...or whatever the name is of the guy running the show. I once heard a sports talk show on the radio while driving that repeated a single piece of advice for athletes who considered themselves a good deal smarter than the rest of the world: JUST SHUT UP!. Great advice for the Greeks. Had they just keep quite and taken their medicine in the markets without complaining about the terrible undeserved interest rates that they were being forced to pay they just might...MIGHT...have gotten through this thing without further embarrassment. But no, they had to keep complaining, and now the whole thing is up in the air again with the IMF pounding at the door, the Germans acting like Germans and everybody mad at everybody else. What everyone is now seeing is what I admitted to miss--the Germans have cast aside any guilt about WW II and are acting like they always have acted,; arrogant and bull-headed--not wrong, mind you--which is why they have always been so loved in Europe.
Now there is no question that the elections in Germany are weighing heavily on Ms Merkel's stance, but come on! The remarkable German export engine is running under full power with record numbers being reported for the quarter benefiting both from the weaker Euro but also within the EU--indeed, mostly within the EU. To believe that Germany would risk the collapse of the Union over a matter of principle is a view hard to come by and indeed even Trichet, no lover of the Hun, dismisses the idea. Yet here we are waiting with baited breath for the coming of Monday to see where this thing is going. I confess to being shocked and incorrect in my assessment of the situation. I still would be long Greek debt, however. Too much is at stake which is not to say that we don't get a rescheduling. Goodness knows EVERYBODY knows how to do those things.
Changing the subject completely, the Prince & Rubin show should be required watching for all of us interested in the financial business. yesterdays event was remarkably enlightening from a number of standpoints. Prince was really good and I think skated through the thing to a point where he's not going to be bothered again. He apologized, admitted he and his management team screwed the pooch, that the entire industry got it wrong and suggested that more regulation might help in preventing a repeat of the same in the future (it will not). Battlin' Bobby, on the other hand, endeared himself to no one. Indeed, he was a disaster and whatever rep he had earned during his stint with the Clintonistas went up in smoke along with focusing a few folks on the fact that he ran Goldman Sachs for a bit, a firm not being viewed as a warm and funny bunch these days..
There's a few things about Bobby that the average Joe may not realize. To begin, he was not a finance guy originally; he was a lawyer. Bob worked at one of the finest firms in NYC, Cleary Gottleib Steen & Hamilton--trust me on this one; i sat on both sides of the table with these guys and I was never anything but impressed. Now Cleary represented Goldman back in the early eighties when the remake of American industry took off during the Reagan administration and Bob was representing Goldie in many transactions. I think he got the idea that the guys he was representing were beginning to make a hell of a lot more money than he was making ; a true whatsupwiththis moment that caused Bob to change shops. Over to Goldie goes Bob; winds up running the Arb business--in which in the eighties you would have to be unable to fog a mirror not to make money--winds up running the whole show and the rest is history. Bob signs on for Clinton, winds up as, "The greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton" (a view not universally shared), and parlays that into a "Mr. Fixit" job at Citicorp at $15 mil a year plus stock. While all this was going on, his old shop, Cleary, develops one of the damndest business lines you have ever seen in acting as counsel to deadbeat countries--perhaps that is too harsh--let us refer to them as debtor nations in the emerging world., at which they are very, very good.
I think Bob's greatest personal moment was when, as the world was going to hell in a hand basket, he was filmed walking down the steps of the Treasury directly to a bank of mikes from every news outlet in the world to announce everything was going to be fine, Daddy was on the case. Brilliant theater, and it worked. Of course, the next day he found $25 billion in a foreign exchange stabilization fund to lend to Mexico to bail out their chestnuts for about the third time in 13 years. Times were so simple then. Maybe the Greeks should take a lesson from Bob.
Oh, I forgot. Who was Mexico's general counsel for all things relating to international finance? Why Cleary Gottleib Steen and Hamilton. Funny how these things work out.
Have a great weekend.
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