Goldman Holders Miffed At Bonuses (WSJ)
Squid on Squid violence: “Some of the largest shareholders in Goldman Sachs have urged the Wall Street firm to reduce the size of its bonus pool, arguing that it should pass along more of its blockbuster earnings to investors, according to people familiar with the situation. Some major Goldman shareholders also are concerned about a little-noticed change in the company’s financial statements that increased the firm’s total head count by adding temporary employees and consultants. The change reduced per-employee compensation, making it look like Goldman employees earn less than they actually do.”

Harvard Poker Pro Says Texas Hold ‘Em Can Teach Traders to Fold (Bloomberg)
“Someone who has made a successful living as a poker player for a few years would more likely be a good trader than someone who hasn’t,” said Aaron Brown, a 53-year-old former poker pro who is now a risk manager at AQR.

Lampert’s Sears Narrows Its Loss as Gap’s Profit Increases 25% (NYT)
This calls for a pizza party, on Eddie.

SEC Told to Improve Ways It Chooses Probe Targets (AP)
A report released by the office of Inspector General David Kotz proposes new requirements that the SEC’s inspections office examine databases and documents related to investment advisers that may be inspected.

GM’s Chairman Seeks Focus on Quality (WSJ)
Edward Whitacre wants to know why people think GM cars suck.

Oregon Democrat DeFazio Calls for Geithner’s Resignation (Real Time Economics)
“I just do not feel that his orientation is other than Wall Street, and has not been other than Wall Street, and will not be other than Wall Street. And quite frankly all the gambling on Wall Street is doing nothing to put people back to work in America and rebuild our economy.”

A Hedge Fund King Comes Under Siege (WSJ)
Ken Griffin is ready to move on from last year, and would like you to move on and invest with him. If you’re nervous about the losses, take heart: “If there were a repeat of 2008’s market turmoil, Mr. Griffin says, his funds would lose less than 20% rather than 55%. Citadel’s biggest hedge fund has rebounded 58% this year through mid-November. And recently, Mr. Griffin has resumed talking about an initial public offering for Citadel as early as next year.”

Whitney Says Goldman Has Lost ‘Talent’ (Bloomberg)
Not just a little talent but a “tremendous amount of talent,” as a result of execs leaving to start hedge funds, apparently.

New Link In Insider Trading Case (WSJ)
Gary Rosenbach, a Galleon senior partner who left the hedge fund “due to family health reasons” earlier this year.

Elizabeth Warren: Winning Means You Won’t Sell It If You Can’t Explain It (Bloomberg)
“We need a new model: If you can’t explain it, you can’t sell it,” said Warren.

Goldman Was Exposed to AIG Losses: Government Report (NYT)
Surprise! If AIG had collapsed, it would have made it difficult for Goldman to liquidate its trading positions with AIG, even at discounts, the report said. It also would have put pressure on other counterparties that “might have made it difficult for Goldman Sachs to collect on the credit protection it had purchased against an AIG default.” A Goldman spokesman called the risks discussed in the report a “moot point.”

Citi Boosts Base Salaries Of Some Senior Employees (Reuters)
CFO John Gerspach’s annual base salary will increase to $500,000 effective November 1 from $400,000 prior to November, while James Forese is receiving $475,000, compared with $225,000. Gerspach is also receiving $2.92 million of stock salary for 2009, while Forese will get $5.4 million. And a sad trombone for Vikram, who will make $1 for the year, with no stock salary.

Blankfein Apologizes for Goldman Sachs Role in Crisis (Bloomberg)
In case you missed it, Blankfein and Co. are kinda sorry about some stuff they got peer-pressured into going along with. Also, fuck the haters: The firm is “very concerned” about the criticism because “our reputation is very important to us,” said Blankfein. “I don’t love it, we kind of sigh,” he said of the criticism. Instead of responding directly to critics, the company instead had tried provide “the kind of constructive suggestions that people would think a Goldman Sachs would be able to come up with.”

Fearing IRS, 14,700 Disclose Disclosed Offshore Accounts (NYT)
Great news for Tim Geithner: “We are talking about billions of dollars coming into the U.S. Treasury,” Douglas H. Shulman, the I.R.S. commissioner, said Tuesday.

UBS Outlines Path To Profit (WSJ)
“We are on track, we have stabilized UBS’s financial condition but we still have some serious topics to address,” Mr. Grübel told investors. First order of business— we’re going to have to come up with some new and inventive tax evasion strategies. The IRS seems to be on to us.

