Cocaine! Shiksas! Oy! Put yourself in Bernie Madoff's office space. See page 47 of the new amended complaint in Wexler v. Tremont.
When Bernie Madoff wasn't slapping on his yarmulke to go rip off fellow Jews, he was using their money to slap the bare asses of shiksa strippers and escorts and fill his nose with cocaine. Right there in his offices in the Lipstick Building. And he was letting his feeder-fund pals into the fun.
Shiksas gone wild! No wonder the guy didn't make a single trade. He didn't have time. That's the story in court papers filed just yesterday in the monumental Wexler case against the Ponzi schemer.
Check out the new filings in the New York state court case, Wexler v. Tremont Partners. It's free reading, but you have jump through some hoops. Start here, use this case number, 101615/2009, and go to the October 20 amended complaint.
Last night on TV, 60 minutes (well, not the full hour) of self-serving bullshit. Commenter OrneryBabe on Gawker provides the best review of the post-game show: "The only explanation I can think of for his exploits is that he probably has a very small penis."
Smart, shrewd story: "The Web can be a mean-spirited place. But when it comes to online reviews, the Internet is a village where the books are strong, YouTube clips are good-looking and the dog food is above average."
Good piece, once you get past a typical New Yorker lede sentence: "In early August, Lawrence H. Summers, President Barack Obama's top economic adviser, accompanied Vice-President Joseph Biden aboard Air Force Two on a trip to Detroit."
If you're still taking Yaz after the above skinback commercial that has been running for months under pressure from the FDA, you could very well be out of your fucking mind.
"The carbon-based free lunch is over," says the CEO of one of the nation's biggest utilities, rebelling against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's head-in-sand stance against global-warming legislation.
Bailout of Wall Street execs gets personal: Aussie drug company Acrux will ask FDA to let it sell Axiron, an underarm spray that boosts testosterone. Global markets for testosterone treatments, story says, is $1 billion a year and has risen up, up, up by more than 20 percent in the U.S. Meanwhile, "U.S. Drug Companies Chase Vaccines," WSJ says of impending flu profits.
G-20 roundup from Pittsburgh. Click on the above video for Russian TV footage of black-clad cops rousting black-clad protesters, as a robotic-sounding voice emanates from a police loudspeaker: "No matter what your purpose is, you must leave." NYT story here.
Thanks to all of you who get paid nothing by Twitter despite your being its only product/asset, the company that hasn't yet generated any significant revenue is about to get $100 million in new funding. In August 2008, Twitter had 4.3 million unique visitors; this August it had 54.7 million. Now hooked, users are, like it or not, about to be bombarded by advertisers and marketers. Too bad most of you are either out of work or otherwise can't afford to buy all the shit you'll be told to buy. (See next item.)
Typically excellent human-interest WSJ story, this one focuses on jobless Americans. Introducing an array of hard-luck yarns: "Nearly 15 million Americans are jobless, and the number is widely expected to remain high even as the economy slowly begins to recover. Part of the problem many of the unemployed face: the very fact that they have been out of work a long time."
CFO at France's biggest telecom warns that, as story says, "the barrage of emails from smartphones and personal computers was stressing out employees."
Opium production in Afghanistan has dropped 10 percent, but prices are still at a 10-year low, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (Afghan Opium Survey 2009). Somehow, this is kinda being spun as progress in the war on drugs.
Taking away Afghan farmers' livelihoods may not be the best way to win the overall Afghan War, and the farmers are fighting back the only way they know how. With an efficiency that would put the most cunning Wall Street derivatives genius to shame, Afghan farmers who haven't been rousted by narcs are extracting more of the popular derivative per poppy bulb.
So why are prices dropping? The same reason that oil prices don't really depend upon supply.
Detailed report on hyperlocal tool Foursquare, which gets people together via smartphones at various restaurants and bars. As a potentially powerful advertising tool for such places, it's yet another threat to newspapers that are trying to survive on online ads. Potentially, restaurants and bars could completely bypass newspapers and other online ad outlets.
