower funding costs than smaller ones during the financial crisis but provides mixed evidence of such advantages in recent years" and that "most models suggest that such advantages may have declined or reversed." The GAO looked at the difference in the yield between bonds issued by banks and equivalently-timed bonds issued by the U.S. Treasury, which are considered to be risk free. The difference between what a Treasury yields and what bank debt yields can be seen as the market's perception of the bank's relative riskiness.
The GAO looked at the difference in debt yields between banks with $1 trillion in assets, which would cover Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo, and banks with $10 billion in assets. In 2013, the GAO said that 18 models it used predicted that the larger banks had statistically significant higher funding costs and four models found they had significantly significant lower funding costs. From 2006 to 2009, however, zero models the GAO uses estimated that smaller banks had a funding advantage.
"In times of crisis, the advantage is even bigger to the big banks, and that's particularly alarming," Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democratic senator who requested the study, told Bloomberg TV.
Other analysis have found that banks' funding advantage has persisted due to the perception that they would be bailed out.
The editors of Bloomberg View, the opinion section of Bloomberg News, said that the implicit subsidy to the ten largest banks amounts to $83 billion a year, and $64 billion flows to the top five largest banks. The editors pointed to research showing that large banks had a 0.8 percentage point funding advantage on all of their debt.
An International Monetary Fund report earlier this year said that the implicit subsidy for the six largest U.S. banks was between $15 billion and $70 billion a year in 2011 and 2012, but that the funding cost advantage had been declining in the U.S. The IMF also said that the subsidy peaked during the financial crisis.
The ratings agency Moody's, which is charged with giving a credit rating to banks' debt, said in a report last year that changes in how large banks can be wound down in the the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill lead it to lower the rating of some debt of the eight largest banks.
The agency removed the "uplift" — an extra boost in the debt of the holding company for the eight banks — but that the ratings for the debt for the banking units would stay elevated because they assumed it would be supported by the bank holding company.
The study is thanks to populist Ohio Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, who requested it, along with Louisiana Republican David Vitter. Brown and Vitter are also the co-authors of a bill introduced last year that would greatly increase the capital requirements for banks with over $500 billion in assets.
Under the bill, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley would have had to increase their capital levels to 15%, well above what international and American regulators mandate. The banks would also have to calculate their capital ratios without adjusting for the riskiness of their assets as current rules allow them to do. Risk weighting, as the adjustment is called, allows banks to have less capital against some of their assets, like debt issued by the U.S. government, while they need more against others, like mortgages or corporate debt.
A bank's capital is money that it uses that isn't borrowed, and the more borrowing a bank does, the more earnings it can generate for its shareholders (and the more at risk it is for going under thanks to a loss).
A big hike in capital requirements — which have already gone up considerably since the financial crisis — would dent banks profitability as they would be less able to juice up their profits with borrowed money. At the same time, however, such a move could also make them more stable. The study was part of Brown and Vitter's strategy to show that a portion of the profits banks generate now is thanks to an implicit subsidy from the public. But that claim is now in doubt.
Even if banks still receive an implicit subsidy, or would in a crisis, the largest banks have also born the brunt of regulations specifically targeted at them in order to make them more stable. In April, bank regulators in the U.S. proposed a rule requiring stiffer restrictions on bank borrowing for banks with more than $700 billion in assets.
The largest and most complex banks also have to comply with more rules that cover the diversity of their activity and some, like JPMorgan Chase, have hired thousands of employees to deal with new regulations. JPMorgan's chief financial officer said in an investor presentation in February that the bank would spend an extra $2 billion in 2014 on compliance and controls.
Brian Cornell’s background is in stark contrast to his “homegrown” predecessor.
AP Photo/Steven Senne, File
Target hired a new chief executive officer from PepsiCo, three months after its former CEO resigned in the wake of the retailer's massive data breach in December.
Brian Cornell, who will also be Target's chairman, led PepsiCo's Americas Foods division, the company's biggest, since 2012, according to a statement today. Before that, he was the president and CEO of Sam's Club — giving him relevant discount-store experience — and CEO of Michaels Stores.
Notably, Cornell arrives at Target from outside the company. Gregg Steinhafel, the former CEO for about six years, spent a total of 35 years at Target — and that might have been a problem.
Target's chief marketing officer penned an unusually open letter on LinkedIn in May, acknowledging the company had "hit a rough patch" and that the five months following the data breach were difficult. He wrote in response to an anonymous employee rant posted to Gawker, in which the employee claimed the "homegrown" executives at Target had " no concept of how to run a 21st century business."
"Target HQ is in bad shape and in desperate need of help, direction and vision, starting from the top down," the employee wrote on Gawker at the time.
"As we seek to aggressively move Target forward and establish the company as a top omnichannel retailer, we focused on identifying an extraordinary leader who could bring vision, focus and a wealth of experience to Target's transformation," Roxanne Austin, Target's interim non-executive board chair said in today's statement.
