In addition to the whole “help turn Morgan Stanley around” task, Ruth Porat, who was named CFO last January, has another entry on her to do list: don’t get unceremoniously canned like your girlfriends. “Be careful in everything you do, because we all know how this ended before,” an analyst told her at a cocktail party earlier this year, the insinuation being that she ought to avoid getting fired from Lehman Brothers, forced to take a leave of absence from Credit Suisse, and ultimately spend her days taking spin classes and dating a firefighter in the Hamptons, like Erin Callan, or getting the bootskie from Vikram Pandit, like Sallie Krawcheck.

Porat may have gone from a client-facing banker job to a “technical” one where you have to, as Glen Schorr puts it, “know everything about everything,” without ever working in a finance department but forget about “numbers” for a second. This lady doesn’t have any quit in her, and has shown that crippling back pain or even labor contractions are mere speed bumps that will not in any way hamper her from doing what she has set out to do, unlike her male counterparts who would be crying for a heating pad at the first spasm or an epidural the second their water broke.

Colleagues say Ms. Porat is a tireless worker. In 1992, during the birth of her first son, she was on the phone in the delivery room making client calls. And in her spare time she, along with her husband, a lawyer, renovate and sell New York City apartments…[Mary] Meeker, the godmother to each of Ms. Porat’s three sons, remembers one meeting with management at the media company Ziff Davis where Ms. Porat threw her back out. “Instead of leaving she laid on the boardroom table and continued on with the presentation,” Ms. Meeker said.

Ruth Porat Avoids Wall Street Pitfalls For Women [Dealbook]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Sara Grillo is a manager with hedge fund advisor Diamond Oak Capital Advisors and the topic of a recent Bloomberg article. What about Grillo intrigued editors enough to profile her? Without having spoken to anyone over there an educated guess would have to be her ability to overcome obstacles and in doing so, set examples for females trying to break into a male-dominated field. Obstacles such as:

1) Unemployment

Work in a bar. That was a friend’s suggestion for Harvard graduate Sara Grillo after she was laid off from Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008. Two years later, the hedge-fund analyst is campaigning to get more women into top financial jobs. Grillo, 32, who co-manages hedge fund advisor Diamond Oak Capital Advisors LLC, found herself among 225,000 unemployed finance workers that year as the subprime market collapsed. “If I were a tall, broad shouldered, gray-haired, 50-year- old man with the same credentials, nobody would have suggested I take a job for less than one eighth of my salary,” said Grillo in a telephone interview from her home in Queens, New York City.

2) The fail rate of the venerable CFA exams

Dismayed by friends’ suggestions that she quit finance, Grillo vowed to help more women join the industry, setting a goal of raising the proportion of women Chartered Financial Analysts to 50 percent from the current 19 percent. “I’m a CFA charterholder and I always look women right in the face and tell them that if I did it, they can do it as well…I wanted those letters after my name so badly,” she said. “If it took me 80 years, it was going to say, ‘Sara Grillo, CFA’ on my tombstone.”

3) Cheapskate boyfriends who apparently deserve to be called out in publications read by millions of people.

Grillo said she and her boyfriend were faced with a choice between a platinum, gold or silver engagement ring. He said he didn’t care which one she chose so long as it was the cheapest. Grillo did care, so she dumped him and invested the money for the wedding in Commercial Metals Co. a small-cap stock that made her as much as 300 percent in profit.

Harvard To Lehman To New York’s Subway [Bloomberg via Daily Intel]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Barclays Taps Diamond As CEO (WSJ)
In an unexpected shake-up, the giant London-based bank announced Tuesday morning that Mr. Diamond, Barclays’s president and investment-banking chief, will replace current CEO John Varley. After serving as CEO since September 2004, Mr. Varley will step down on March 31. Mr. Diamond will assume the title of deputy group CEO on Oct. 1. The announcement comes as a surprise, since Mr. Varley hasn’t previously indicated he has plans to retire. The 59-year-old Mr. Diamond, an avid golfer and die-hard Boston Red Sox fan, is four years older than Mr. Varley, who is 55. He lost out to Mr. Varley for the CEO job in 2003.

Obama Plans Business Tax Relief, Spending to Spur Growth (Bloomberg)
Obama will announce an expanded tax incentive to encourage business investment, an administration official said on condition of anonymity. Obama also will urge Congress to extend permanently and expand a research-and-development tax credit for businesses, costing about $100 billion over a decade. He began the rollout of initiatives yesterday in Milwaukee, calling for $50 billion in the first of a six-year program to fix roads, railways and runways and modernize the air-traffic control system. “All of this will not only create jobs now, but will make our economy run better over the long haul,” Obama said, announcing his public-works program. “It’s a plan that history tells us can and should attract bipartisan support.”

