Free Republic

With the job market in shambles, MBAs need encouragement wherever they can find it. For tea and sympathy, many are now turning to B-school support groups. Gillian Mager was in the midst of updating her MBA job club members on her networking efforts last June when she broke down in tears. Like most in the support group at the University of California at San Diego's Rady School of Management (Rady Full-Time MBA Profile), her job search had extended beyond graduation and she spent her days sending out reams of résumés, often getting no response back. Making matters worse, she learned...

When Larry Summers was president of Harvard, a woman by the name of Iris Mack was fired from Harvard Capital Management. The problem with this? A month before she was fired she sent Summers an email warning him about the quality of the portfolio managers at HMC and also about the dangerous derivatives positions that HMC was taking on that ultimately resulted in huge losses for Harvard. {snip] The story of Summers' mismanagement of Harvard's finances appears to be a story that won't seem to die. Most recently showcased by Bloomberg. Now focus appears to be picking up on Mack,...

Arnold Kling has a post on what he calls the Harvard-Goldman filter: The Harvard-Goldman filter works like this. 1. To get into a position of power, you have to pass through a filter. The easiest way to show that you can pass through the filter is to go to Harvard and then work for Goldman. 2. If you do not go to Harvard and work for Goldman, then you have to show that you can get along with people who did. 3. The best way to show that you can get along with people who pass the Harvard-Goldman filter is...

Goldman retreats from life settlements Fri Dec 18, 2009 2:27pm EST *Goldman decision follows Congressional hearing *Credit crunch crushes exotic securities By Matthew Goldstein NEW YORK, Dec 18 (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs (GS.N) is quietly backing away from life settlements--- the business of buying life insurance policies from aging Americans in the hopes of collecting on the death benefit. The Wall Street investment bank is ending its involvement with a "mortality index" it launched in December 2007 with high expectations. A Goldman spokesman confirmed the decision. Goldman's QXX index tracks the life expectancy of a group of people aged 65...

A senior Chinese official criticized foreign banks for selling derivatives with “fraudulent characteristics” that led to heavy losses for state-owned airlines and other companies. “Some international investment banks are the biggest villains,” said Li Wei, deputy chairman of the agency that oversees China’s biggest state companies, in a commentary in this week’s edition of the Study Times, a newspaper published by the school of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. The comments were the Chinese government’s most pointed public criticism yet of foreign institutions. Li’s agency said in September it would support companies that want to challenge the contracts in court....

A senior Chinese official who oversees the country's largest state-owned enterprises has publicly slammed Western investment banks for "maliciously" peddling complicated derivative products that caused huge losses for Chinese companies over the last year. In Beijing's strongest criticism on the matter to date, Li Wei, vice director of the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, singled out Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup in a long and highly critical article in the latest issue of an official Communist party newspaper. The large losses suffered by Chinese state companies were "closely associated with the intentionally complex and highly leveraged...

As we have been reading the latest coverage on the AIG bailout from the SIGTARP report and the Treasury Secretary Geithner’s Congressional testimony, a nagging question remains unresolved: why did AIG get bailed out but the monoline bond insurers did not? . . . I hate to get sucked into the vampire squid line of thinking about Goldman, but the only explanation i can think of for why AIG got rescued and the monolines did not is because Goldman had significant exposure to AIG and did not have exposure to the monolines. When it became clear that AIG could face...