Target is still working to recover from its data breach in mid-December, which has rocked both sales and profits.
Target / Via investors.target.com
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Add this to the bank’s tab of over $60 billion to settle financial crisis-related litigation.
Mike Blake / Reuters
While Bank of America is still in negotiations with the Justice Department over its sale of mortgage backed securities before the financial crisis, it was ordered by a federal judge today to shell out $1.3 billion in a separate case.
Last year, Bank of America was found liable for fraud for a program run by Countrywide, the mortgage company it acquired in 2008. The program, called the "High Speed Swim Lane" or "Hustle," incentivized Countrywide employees to pump out mortgages as the housing market was collapsing. Jed Rakoff, the federal judge overseeing the trial, wrote in his order that the program was "the vehicle by which Countrywide had perpetrated a subsequent fraudulent scheme from August 2007 to May 2008." Rakoff described the program as a "vehicle for brazen fraud." Prosecutors had originally asked for a $864 million fine.
"We believe that this figure simply bears no relation to a limited Countrywide program that lasted several months and ended before Bank of America's acquisition of the company. We are reviewing the ruling and we'll assess our appellate actions," said Bank of America spokesman Lawrence Grayson.
Federal prosecutors brought the case against Bank of America under a law dating from the savings and loan crisis that allows prosecutors to sue companies that damage federally insured banks. The prosecutors argued that Bank of America could be sued under the law because banks invested in Fannie and Freddie stock and debt, and had those investment wiped out when the two companies nearly collapsed thanks to bad mortgage investments.
In last year's jury trial for the Countrywide case, Bank of America was found liable for fraud, as was a former Countrywide executive, Rebecca Mairone.
In his order today, Rakoff said that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had paid for $2.9 billion loans from the Hustle program. Prosecutors claimed that Countrywide had made $165 million from the program. Rakoff came to his $1.3 billion figure by relying on an expert who worked with prosecutors who said that 57% of the Hustle loans were not "materially defective," leaving 42% that were and bringing the figure to $1.3 billion.
Mairone was ordered to pay $1 million herself — although she can pay in installments, so as not to "strain her resources to the limit."
"We continue to maintain that Rebecca never intended to defraud anyone and never did defraud anyone. Unfortunately, more powerful people chose her as a scapegoat because they thought she was an easy target. We will fight on to clear her name," said her attorney Marc Mukasey.
"Not a little responsibility for this fraud can be laid at her doorstep," Rakoff wrote. And while her lawyers argued during the trial that Mairone was not solely responsible for the Hustle program, "the fact that other, higher-level individuals arguably participated in the fraud were, for whatever reaons, not charged by the Government does not significantly lessen Ms. Mairone's culpability for her leading role in the fraud," Rakoff wrote.
Bank of America is also in separate negotiations with the Justice Department over a settlement to end an investigation into the sale of mortgage backed securities before the financial crisis to investors by Countrywide, Bank of America, and Merrill Lynch, which Bank of America acquired in 2008. The Wall Street Journal reported that Bank of America had offered $13 billion but that the Justice Department turned it down. Bank of America's profits fell 43% in the second quarter of this year thanks to setting aside $4 billion in its reserves for litigation.
Overall enrollment in for-profit colleges is down, but it’s increasingly sharply among veterans.
AP Photo/Al Behrman
For-profit colleges have been increasingly targeting and enrolling veterans, and raking in federal GI Bill funding, according to a report released today by Senator Tom Harkin and the Democratic majority of the Senate's education committee.
Overall enrollment in for-profit colleges has been in steep decline since 2009. In that same time frame, the report says, veteran enrollment at the country's largest for-profit colleges has "dramatically increased," with almost a third of veterans using GI Bill funding now attending for-profit colleges, up from 23% in 2009. That means that a huge chunk of federal funding for veterans' education is now flowing to public companies: of the ten top recipients of GI Bill money in 2008, eight were for-profit colleges, taking in more than $1.7 billion in GI Bill benefits in the 2013 academic year.
Harkin and Senate Democrats are well-worn foes of the for-profit college industry. Harkin first released a scathing critique of the industry exactly two years ago, and has been a primary proponent of regulations to limit the schools' access to federal money.
At the University of Phoenix, the country's largest for-profit college, veteran enrollment has increased 190%, the report said. More than 40,000 veterans now attend the school. Another of the top recipients of GI benefits, the report said, was Corinthian Colleges, the troubled for-profit giant that announced it was going out of business earlier this month in the wake of federal investigations and financial troubles. Corinthian "almost tripled" the amount of federal GI benefit money the company received between 2009 and 2013.
For-profit colleges say they are better equipped to serve veterans, who are nontraditional students and are usually looking for quick, reliable ways to enter the workforce and transfer credits earned in the military and elsewhere as opposed to traditional college experiences.