The L.A. Times, in its very first paragraph of a hometown big-news story, calls Disney's conquest of Marvel's superheroes a "reinvention" — no wonder that readers are flocking away from dull daily newspapers. Much better, as usual, is the Wall Street Journal's take: "By bringing in macho types such as Iron Man, Thor and Captain America, the Marvel deal would expand Disney's audience, adding properties that appeal to boys from their preteen years into young adulthood. That demographic group hasn't been swept up by Disney's recent hot properties, such as High School Musical and the Jonas Brothers." Marvel becomes a Mickey Mouse operation as Disney tries to jump-start flagging DVD sales. The film industry is in deep trouble from all sorts of Web-based diversions, and the WSJ sees more consolidation in Hollywood. Meanwhile, Disney's Bob Iger sounds like a pedophile: "We view this as an opportunity to attract more boys and older kids." The Big Money's Chadwick Matlin spoofs "Exclusive Disney-Marvel Synergy Memo." Click on video above (or here) for Disney's subliminal messages.
Riffing on David Cho's scary story last weekend in the Washington Post, "Banks 'Too Big to Fail' Have Grown Even Bigger," Salmon urges that someone has to force Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, and BofA "to start shrinking today."
"In a perfect world, we would simply ban leveraged buyouts. The vast majority of these debt-laden corporate takeovers are no less predatory and value-destroying to a company than a loan shark who charges usurious rates of interest." However, it's an imperfect world, so why not force private equity buyers "to pony up at least 50 percent of the purchase price"?
Puts the lie to current spin. With links. Behind all this is that sharks are using corporate welfare to churn shitty banks, and that's not going to accomplish anything but profits for individual sharks. His conclusion: "Recognize bad debt instead of continuing to pretend it will work itself out eventually. Stop funding insolvent institutions and use those funds to seed new, healthy banks instead."
Warner Chilcott's $3.1 billion purchase of Procter & Gamble's prescription-drug unit is not only a sign that banks are starting to resume leverage action. The market is loving it, and it's evidence that money is starting to flow again.
But this is also a perfect fit of two major drug dealers: P&G has been a major player in female meds, and Warner Chilcott has been angling not only to dominate female specialty meds but also get into the growing erectile-dysfunction market.
Only last January, Warner Chilcott signed a big deal to peddle Korean drug giant Dong-A's erectile-dysfunction pill. (Dong-A's Ausung condoms pictured left.)
And talk about growing: The deal with P&G triples the size of Warner Chilcott.
Warner Chilcott is referred to as an Irish company, but that's only because it just fled Bermuda for Eire. And that's only because of the international crackdown on tax havens. Actually, Warner Chilcott's corporate HQ is in Rockaway, New Jersey, and its big plants are in Puerto Rico, where it has a sweetheart tax deal.
P&G's Actonel (for osteoporosis) rakes in $1 billion a year, which is more than Warner Chilcott's total annual revenue for everything.
P&G's withdrawal from prescription meds makes sense. The WSJ's Jacob Goldstein sums it up nicely: "With tight scrutiny from the FDA, intense competition from generics companies and looming patent expirations, big pharma is busy pushing further into diversified fields like consumer products, branded generics and animal health."
Warner Chilcott CEO Roger Boissonneault says the purchase transforms the outfit "into a global pharmaceutical company, expands our presence in women's healthcare, establishes us in the urology market in advance of the anticipated launch of our erectile dysfunction treatments, and adds gastroenterology therapies to our product portfolio." Warner Chilcott looks like one big swinging dick.
Slate's Tim Noah has all the grisly details of how the White House has caved in to the Billy Tauzin and the pharmaceutical industry in the complex, intense bartering over health-care "reform."
By agreeing to lower prescription costs for seniors by $80 billion, Big Pharma won a key concession from Barack Obama's crew: The drug industry would not have to endure additional pressure from Congress for more savings. Some estimate that Big Pharma got off extraordinarily easy.
Lefties are howling about it, and so are many conservatives. That might mean that Obama's doing the right thing, but it might also mean that he's running a protection racket. It sure as shit looks like one.
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