It’s the Juggernaut, Bitch! (Bloomberg)
Origins of nicknames: “People who know [new head of the Citadel investment banking unit] Patrik Edsparr describe him as outspoken, with a forceful personality. He earned the nickname “juggernaut” during his first job at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., where one of his tasks in the research unit was to collect daily price data from senior traders, one of the people said. Most of his predecessors failed because they were too intimidated to interrupt the traders, who would shout at them. Edsparr would stand behind them, often for up to two hours, until they gave him the data.

Soros Fund Management Holdings Increase (Reuters)
$6.2 billion, up $2 billion, after taking a stake in Ford.

America’s Newest Land Baron: FDIC (WSJ)
The current backlog of property stuck on the agency’s books, with an appraised value of $1.8 billion, ranges from an $18,700 clapboard home with stained carpets in Birmingham, Ala., to a $1.7 million mountainside lodge with a heated driveway in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

Facebook Verb Named English Word of the Year (Reuters)
Don’t want to live in a world where ‘unfriend’ is recognized as a real verb? Then you’re gonna need to kill yourself now.

Paul Allen Diagnosed With Lymphoma (NYT)
“This is tough news for Paul and the family,” wrote Allen’s sister Jody. “Paul is feeling O.K. and remains upbeat. He continues to work and he has no plans to change his role at Vulcan. His health comes first, though, and we’ll be sure that nothing intrudes on that.”

Audit Faults New York Fed in A.I.G. Bailout (NYT)
The Fed “refused to use its considerable leverage,” Neil M. Barofsky wrote in a report to be officially released on Tuesday, examining the much-criticized decision to make A.I.G.’s trading partners whole when people and businesses were taking painful losses in the financial markets.

Bank of America Hits Pay Snag In CEO Hunt (WSJ)
The BAC board has identified another reason no one wants to take over for Ken Lewis (i addition to a lack of interest in running a hellhole) and it starts with a ‘K’ ends with a ‘en Feinberg.’

UBS’s Debt Trading May Be Key for Profit Revival (UBS)
“I’d like to see us put more risk on the table and actually trade a bit harder,” said CFO John Cryan, 48. Wealth management clients, who have already withdrawn a net 182.9 billion francs over the 18 months through the end of September, may not halt redemptions until UBS returns to profitability, he added. “The turnaround will have to come from the investment bank,” said Dirk Becker, a Frankfurt-based analyst at Kepler Capital Markets who rates UBS “reduce.” “However, the biggest profits will come from the private bank. The problem is money outflows and there is no serious hope yet that they will stop.”

Paulson Puts Money On Citi, Ditching Goldman (NYT)
Paulson & Co. acquired an additional 300 million shares of Citigroup during the third quarter, while selling its entire holding in rival Goldman Sachs.

Blankfein: Firm’s wealth unit ‘should be bigger’ (IN)
He declined to discuss specific hiring goals but said in the interview that the firm “has to get into the high hundreds, before we can talk about thousands, of advisers.”

Deutsche Bank Drowning in Vegas on Costliest Bank-Owned Casino (Bloomberg)
And they’re literally underwater: “Any construction project of this size runs into problems,” Fasulo said. “But to bump into an aquifer is just bad luck.”

GM Reports $1.15 Billion Loss (WSJ)
An improvement over last year!

Jamie Dimon: Banks Should Be Allowed To Expand—And Fail (WaPo)
“Ending the era of “too big to fail” does not mean that we must somehow cap the size of financial-services firms. Scale can create value for shareholders; for consumers, who are beneficiaries of better products, delivered more quickly and at less cost; for the businesses that are our customers; and for the economy as a whole. Artificially limiting the size of an institution, regardless of the business implications, does not make sense. The goal should be a regulatory system that allows financial institutions to meet the needs of individual and institutional customers while ensuring that even the biggest bank can be allowed to fail in a way that does not put taxpayers or the broader economy at risk.”

Warren Buffett Says The Financial Panic Is Over (Reuters)
“The financial panic is behind us,” Buffett said at Columbia University’s business school. “Our economy was sputtering, still is sputtering some.”

Ex-Bankers Form ‘Blind Pools’ in Bid for Failed Lenders (WSJ)
“Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG are racing to form investment pools that plan to fund acquisitions by the bankers, who hope to leap into the auction process for failing banks led by the Federal Insurance Deposit Corp. One trio of banking veterans who are considering such plans is former J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive William Harrison, former Wachovia Corp. CEO Robert Steele, and Herb Boydstun, former CEO of Hibernia Corp., a regional bank in New Orleans that was sold to Capital One Financial Corp., according to people familiar with the situation.”