For companies like Apollo, which owns the University of Phoenix, veterans are desirable students. Their federal money comes in grants, not loans, so they pose no risk of going into default. Under proposed federal regulations, programs at for-profit colleges where high numbers of students default on their loans would lose their access to federal money.
For-profit colleges are also bound by regulations that say they cannot receive more than 90 percent of their revenues from federal funding. GI Bill benefits used by veterans, although they come from the federal government, don't count as part of that measurement; they are included the 10 percent of non-federal dollars. Most colleges toe the line of the "90/10 rule," drawing well above 80 percent of their revenues from federal money. It's the GI Bill benefits, the Senate report says, that allow those schools to remain in compliance with the law.
The GI Bill exemption, according to the report, "actually incentivizes these companies to aggressively market to and recruit veterans." Several different attempts have been made to amend the regulations to include GI Bill funding in the "90 percent metric," but they have been quickly shut down in committee.
Regulators in California have recently barred the University of Phoenix from enrolling veterans in several of its programs, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting. The company had run afoul of another funding regulation that prevents individual programs from getting more than 85 percent of their revenue from GI benefits.
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Economists had been expecting 3% annualized growth, the big number turns the economy positive for the year.
The US economy has successfully turned around from an unexpectedly deep contraction earlier this year. The Commerce Department today reported that the economy's gross domestic product grew at a 4% annualized rate in the second quarter, more than making up for a 2.1% contraction in the first three months of the year.
Economists were expecting growth in the second quarter to come in at 3%. Also, the most recent data, which can be further revised in the future, showed that the first quarter's contraction was 2.1%, not the 2.9% reported last month.
The first quarter's dire growth data — the largest contraction not immediately prior to or during a recession — stood in contrast to the labor market, which continued its slow and steady expansion. While the economy shrunk at 2.1% annual rate in the first three months of the year, the biggest decline since 2009, an average of 190,000 jobs were added per month. In the second quarter, the labor market started expanding even more with, an average of 272,000 jobs created per month, indicating that the extreme weakness in the growth statistics were unlikely to persist into the second quarter.
The turnaround was largely driven by an increase in personal consumption, which grew 2.5% after a meek 1.2% in the first quarter. Purchases of durable goods grew 14% after only going up 3.2% earlier this year.
As is typical with big, unexpected swings in the GDP, much of the change came from the highly volatile category called change in private inventories, which measures how much stuff businesses accumulate in hopes of selling or producing more in the future. 1.66 percentage points of the second quarter's GDP number came from an increase in the change of private inventories, while changes in private inventories took off 1.16 percentage points in the first quarter.
Actual inventory increases were positive in the first quarter — going up $35.2 billion in the first three months of the year and $93.4 billion in the second three months — but the number needs to go up steadily to add to gross domestic product. Taking out change in inventories, the change in the growth rate was less dramatic — decreasing 1% in the first quarter and increasing only 2.3% in the second.
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Exxon says: “We are assessing the impact of the sanctions.”
A view of the Exxon Mobil refinery in Baytown, Texas September 15, 2008.
Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters / Reuters
WASHINGTON — ExxonMobil may scale back its partnership with the Kremlin-backed energy giant Rosneft, according to a report Tuesday in the Russian media.
Alexander Nekipelov, chairman of Rosneft's board of directors, said it was possible "Exxon's participation in some things could be halted," according to TV Rain, a respected independent Russian news channel. Rosneft's CEO Igor Sechin was added to the U.S. sanctions list in April as part of the U.S. effort to curb Russia's aggression in Ukraine. Rosneft does business with major American companies including Exxon and Morgan Stanley, which planned to sell its oil trading unit to Rosneft; Exxon signed a deal in 2011 worth billions of dollars with the company, and the two have planned to partner on an Arctic oil field exploration initiative.
On Tuesday, both the U.S. and the European Union ratcheted up sanctions on Russia, causing British oil company BP to question its involvement with Rosneft, saying "Further economic sanctions could adversely impact our business and strategic objectives in Russia, the level of our income, production and reserves, our investment in Rosneft and our reputation."
Now, it looks like Exxon could be making the same calculation, according to Nekipelov.
"I think it's possible, in the worst case scenario, that Exxon's participation in some things could be halted, if there's nowhere for them to go, but I think that they'll be straight back as soon as the situation changes," Nekipelov told TV Rain, saying he was speaking "as an expert and a scientist rather than as the chairman of the board of directors."
"There's one thing introducing sanctions won't have any effect on at all," Nekipelov added. "It won't change the oil resources in the Arctic."
"I stressed that we've built very constructive and friendly relations where, in many cases, the sides believe and trust each other," Nekipelov said. "But we've got to look at all kinds of options. We've got to be realistic."
A spokesman for Exxon did not confirm or deny if Exxon plans to scale back its cooperation with Rosneft.
"We don't have any comment on media reports," Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers told BuzzFeed. "We are assessing the impact of the sanctions."
One energy industry source expressed skepticism that Exxon would truly scale back its involvement with Rosneft.