No Defense Against Double-Dip-Recession, Roubini Says (Telegraph)
“The US has run out of bullets,” said Nouriel Roubini at the annual Ambrosetti conference on Lake Como. “More quantitative easing (bond purchases) by the Federal Reserve is not going to make any difference. Treasury yields are already down to 2.5pc yet credit spreads are widening again. Monetary policy can boost liquidity but it can’t deal with solvency problems,” he told Europe’s policy elite. “There is a 40pc chance of double-dip recession in the US, and worse in Japan. Even if it is not technically a recession it will feel like it,” he added.

Burry of `The Big Short’ Bets on Farmland, Gold After Profits on Subprime (Bloomberg)
Michael Burry, the former hedge-fund manager who predicted the housing market’s plunge, said he is investing in farmable land, small technology companies and gold as he hunts original ideas and braces for a weaker dollar. “I believe that agriculture land — productive agricultural land with water on site — will be very valuable in the future,” Burry, 39, said in a Bloomberg Television interview scheduled for broadcast this morning in New York. “I’ve put a good amount of money into that.” Burry, who now manages his own money after shuttering the fund in 2008, said finding original investments is difficult because many trades are crowded and asset classes often move together. “I’m interested in finding investments that aren’t just simply going to float up and down with the market,” he said. “The incredible correlation that we’re experiencing — we’ve been experiencing for a number of years — is problematic.”

Cameron lines up HSBC’s Green as trade minister (FT)
Stephen Green is expected to announce on Tuesday he is standing down as chairman of HSBC to become trade minister, ending David Cameron’s long search to find a high-profile business figure to fill the role.

Bounties Spur Surge In Fraud Tips (WSJ)
The Dodd-Frank financial law passed in July provides for the larger bounties, with the hope of fingering wrongdoers such as Bernard Madoff before they swindle thousands of people. People who supply “original information” about large frauds could net as much as 30% of the penalties and recovered funds collected by the SEC, which could add up to a multimillion-dollar payout. Lawyers who represent whistle-blowers have been spreading the word about the new incentives. “We’ve gotten some very high-quality tips,” said SEC official Stephen Cohen.

Why You Can’t Beat Wall Street (NYM)
The current economic malaise would cause trouble for whichever party is in power. But having helped open the valves of anti-Establishment fervor, the Democrats may have not only failed to harness the energy they unleashed, but lost what capitalist allies they had as well. If there is still such a thing as an Establishment, the Obama administration increasingly faces the prospect of alienating it while still getting pilloried for being it. That’s a political perfecta no one was looking to pull off.

Flight Attendant, Jet Blue Part Ways After Dramatic Exit (CNN)
JetBlue spokeswoman Jenny Dervin told CNN on Saturday that Steven Slater no longer works for the airline. She said that the separation occurred last week, but declined to elaborate how Slater and the company parted ways.

Buffett, Gates to Take Philanthropy Trip to China (CNBC)
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates will reportedly travel to China later this month to “learn how to do philanthropy” in that nation. China’s Economic Observer newspaper says Gates and Buffett have invited a “select group” of 50 to 60 members of the nation’s “business elite” to a “private party” in Beijing. Some of those invited, however, have declined to attend, apparently over concerns they’d be asked, or even pressured, to make a donation pledge at the event.

Europe’s Bank Stress-Tests Minimize Debt Risk (WSJ)
An examination of the banks’ disclosures indicates that some banks didn’t provide as comprehensive a picture of their government-debt holdings as regulators claimed. Some banks excluded certain bonds, and many reduced the sums to account for “short” positions they held—facts that neither regulators nor most banks disclosed when the test results were published in late July.

Bankers Gather To Assure Industry Is On The Right Track (NYT)
Top executives from some of the world’s leading banks are due to gather for a conference in Frankfurt later this week as lenders seek to avoid what they see as overly harsh regulation following the global financial crisis. Two years after Lehman Brothers’ collapse heralded the global financial system’s breakdown, chief executives at Morgan Stanley, Unicredit and Commerzbank are expected to try and convince the audience at the “Banken im Umbruch” conference that they have done their work to stabilize their banks and should not be thrown back by new banking rules.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

“There was no capital hole. Lehman had the capital. We needed the liquidity.” [DI]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Barclays Plc had no idea how big Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s futures-and-options trading business was when it considered taking over the defunct bank’s derivatives trades at exchanges in 2008, a Barclays executive said. “Lehman’s books were in such a mess that I don’t think they knew where they were,” Elizabeth James, a director of Barclays’s futures business, testified today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. James worked on Barclays’s purchase of Lehman’s brokerage during the 2008 financial crisis. She said she received an e-mail from former Barclays trading executive Stephen King saying Lehman had “absolutely no idea” if it had sold $2 billion more options than it had bought, or whether it owned $4 billion more than it had sold. [Bloomberg via DI]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

As you may have heard, Wall Street is not, lets just call it, the most “popular” place these days. This is especially true if you’re currently in or running for office. Gotta give the people what they want and what the people want is, for example, you to very publicly and hurtfully break off your bro-mance with anyone in the upper echelons of the Street, no matter how charming, handsome, and sweet they may be. The fact that he was once a managing director at Lehman Brothers is naturally something that Republican Gubernatorial hopeful John Kasich’s opponents are throwing in his face but it wasn’t until recently that they uncovered a relationship that could ruin his chances. It’s not with a hooker and it’s doesn’t involve a source who identified Kasich servicing a hobo in the men’s room of the Port Authority, though it does involve a Dick.