Roomy Khan Tipped Several People In Galleon Case (NYT)
“I provided information to several co-conspirators who worked for various hedge funds, who also traded on the inside information for profit,” Khan said. Also, she destroyed incriminating emails. NBD.

At Boeing, Dreamliner Fix Reveals New Wrinkle (WSJ)
Bad news. Your order is being delayed yet again.

Balyasny Ex-Analyst Under Probe (WSJ)
A complaint was filed last week alleging that an unnamed individual, supposedly Mark Adams, provided material non-public info about EMC Corp, where he once worked, in 2008 and 2009 while he was at Balyasny Asset Management (Adams previously worked at SAC Capital from July 2005 to December 2007).

Bear Stearns Loss Echoes Long Line of U.S. Prosecution Defeats (Bloomberg)
Don’t worry, the Matthew Tannin/Ralph Cioffi case wasn’t the first time the Justice Department was made to look stupid: “The acquittals of two Bear Stearns Cos. hedge-fund managers in a test trial for prosecutions linked to the subprime crisis echo a long line of high-profile financial cases that blew up in the government’s face. The U.S. twice failed to jail ex-Credit Suisse banker Frank Quattrone for obstruction, in 2003 and 2004; HealthSouth Corp. founder Richard Scrushy eluded a fraud conviction in 2005; and many defendants walked free in the most notorious corporate fraud of the decade, the fall of Enron Corp. in 2001.”

Bill Gates Says Wall Street Pay Is Too High (Reuters)
But he also doesn’t like the government putting caps on salary, getting up in people’s business, etc: “I do worry that when the government owns an entity like AIG that you can greatly devalue that entity by having it essentially have to behave as though it part of the government,” Gates said. “It’s an unnatural situation when the government owns a lot of a private company. Unfortunately there is a view that that should exist for a long term. There’s some devaluation of what that asset would have been worth if it hadn’t had to go through that kind of management structure. It’s unavoidable,” he said.

Beijing’s Heaviest Snow in 54 Years Strands Thousands (Bloomberg)
The gov wanted a snow day and god damn it, they were going to get one: “The government induced snowfall in the capital on Nov. 10 by seeding clouds with silver iodide, the China Daily newspaper reported yesterday, citing an unidentified official at the Beijing Weather Modification Office.”

White House Aims To Cut Deficit With TARP Cash (WSJ)
They’re serious about fixing this thing: “The idea is still a matter of debate within the administration and it is unclear how much impact it would have on the nation’s mounting deficit levels. Still, the potential move illustrates how the Obama administration is trying to find any way it can to bring down the deficit, which is turning into a political as well as an economic liability.”

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AIG’s Benmosche Threatens To Leave (WSJ)
Man’s got a vineyard and 12 bathrooms. He doesn’t need this: “At a board meeting last week, the strong-willed industry executive told fellow AIG directors that he was “done” but agreed to think it over after other board members reacted with shock, according to the people. During the three-hour meeting, board members discussed difficulties of complying with pay policies and retaining talent at the company. Mr. Benmosche’s frustrations “hit a crescendo,” said a person familiar with the matter. “Bob feels he is in an impossible situation,” the person added. Mr. Benmosche didn’t respond to a request for comment.”

Whitacre Prods GM Executives With Message of ‘We Need to Hurry’ (Bloomberg)
Let’s put the pedal to the metal here, people: “I’ve been telling them that we need to hurry every chance we get, that we don’t have long to do all this,” Whitacre, 68, said yesterday in an interview from his office in San Antonio. “This is about a turnaround, this is not business as usual. This is about a new GM, a new way of doing business.”

Tax Fears Are Causing Client Outflows, Swiss Bank Asserts (NYT)
Julius Baer would appreciate it if we could please stop scaring its clients into thinking they’re going to get in trubs for tax evasion.

Geither Wants A Strong Dollar, Will Tackle Deficit (Reuters)
“I believe deeply that it’s very important to the United States, to the economic health of the United States, that we maintain a strong dollar,” Geithner said in a meeting with Japanese reporters at the U.S. embassy.

Swiss Bonus Rules Limited to 12 Biggest Finance Firms (Bloomberg)
So, sorry if you work at UBS.

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