"Can't imagine why the Russian said what he did. I would think too soon to tell," the source said in an email. "Assume ExxonMobil's lawyers have been examining their contracts and talking to Treasury's OFAC to understand what their options are, since everyone knew these new sanctions were coming. Suspending operations is not so simple. Mobilization costs of long-term projects are significant, also opportunity costs of management attention and expert staff time. Once such assets are redeployed, it is not so simple to bring them back as they will be devoted to other projects in other parts of the world."
Ace Greenberg’s thrifty and magical career, down to the cheap casket. “Ride winners, take losses.”
Jim Zirin TV / Via youtube.com
Before the former Bear Stearns chief executive officer and chairman Alan "Ace" Greenberg died from complications due to cancer on Friday, he wrote to his wife Kathy that "when the inevitable happened," he wanted his funeral to be held at Temple Emanu-El, the great headquarters of prosperous New York reform Judaism across the street from Central Park.
"I think it's awful for people to stand around at a funeral, Temple Emanu-El should be big enough," he wrote.
Greenberg's friends, family-members, business associates, fellow magicians, bridge players, philanthropists, and members of the New York Jewish community were seated in the temple's large main sanctuary to pay tribute to a man who was an icon of the generation that built Wall Street's greatest banks — and then watched them collapse, get absorbed by their rivals, or limp on.
CBS chief Les Moonves, hedge fund manager Nelson Peltz, Bear Stearns' last CEO Alan Schwartz, its last chief financial officer Sam Molinaro, and Gristedes owner John Catsimatidis were all in attendance. Donald Trump came in late through a side door. The synagogue's massive limestone building, high walls, soaring arches, and bronze doors matched the stability that Greenberg sought to bring to Bear Stearns during his almost 60 year tenure with the firm.
The service started at exactly 11 AM, and was over only 58 minutes later, in keeping with Greenberg's frequent admonitions to start on time, get to the point, and keep it short. It was, his friend of more than 50 years and former vice chairman, John Rosenwald said, "vintage Ace."
The eulogies, delivered by temple's rabbi emeritus Ronald Sobel, Rosenwald, and his son Ted Greenberg didn't just mourn the man who helped build Bear Stearns "from nothing" — as Schwartz described it — into a 14,000 person investment banking giant competing with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. This was also a funeral for an investment banking culture that valued street smarts, abhorred losses, and populated by firms that were stewarded by partners for life. (Greenberg's predecessor, Cy Lewis, died at his 1978 retirement party).
Greenberg, who was still a vice chairman emeritus at JPMorgan when he died, joined joined Bear Stearns in 1949 as a clerk, became chief executive in 1978, chairman in 1985, and stepped down from heading the company's board in 2001. In March, 2008, when the bank's clients and lenders abandoned it because of doubts about the value of its mortgage-related assets and it was bought by JPMorgan at a firesale price, he was the head of its executive committee, the role he took when his successor as CEO, Jimmy Cayne, took over as chairman.
Rosenwald said in his eulogy he could still see Greenberg "seated at the head of the trading desk in the huge Bear Stearns trading room, with his neatly tied bow-tie, it was here that his mantra 'ride winners, take losses' was born."
Rosenwald recounted how Greenberg confronted Bear's senior partner, Cy Lewis, telling him "Sy, you're the senior partner of the firm, and you can commit this firm to buy any security you want. But if it goes down, I'm in charge of selling it." Rosenwald said this conversation "was not an easy one" but that it "cemented Ace and unquestionably saved the firm."
"That lesson — ride winners, take losses — was one that thousands in our industry should have learned," Rosenwald said.
Although Rosenwald only once mentioned Bear's collapse, he and Greenberg's son Ted returned again and again to the values of partnership, thriftiness, quick recognition of losses, and conservatively holding on to a firm's capital, so losses wouldn't quickly wipe it out.
One year after Greenberg gave up the chairmanship to Cayne, Bear Stearns had about 16 dollars in debt for every dollar in equity; by 2007, its leverage had gone up to 38 to one. Its rival Lehman Brothers was driven into bankruptcy in part because of its CEO Dick Fuld's hope that the firm's problems were only temporary.
Rosenwald said that when he first met Cayne in 1954, they both lived in the same apartment building on Lexington and 94th Street, and they would drive to work every day with John Gutfreund, who would later go on to become the senior partner at Salomon Brothers. Rosenwald recalled that one morning in Gutfreund's convertible, they read in the Wall Street Journal that Kuhn Loeb's senior partner had to write a $12 million personal check to cover the firm's commitment to a client. Because Kuhn Loeb was a partnership (like Bear Stearns), its partners took home profits at the end of the year, leaving it with only a little bit of capital.
"Ace turned to me," Rosenwald said, "Johnny, we can never let that happen to Bear Stearns." The firm then put in a rule that partners would leave their capital with Bear Stearns, "this turned out to be another critical factor in Bear Stearns remaining a business long after so many of our competitors disappeared, another moment of Ace saving the firm."