“Fuld is an awesome guy,” Kasich told New York Observer for a September, 2001, story. “He is the kind of guy you want to go into battle with,” the article quoted Kasich as saying. “He is a great leader.”

After Lehman’s demise, Fuld quickly emerged as one of the chief villains of the financial crisis. He was even rumored to have been punched in the face while exercising in the Lehman gym around the time of the company’s bankruptcy. Kasich backed away a little from his association with Fuld during his Reuters interview, saying: “I called him a good leader because of what he did after 9-11.”

Kasich, though, was interviewed for the story before September 11 and the piece made no mention of the attacks, which destroyed Kasich’s New York office.

“Fuld had his thing to do and I had my thing to do,” Kasich added.

Shorting Wall Street On The Campaign Trail [Reuters]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

You’d really be helping them out and apparently they’ve got high hopes, so it’d be yet another kick in the pants for yet another thing to fail. Do it for Dick. [CNBC]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

First off, let me start by putting this out there: Team Rebellion doesn’t need your money. As you can plainly see from the photo at left, if this whole hedge fund thing doesn’t work out, the principals can easily find work as a boy band. Having said that, they’re going to keep at this money biz a bit longer and would love to have you along for the ride. Here are the relevant details:

* The Rebels are like a teeny tiny RenTec, sans the Pall Malls.

* They use Artificial Intelligence to invest, being of the mind that computers = smart, man = stupid (“It’s pretty clear that human beings aren’t improving,” said Spencer Greenberg, 27 years old and the brains behind Rebellion’s AI system. “But computers and algorithms are only getting faster and more robust.”)

* You could try to do what they do at home, but you would most likely die.

“No human could do this,” said Michael Kearns, a computer-science professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has used AI to invest at firms such as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. “Your head would blow off.”

* They have about $7 Million in AUM but have “struggled to raise money, in part because investors since the credit crisis are dubious of opaque math-based strategies.” (This is where you come in.)

* The founder, Spencer Greenberg, is the grandson of Hank Greenberg, the baseball player, not the old man with the dog.

* The other employees are Alexander Fleiss, Jeremy Newton, and Jonathan Sturges, who are not pulling their weight in the famous relatives department. (Fleiss’s background is in finance and math, Sturges has a master’s in music composition, and Newton is a mathematician who helped design the program.)

* Rebellion’s computer is nicknamed “Star,” which isn’t so great as nicknames go but if they can put you down for $100 million and an 8-year lock-up you could probably have a say in getting renamed T-bone or the Big Guy or something.

* If you’re nervous about putting all your money into the hands of a machine, don’t be. Fleiss was scared too until he learned to let go and love the bomb.

In early 2009, Star started to buy beaten-down stocks such as banks and insurers, which would benefit from a recovery. “He just loaded up on value stocks,” said Mr. Fleiss, referring to the AI program. The fund gained 41% in 2009, more than doubling the Dow’s 19% gain.

The firm’s current portfolio is largely defensive. One of its biggest positions is in gold stocks, according to people familiar with the fund.

The defensive move at first worried Mr. Fleiss, who had grown bullish. But it has proven a smart move so far. “I’ve learned not to question the AI,” he said.

* Similarly, if you’re skittish about trusting your money with a bunch of kids under the age of 28, relax. At least one of the principals can grow a beard:

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

The reason a run-of-the-mill financial bust became a catastrophe, Mr Kaletsky claims in his book, was due largely to the stunning failures of one man: Henry Paulson, George Bush’s treasury secretary. In a passionate ad hominem attack, called “The Economic Consequences of Mr Paulson” (after Keynes’s 1925 pamphlet “The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill”, a devastating critique of Sir Winston’s defence of the gold standard), Mr Kaletsky excoriates Mr Paulson, particularly his decision to allow the investment bank Lehman Brothers to fail. The hyperbole is spectacular. Mr Paulson, the book claims, came “closer to destroying capitalism than Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong combined.” [The Economist]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Watch the latest business video at video.foxbusiness.com
Fortunately, this attention by the SEC has not stopped Gregory from going after the $230 million he’s owed in deferred comp.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker