Obligatory Zegna tie.

Niccolo Machiavelli, Vice President at Goldman Sachs, offers some helpful career advice to this year’s male summer interns via the GSElevator blog:

1. If your boss smokes, smoke.

2. If your boss is Indian or Pakistani, learn the rules of cricket. He probably also smokes, so see #1. But be careful, if he doesn’t, he’s a vegetarian yogi.

3. Don’t wear Hermes ties, ever. You have to earn it.

4. Buy a decent suit or 3, but no cuffed or pleated pants. And don’t wear a tie unless you might have a meeting. No one likes that kind of kiss-ass.

5. Learn how to tie a double Windsor; just make sure the knot’s not too fat.

6. Keep your shoes shiny, but don’t let anyone see you having your shoes shined. You have to earn it.

7. If you went to a decent boarding school, subtly find out if anyone who matters went to the same school. Boom, he’s your rabbi. At this point, no one cares about college credentials; it’s a given.

8. As it relates to fellow interns, make no mistake about it – it’s war:

Let’s be clear. It’s impossible to compete with female interns. And it’s not cool. So don’t bother trying.

When a fellow intern leaves his desk, change his screen (or screens) to rolex.com, porsche.com, or morganstanley.com.

Come up with dismissive nicknames for fellow interns (Chico, Bud Fox, Fredo, Bubba, etc.). Hope that it catches on.

When a fellow intern leaves his computer unlocked at the end of the evening, change the signature on his Email settings. Using white font, add any variety of obscene words. No one will see it… except for IT and HR.

9. Don’t be too good to do the coffee runs. It shows confidence. Just don’t fuck it up. If you can’t be trusted with coffee, how can you sell bonds or manage risk.

10. Call Bloomberg and have them give you a tutorial on functions. It’s free. And most EDs and above are still using functions and short cuts from 5+ years ago. It’s an easy way to impress them. And many of the Bloomberg girls are hot.

11. Leave a jacket on the back of your chair at all times. While you are at it, keep a tie in your drawer. Zegna is a good choice.

12. Ask the secretary for the travel schedules of the senior members of your group for the week ahead. She’s dumb enough to think you are being proactive. But now you know when you can sleep in, hit the gym, or beat the traffic to Southampton.

13. Never tell racist jokes. Always repeat racist jokes in the proper company and be sure to credit ‘the other intern’ who told you.

Read the whole thing, Bubba.

Hat tip to Lynn Chu.

Greg Smith’s resignation from Goldman Sachs via a denunciatory letter to the New York Times editorial page yesterday provoked Jim Geraughty (via his emailed Morning Jolt) to imagine the same letter composed by a fed-up Dark Lord of the Sith.

Today is my last day at the Empire.

After almost twenty years, first as a summer intern, then as the Emperor’s spy on the Jedi Council, then as his apprentice and Dark Lord of the Sith, I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of the Empire’s culture, its people (both cloned and non-cloned) and its role in bringing order to the galaxy. I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it, and I don’t mean destructive in its traditional, positive connotation.

This used to be an institution based upon facing one’s foes eye-to-eye, like a room full of younglings. Or betraying longtime brothers-in-arms in the middle of battle, when they least expect it. But instead, management meetings are dominated by the boasting and taunting of Imperial officers whose lack of faith is disturbing, all too proud of the technological terrors they’ve constructed. They fail to see that the power to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

I have attempted to reach out and make a gripping argument to those who disagree, but the old, all-too-complacent top management insists these whippersnappers be released and that this assessment is dismissed as “pointless bickering.” Time and again, middle management proves itself as clumsy as it is stupid. Outside consultants are dismissed with a sneer, “we don’t need their kind.” Managers expect us to ignore delays in construction projects by sniveling that our presence is an “unexpected pleasure” and how honored they are by our presence. We can dispense with the pleasantries.

People who care only about making the same super-weapon, again and again, with more or less the exact same weakness and design flaw, will not sustain this Empire—or the fear of its people—for very much longer.

James Pethokoukis suggests that the lights burned late on Friday at the White House and loud sounds of weeping could be heard by anyone nearby.

[Friday] night in a new report, Democrat-friendly Goldman Sachs dropped an economic bomb on President Obama’s chances for reelection (bold is mine):

Following another week of weak economic data, we have cut our estimates for real GDP growth in the second and third quarter of 2011 to 1.5% and 2.5%, respectively, from 2% and 3.25%. Our forecasts for Q4 and 2012 are under review, but even excluding any further changes we now expect the unemployment rate to come down only modestly to 8¾% at the end of 2012.

The main reason for the downgrade is that the high-frequency information on overall economic activity has continued to fall substantially short of our expectations. … Some of this weakness is undoubtedly related to the disruptions to the supply chain—specifically in the auto sector—following the East Japan earthquake. By our estimates, this disruption has subtracted around ½ percentage point from second-quarter GDP growth. We expect this hit to reverse fully in the next couple of months, and this could add ½ point to third-quarter GDP growth. Moreover, some of the hit from higher energy costs is probably also temporary, as crude prices are down on net over the past three months. But the slowdown of recent months goes well beyond what can be explained with these temporary effects. … final demand growth has slowed to a pace that is typically only seen in recessions. .. Moreover, if the economy returns to recession—not our forecast, but clearly a possibility given the recent numbers …

Alarms bells must be ringing all over Obamaland today. Unemployment on Election Day about where it is right now? Sputtering — if not stalling — economic growth? To many Americans that would sound like the car is back in the ditch — if it was ever out.

Frank Luntz debunks the democrats’ supposed financial “reform” at Huffington Post of all places. This editorial would fit just fine on any conservative blog site.

The New York Times’ headline said it all: “Off Wall St., Worries About Financial Bill”. The Democrats in Washington may think it’s a slam dunk, but the rest of America doesn’t agree.

Look, those who are on the side of significant financial reform are fighting on the side of the angels—and with broad public support. We are fed up with Wall Street abuses and arrogance that makes life for the rest of us on Main Street more difficult. Let’s hold people and businesses more accountable and responsible for what they do and how they do it.

But that doesn’t suddenly equate to support for the legislation now being considered by the Senate. In exactly the same way that the public wanted healthcare reform, just not Obama’s healthcare reform, they want something done to punish the perpetrators of the financial meltdown, but not at the expense of their own checking accounts—or American economic freedom.

The dirty secret of the Senate financial reform bill is that some of its biggest supporters work on Wall Street. Recipients of taxpayer bailout money have no concerns about the bill—in fact, the CEOs of Citi and Goldman Sachs have publicly endorsed it, and several of the other big banks have expressed support. It keeps the “too big to fail” guarantees in place for another generation of financial services companies.

But here’s where it gets really interesting. The Democrats supporting the current legislation have assured an anxious electorate that whatever funds are used to create whatever regulatory scheme created will come from the banks, not the taxpayers. Let me emphasize that so that even casual readers will catch it: the Democrats promise that you won’t pay for their legislation, banks will.

Really?

Since when have corporations ever paid taxes, fees or penalties? Employees end up paying in the form of lower salaries and benefits. Customers end up paying in the form of higher costs.

And in this case, every account holder will be forced to pay higher fees on their checking account and savings account. That’s you, my friendly reader. Can you say “checkbook tax”? I can, and I think lots of candidates will be saying it come November. Is that what you really want to do to your constituents, Senator Lincoln? Is that what you really want to explain on the campaign trail, Senator Bennett?

But it goes deeper than just taxation and regulation. Wall Street can pass it all onto consumers. Main Street cannot. And that’s because Wall Street firms have all those pesky well-connected, nicely dressed lobbyists to ensure that whatever is passed strengthens their hand at the expense of the little guy.

Regardless of what side you’re on, the financial reform bill is special interest heaven—a bill written by lobbyists, for lobbyists, and will probably be implemented by lobbyists. The Dodd bill has carve-outs right from the get-go. Real estate agents, title companies, the Farm Credit system, even Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae are exempt from its onerous and costly provisions. And for everyone else, it’s been a special interest feeding frenzy.

More than 130 companies have publicly hired lobbyists seeking their own loophole. Mars Candy wants to continue to use derivatives to hedge against price hikes in sugar and chocolate, so they’ve hired a lobbyist. Harley Davidson wants to protect dealer financing of their bikes, so they’ve hired a lobbyist. And eBay wants to not harm its subsidiary, PayPal, so they’ve hired … well … a team of lobbyists.

But most average Americans—the ones who bailed Wall Street out in the first place—cannot afford lobbyists, and won’t be exempted from the legislation.

There’s a reason why American trust in government is at an all-time low. Voters believe legislation like this is passed not for the public interest, but for special interests. And that is certainly the case with the Dodd bill.

In a party line 3-2 vote SEC commissioners voted to sue Goldman Sachs. The SEC charges that Goldman fraudulently represented to investors that the mortgages underlying one of its residential mortgage-backed securities were being selected by an independent third-party. The mortgages, however, were selected by Paulson & Co., a hedge fund that also took a $15 million credit default swap position betting against the same residential mortgage-backed security.

The Epicurean Dealmaker puts the whole fuss wittily into perspective.

I have been reliably informed that something scandalous has recently been unearthed which involves a recurring target of Your Formerly Diligent Blogosopher’s ruminations. I even believe the word “fraud” has been bandied about liberally.