Not once did Rosenwald mention the firm's 1985 initial public offering, which turned it from a partnership funded by its profits and its senior employees to a public company dependent on its shareholders.
Greenberg's son Ted in his own eulogy drew an implicit contrast with how his father led the firm compared to the banks he competed with (Bear was the smallest of the "big five" investment banks on Wall Street before its collapse), saying that Greenberg helped grow the firm from 120 employees when he arrived in 1949 to 10,000 when he resigned the chairmanship, without a single acquisition of a firm larger than 30 employees.
This was in contrast to its competitors which grew into behemoths thanks to merger-hungry chief executives. That, along with its policy that executives donate 4% of their salaries to charity and their reluctance to fire employees was "more characteristic of a family than a corporation."
Greenberg was also famously thrifty, telling his employees in a memo to save paper clips. He had a small office and mainly worked at a desk on Bear's trading floor, and asked his wife to be buried "in the simplest casket available," his son Ted said, reading from his father's instructions.
"I think spending money on an expensive casket is a waste of money, if you can't find one cheap enough, let me know and I will build one in my workshop in the Hamptons," Greenberg wrote in his funeral instructions.
This too was an implicit contrast to the lavishness that marked pre-crash Wall Street, like when Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain reportedly spent $1.2 million when he took the job in December 2007. Less than a year later, Merrill Lynch was nearly bankrupt and had to be rescued by Bank of America.
Greenberg was laid to rest in a $600 finished nutmeg casket. "Sorry Dad, we couldn't do it," his son said, "we'll try to make it back at the Harmonie Club shiva."
At the beginning of the service, two members of the American Society of Magicians, of which Greenberg was a longtime member, broke his wand.
"When he was initiated into the magic fraternity, he was presented with this wand, an ancient emblem of mystery and power" Jerry Deutsch, a friend and fellow magician said, holding the wand. "However when a magician dies, the wand has no further meaning, no authority, it becomes just a piece of wood, and the spell is broken."
It’s called Bolt, but it’s only launching in Singapore, South Africa, and New Zealand to get things started.
Facebook unveiled another attempt at an ephemeral photo-sharing application today — this one under the Instagram banner called Bolt, though it won't be available in the U.S. right away.
The hook for Bolt this time is it removes another layer of the sharing process. Instead of taking a photo and then deciding who to send that photo, Bolt has a row of profile pictures that themselves serve as buttons to take the photo.
When signing up, the app uses a phone number in lieu of a Facebook or Instagram account. Users then add friends to their list of "favorites," which show up as little profile badges on the bottom of the app. Users then tap that badge to send a photo or a video to that person.
This is the not the first time Facebook (which owns Instagram) has taken a crack at a more seamless alternative photo-sharing application. It tried to essentially clone Snapchat in the form of an app called Poke. It also recently released a photo-sharing application called Slingshot that requires its users to send another photo in order to view the ones they have received. Neither has quite captured the magic of Snapchat — or even Instagram — and rocketed to the top of the App Store charts.
AppAnnie
Snapchat, the likely competitor for an application like Bolt, is already a pretty seamless process with one tap to take a photo, and then a few extra taps to decide who receives that photo outside of the actual photo-editing process. The sell for Bolt appears to be that it is much faster than those applications, reducing the photo-sharing process to a single tap.
Bolt, too, is not the only photo-sharing application focusing on speed. Taptalk, another photo-messaging app, enables users to send a photo by tapping a profile photo. The next version of the iPhone messaging application, too, will include a tap-to-record video function built into iMessage. Speed is certainly becoming an important part of photo-sharing, and it will be up to the differences Facebook has built in — both at a design and functional level — to differentiate Bolt from those other applications.
The retailer is trying hard to convince teenagers it’s a brand for their generation.
Via aeropostale.com
"Are you who you were a year ago?" Aeropostale asks teens in a new video ad. No, it answers. And neither is Aeropostale, it adds. The screen then flashes the words: "Aero Now."
The struggling mall chain rolled out a new logo and back-to-school campaign on Monday under the "Aero Now" tagline, as it works to convince teenagers that it's relevant and cool. Chief Executive Officer Tom Johnson said in May that the campaign was meant to "cast a bright spotlight on all of the changes we've made to our brand, as well as resonate strongly with the teen consumer." After six straight quarters of declining sales, and a 65% stock plunge this year, it's essential for the retailer to get it right.
Most of Aeropostale's marketing has taken place on social media, especially on Twitter, where its bio proclaims: "WE ARE A GENERATION OF NOW." As teens hang out at the mall less, Johnson has said that Aeropostale is trying to counter that trend by "attacking social media in a significant way."
Aeropostale purchased a promoted trend on Twitter yesterday, an exclusive 24-hour buy, along with other Twitter ads, and also advertised its new campaign across Instagram, Vine, YouTube, and Facebook. Still, Twitter was its focus, where the brand responded to both fans and its "haters" in real-time. For example, one user tweeted: "Aeropostale is trying to make a comeback. Key word trying." Aeropostale responded with a gif of Britney Spears saying "Bye." (The user apologized.)
"Because the conversation piece is so heavy on Twitter in a way that doesn't happen on the other platforms, we felt it was a really important place for us to take our message," David Gallon, Aeropostale's director of social media said. The campaign, represented through the hashtag #AeroNow, has gotten "tremendous positive reaction," he said.
Aeropostale is the cheapest offshoot of the "three As," retail industry parlance for a group that also includes American Eagle and Abercrombie & Fitch. All three chains have come under pressure in the past few years as teens have moved away from preppy, uniform-like styles and towards fast-fashion and surf-and-skate chains. The shift has been the hardest on Aeropostale.
Aeropostale's declaration that it has changed "is a bold statement," according to Gallon.
"I think it's really thought-provoking," he said. "Obviously, the implicit statement we're making is we're not the same as what we were a year ago, but I think it also plays back to a teenager and where they're at in this stage of their lives."
He added: "It was really about owning the moment. I think at the end of the day, if the teen thinks, 'You know what, that was cool. They get it.' That's what this is about. It's about building that relationship with the teen audience and being relevant and speaking their language."
The company reported its second-quarter earnings today. The stock is soaring, up 20% in extended trading.
Eric Gaillard / Reuters
Shares of Twitter exploded in extended trading, jumping more than 20%, after the company reported its second-quarter earnings that were much better than what Wall Street analysts were expecting.
Twitter said it earned 2 cents per share on $312 million in revenue. Analysts were expecting a loss of 1 cent per share on revenue of $282.8 million. The company's user growth rate actually rose on a quarter-over-quarter basis, with the company saying it had 271 million monthly active users. That would imply that Twitter has managed to at least, for the time being, hold off a continued decline in its user growth rate – a point of frustration for both the company and its investors.
It was a busy quarter for Twitter, which not only saw a huge amount of activity around the World Cup, but also rolled out its own Mobile App Install Ad product. The company also bought Tap Commerce, a firm that specializes in getting a user who has already installed an app to go back to that app through advertising, for $100 million.
By introducing new advertising products and improving targeting, Twitter can build its advertising business. The company has had trouble keeping up with Wall Street's expectations for user growth, but it can make the case to investors that its ad targeting is improving and is competitive with larger platforms like Facebook. Twitter says its advertising network, powered by an advertising company called MoPub that it acquired in September last year, reaches more than one billion mobile devices.
Twitter is also searching for new metrics to demonstrate its growth beyond the monthly active user, which has become a go-to among investors and the technology community for gauging growth. While it's those users that are tweeting, Twitter is making the case that its overall reach is actually much higher thanks to the company's tweets — and the content in those tweets — being published on other web sites and services on the Web.
While the stock is off from its highs after its mobile active user growth was lower than expected, Twitter's share price has found some stable footing through much of July. Twitter's lockup also expired earlier this quarter, leading to a flood of new shares available for public trading as employees were able to rake in their IPO winnings.
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During the company’s second quarter earnings call, CEO Michael Johnson defended Herbalife’s earnings miss and recent hiring of a government affairs official by sharing his grand vision for its future. The comments come a week after Bill Ackman’s Herbalife presentation in New York at which he vehemently insisted the company was a giant pyramid scheme.
Robert Galbraith / Reuters / Reuters
Eduardo Munoz / Reuters
One day after reporting its first earnings miss in 21 quarters that sent its stock tumbling more than 10% to below $60 per share, Herbalife CEO Michael Johnson defended the company, saying it was on track for significant growth in the near future.
Johnson – under highly public attack by hedge fund titan Bill Ackman — said his appointment of a new top lobbyist, Alan Hoffman, to handle regulatory questions is merely a product of Herbalife's ambition. In the last year, the company has come under investigation by multiple government agencies including the the Federal Trade Commission and the FBI.
"Eventually, we're going to be a Fortune 100 company," Johnson said. The Los Angeles-based, $6.6 billion nutritional supplement company did not crack the Fortune 500 most profitable list for 2014.
The comments come a week to the day after Ackman's at times bizarre presentation on Herbalife, in which he vehemently defended his $1 billion short position and continued his crusade to bring the company down, believing it to be a massive pyramid scheme.
Analysts expected Herbalife to deliver a second quarter adjusted profit of $1.57 per share ahead of Tuesday's call. The company announced Monday it had second quarter earnings of $1.55 per share, which the company defended on the call, saying that while sales were slightly below its estimates, they were offset by lower-than-expected costs throughout the quarter.
And while Ackman's assertions from last week's presentation that Herbalife's customer base was grossly exaggerated and in some cases, completely fake were not directly addressed on the call, Johnson appeared to fire back in defense of his company, saying, "There is real demand by real people for our products."