Given that a) I have been occupied elsewhere, and b) I really couldn’t give a flying fuck in a rolling donut whether the Great Vampire Squid of West Street (new digs, natch) vanishes into the singularity or not, I frankly have not paid much attention to the scandal beyond a cursory perusal of the headlines and a couple of blog posts. Honestly, life is just too short.

However, in the spirit of duty which compels Your Humble Servant to satisfy every bloggy whim my Peremptory Audience demands of me (and also because Natasha has temporarily left the hotel room to get more caviar and ice cubes), I will make the following brief observations:

The parties which Goldman supposedly defrauded were large and supposedly sophisticated financial institutions. The managers of these institutions were or should have been paid quite large sums of money to, among other things, protect their stakeholders from fraud, unethical sales practices, and general office supply stealing. I have no sympathy whatsoever for the knuckleheads at ACA or IKB. And, frankly, neither should you.

Whether the alleged fraud rises to the level of an actionable civil claim or simply represents unethical behavior is a question for a court of law. I am not qualified to judge, but the criteria which ultimately determine the nature of Goldman’s alleged offense will be legalistic ones, akin to judging exactly how many mortgage CDO investors’ brains can be fitted onto the head of a pin. While the answer may be definitive, it will not be particularly revealing to the vast majority of us who live outside the cloistered halls of Americus Litigalis.

I must agree with Felix Salmon and others, who claim that the real damage to Goldman Sachs has already been done, with its formerly venerated name being dragged publicly through the mud with an accusation of fraud. While this may have little effect on the majority of Goldman’s business on the sales and trading side of the house—where counterparties are generally too smart to raise a stink about the 800 pound gorilla of the global financial markets (and often too unprincipled themselves to care) — it should and will have an effect on Goldman’s extensive investment banking business with governments, corporations, and other entities.

The Squid has been living for years off the simple fact that, like the fabled IBM of yore, no-one ever got fired (or sued) for picking Goldman Sachs. That calculus has been changed, and I and every one of my red-blooded peers in the industry who is not currently drawing a paycheck signed by David Viniar are making damn sure that CEOs, CFOs, government officials, and Boards of Directors know it. For those of you who were wondering, this is the real reason why Goldman’s market capitalization has taken the vapors to the tune of more than ten billion dollars in response to an action likely to cost it no more than a tiny fraction of that amount: its reputation premium is quietly and rapidly evaporating. There is no shortage of competent investment banks and adequate investment bankers available to conduct the financing and M&A business of the global corporate and government economy. No longer can Goldman rest assured that it will win mandates simply because it is Goldman Sachs.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker, contemplates the history of the famous firm laid out in Charles Ellis’s The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs, and connects the current Wall Street debacle to the wrong kind of leadership.

The rags-to-riches story—that staple of American biography—has over the years been given two very different interpretations. The nineteenth-century version stressed the value of compensating for disadvantage. If you wanted to end up on top, the thinking went, it was better to start at the bottom, because it was there that you learned the discipline and motivation essential for success. “New York merchants preferred to hire country boys, on the theory that they worked harder, and were more resolute, obedient, and cheerful than native New Yorkers,” Irvin G. Wyllie wrote in his 1954 study “The Self-Made Man in America.” Andrew Carnegie, whose personal history was the defining self-made-man narrative of the nineteenth century, insisted that there was an advantage to being “cradled, nursed and reared in the stimulating school of poverty.” According to Carnegie, “It is not from the sons of the millionaire or the noble that the world receives its teachers, its martyrs, its inventors, its statesmen, its poets, or even its men of affairs. It is from the cottage of the poor that all these spring.”

Today, that interpretation has been reversed. Success is seen as a matter of capitalizing on socioeconomic advantage, not compensating for disadvantage. The mechanisms of social mobility—scholarships, affirmative action, housing vouchers, Head Start—all involve attempts to convert the poor from chronic outsiders to insiders, to rescue them from what is assumed to be a hopeless state. Nowadays, we don’t learn from poverty, we escape from poverty, and a book like Ellis’s history of Goldman Sachs is an almost perfect case study of how we have come to believe social mobility operates. Six hundred pages of Ellis’s book are devoted to the modern-day Goldman, the firm that symbolized the golden era of Wall Street. From the boom years of the nineteen-eighties through the great banking bubble of the past decade, Goldman brought impeccably credentialled members of the cognitive and socioeconomic élite to Wall Street, where they conjured up fantastically complex deals and made enormous fortunes. The opening seventy-two pages of the book, however, the chapters covering the Sidney Weinberg years, seem as though they belong to a different era. The man who created what we know as Goldman Sachs was a poor, uneducated member of a despised minority—and his story is so remarkable that perhaps only Andrew Carnegie could make sense of it.

Read the whole thing.