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The online retailer of affordable fashion jewelry has now raised a total of $15.6 million.
BaubleBar / Via Facebook: baublebar
BaubleBar, an online retailer that sells low-priced fashion jewelry, has raised $10 million in a second fundraising round led by entrepreneur Chris Burch's eponymous investment firm.
Burch Creative Capital was joined by Aspect Ventures, Triplepoint Ventures, Comcast Ventures and current investors Accel Partners and Greycroft Partners for the Series B round, BaubleBar said in an announcement. The New York-based startup has raised a total of $15.6 million in capital.
BaubleBar says the money will be used to help support partnerships it started this year with Nordstrom and Anthropologie and to expand the company's online and offline infrastructures. BaubleBar, which counts $26 earrings and $38 necklaces among bestsellers on its website, also has its own store in New York.
"We'll also make investments in improving our customer experience both online and on mobile and continue to innovate on our fast fashion sourcing model and quick speed-to-market merchandising strategy," cofounder Daniella Yacobovsky said in an e-mail.
The company says it's "especially" excited to have retail veteran Burch involved in its latest round. Burch, designer Tory Burch's ex-husband, is behind new fashion line C. Wonder. His firm has made investments in Jawbone fitness wearables, Five Below, and the Monika Chiang brand.
Nordstrom / Via shop.nordstrom.com
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The giant bank points to the huge scope of its business as a defense against a pay discrimination suit. Goldman lawyers said there was no evidence of a company-wide policy that disadvantaged women in pay and promotion
This bewilderingly large graphic is part of Goldman Sachs's defense against a four year-old gender discrimination suit that gained new steam as the plaintiffs sought to include up to 2,300 current and former female employees in a class action.
The plaintiffs said in a filing earlier this month said Goldman's "common, discriminatory performance review, compensation, and promotion procedures … cause systemic disparate treatment against women" was in violation of federal and New York City anti-discrimination laws. They also repeated allegations that Goldman Sachs bad a "boys club" atmosphere, including trips to strip clubs and excluding female employees from golf game and trading-floor push up competitions.
The plaintiffs pointed to statistics gleaned from Goldman Sachs data gathered during the discovery process and analyzed by an expert witness which showed that female vice presidents earned 21% less than their male counterparts, while female associates earned 8% less and that 23% fewer vice presidents who were women earned promotions to managing director. The plaintiffs will respond Tuesday, a lawyer for the plaintiffs told the Wall Street Journal.
In a filing today, Goldman's lawyers sought to rebut the plaintiffs' attempt to certify the class-action, saying that the experiences of the women named in the suit were not indicative of a pay and promotion policy that goes across the entire proposed class, which would include female associates and vice presidents in the bank's investment banking, investment management, and securities divisions from 2004 through today. The company's lawyers cited the precedent the Supreme Court established in Wal-Mart v Dukes, where the Court refused to certify a group of female Wal-Mart employees as a class because they couldn't show that a common corporate policy lead to differences in pay.
"What Plaintiffs must show to certify their proposed class is not merely the existence of some procedural framework, but that the Firm's undeniably gender-neutral processes have been uniformly applied—across a class of more than 2,300 women professionals in 140 Business Units—to disparately impact those professionals," the bank's lawyers said in the filing.
The filing included a diagram showing the company's business units in far more detail than is typically included in the bank's public reports. David Wells, a Goldman Sachs spokesperson, said the that the organization chart included in the filing wasn't current, but instead accurate through 2011. Even so, it provides a stark visual look at just how sprawling and diverse Goldman Sachs's business is.
To rebut the plaintiffs claims that the female employees in the investment banking, investment management, and securities divisions were affected in a discriminatory way by a common policy, Goldman pointed to the diversity of business units and compensation policies in those units. "This case is a textbook example of why class certification requires proof, not a broad brush and a bucket of mud," the lawyers said in a filing.
Investment management includes both wealth management for wealthy individuals, foundations, and endowments along with funds run by the bank for investors. Securities includes selling and trading all sorts of financial products, like stocks, options, bonds, mortgages, currencies and commodities, while investment banking includes advice for companies on strategic matters like fundraising and mergers along developing and selling financial products to companies.
Goldman Sachs also has an investment and lending division — whose female employees the plaintiffs in this case did not try to represent in their suit — that makes longer term investments in companies, debt, and real estate.
Two of the original plaintiffs worked in the securities division of the bank, which itself had 35 different business units in 2005 when one of the plaintiffs, Cristina Chen-Oster, left the bank.
Goldman said that the diversity of the investment banking, securities, and investment management business and the purported lack of evidence of discriminatory polices across the three divisions and their more than 140 business units is a reason not to certify a glass of female employees. "Across these Business Units, the proposed class members advised on mergers and acquisitions in the healthcare industry, traded petroleum futures, structured financial derivatives, ran investment funds based on mathematical algorithms, and so on," Goldman's lawyers said in a filing.
The lawyers said that "nothing about the diverse roles of these professionals...is uniform." The pay structure is similarly differentiated — while employees across Goldman get a base salary and a bonus, each business unit has its own bonus policy.
Commodities traders, for instance, have their pay "tied directly to their profit and loss statistics," Goldman's lawyers said, while managers in the Principal Strategic Investments, which owns stakes in market-related companies like exchanges, "do not analyze profit and loss on an individual level in determining compensation."
Goldman also provided its own expert witness that criticized the plaintiffs' analysis, saying they didn't take into account how the performance of employees affected their pay and promotion. The filing also characterized additional declarations added to the original suit that were largely consistent with the original complaint — including one from a current Goldman Sachs employee — as "a handful of anecdotes of supposed hostility toward women" and said that the additional six declarations gathered over four years showed the evidence of discrimination was "less than paper-thin" and "virtually nonexistent."
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Darden Restaurants announced late Monday that CEO Clarence Otis will be stepping down after 10 years with the fast casual dining giant. His departure follows the company’s sale of Red Lobster to private equity firm Golden Gate Capital.
Keith Bedford / Reuters
Monday marked the end of an era in more ways than one at Darden Restaurants, the fast casual dining giant and parent company of Olive Garden and, as of this afternoon, Red Lobster. But the battle between Darden and Starboard Value, the activist hedge fund fighting for control of the company, rages on.
After closing the sale of Red Lobster earlier this morning to the private equity firm Golden Gate Capital for $2.1 billion in cash, Darden announced that its Chairman and CEO of 10 years, Clarence Otis, would be stepping down effective immediately. Additionally, the Darden board moved to amend its corporate bylaws to separate the Chairman and CEO roles, with Otis remaining in the latter position until a successor is named, or the end of this year, whichever comes first.
"With the Red Lobster sale complete and progress on our Olive Garden brand renaissance and other strategic priorities underway, this is the right time for me to step down," Otis said in a statement. " Darden benefits from thousands of talented employees who work tirelessly to nourish and delight our guests every day. I am confident that they, under the leadership of our Board and management team, will continue to make progress on the actions we are taking to reinvigorate restaurant performance and further enhance shareholder value."
For the last seven months, Darden has been fighting two activist investors, Barington Capital and Starboard Value, which have been fighting for a new strategic direction for the company, and Red Lobster and Olive Garden, specifically. The battle intensified in May, when Darden announced it would sell Red Lobster, in spite of a special meeting Starboard Value had rallied shareholders to vote in favor of to discuss the merits of a potential sale.
Starboard fired back, launching a proxy fight five days later to take control of the full Darden board.
It now appears Darden is attempting some semblance of a peace offering, ousting Otis, approving the full slate of Starboard nominees for its board, and only nominating nine of a potential 12 board members, leaving three seats open for Starboard to be voted on by Darden shareholders at the company's annual meeting in September.
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“This is a big deal,” Blockchain CEO Nicolas Cary said. The app had been removed in February but has now returned following Apple’s publishing guidelines for digital currency apps released in June.
When Apple removed all digital currency apps on the App Store earlier this year, the bitcoin community responded with shock, anger, and destruction — one bitcoin user even shot his iPhone 4S with a rifle in exchange for a Nexus 5.
But today, Blockchain, which was the most popular bitcoin app before its removal in February, announced that its wallet app is available again in the iOS App Store. "This is a super exciting day for bitcoin," Blockchain CEO Nicolas Cary said in an interview with BuzzFeed. "Everyone here is all smiles." Blockchain's wallet app allows users to send and receive bitcoins and view their transactions along with their bitcoin balance.
The app's return follows Apple's release of new guidelines for developers of virtual currency apps back in June. The release said it would allow apps for digital currency transmission "provided that they do so in compliance with all state and federal laws for the territories in which the app functions." The new guidelines signaled that the company was willing to allow bitcoin back on the App Store and release the huge iOS developer community to work with bitcoin apps.
Cary said that the UK-based Blockchain had grown from 950,000 users in the beginning of the year to 1.9 million today, despite losing access to iPhone and iPad users. The app had been downloaded over 120,000 times before it was removed. It had been available for more than two years in the App Store before it was first removed.
Cary emphasized that mobile access was crucial for any bitcoin app because many of those interested in using bitcoin don't have PCs.
He also said that the wallet app had added a new security feature — a pin screen — and was also rewritten to be faster with an updated user experience. He didn't think any of the changes were what led Apple to accept it, though. Blockchain submitted the app last week and heard over the weekend that it was available in the App Store. "It has a lot more to do with the whole community than us, it demonstrates that Apple is open to developers," Cary said. The company has also released an updated version of its Android app.
"I think not only is this a big deal for Blockchain," Cary said. "Apple is the world's leading consumer brand period, allowing bitcoin wallets back into the space is an enormous endorsement."
