A panel of Goldman Sachs employees spent a recent Tuesday night at the Columbia University faculty club trying to convince a packed room of potential recruits that Wall Street, not Silicon Valley, was the place to be for computer scientists.
.. “It breaks my heart when my engineering students use the talents I taught them to engineer the financial system instead of engineering solutions to the world’s problems,” he said.
.. “As soon as we start talking to the candidates about what our starting packages look like, the lifestyle questions about flip-flops and beanbags really start to go away,” he said.
Defining Solvency at the Fed
Marvin Goodfriend, a professor at the Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business who spent 12 years as a policy adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, agreed. “It’s hard to define insolvency in a financial crisis, since it depends on the behavior of the entire financial system,” he said. “Solvency is only well defined when a particular firm is in trouble but the rest of the economy is O.K. When you come to a systemic problem, where the Fed’s very action has a bearing on whether those firms are solvent or not, you have a Catch-22 problem that can’t be solved.”
The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare
But that morning the presser was suddenly canceled, and no complaint was filed. According to later news reports, Dimon had personally called Associate Attorney General Tony West, the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, and asked to reopen negotiations to settle the case out of court.
.. Fleischmann later realized that the government wasn’t interested in having her testify against Chase in court or any other public forum. Instead, the Justice Department’s political wing, led by Holder, appeared to be using her, and her evidence, as a bargaining chip to extract more hush money from Dimon. It worked. Within weeks, Dimon had upped his offer to roughly $9 billion.
.. In a pair of celebrated cases, an unpleasantly honest federal judge named Jed Rakoff had rejected sweetheart deals worked out between banks and slavish regulators and had commanded the state to go back to the drawing board and come up with real punishments.
Seemingly not wanting to deal with even the possibility of such a thing happening, Holder blew off the idea of showing the settlement to a judge. The settlement, says Kelleher, “was unprecedented in many ways, including being very carefully crafted to bypass the court system. . . . There can be little doubt that the DOJ and JP-Morgan were trying to avoid disclosure of their dirty deeds and prevent public scrutiny of their sweetheart deal.”
..In a pair of celebrated cases, an unpleasantly honest federal judge named Jed Rakoff had rejected sweetheart deals worked out between banks and slavish regulators and had commanded the state to go back to the drawing board and come up with real punishments.
Seemingly not wanting to deal with even the possibility of such a thing happening, Holder blew off the idea of showing the settlement to a judge. The settlement, says Kelleher, “was unprecedented in many ways, including being very carefully crafted to bypass the court system. . . . There can be little doubt that the DOJ and JP-Morgan were trying to avoid disclosure of their dirty deeds and prevent public scrutiny of their sweetheart deal.” Kelleher asks a rhetorical question: “Can you imagine the outcry if [Bush-era Attorney General] Alberto Gonzales had gone into the backroom and given Halliburton immunity in exchange for a billion dollars?”
.. The people who stole all those billions are still in place. And the bank is more untouchable than ever – former Debevoise & Plimpton hotshots Mary Jo White and Andrew Ceresny, who represented Chase for some of this case, have since been named to the two top jobs at the SEC.
Finding, and Battling, Hidden Costs of 401(k) Plans
In many retirement plans, a significant amount of future retirees’ funds are devoured by fees. According to a 2012 study published by the progressive think tank Demos, high 401(k) fees can drain $155,000 from an average household over a lifetime. Higher-earning households can lose even more — up to $278,000.
.. Also look at revenue sharing. This is an often complex arrangement where a fund manager “shares” some of the fees it receives from fund expenses with other service providers, such as brokers. This practice, though declining, is particularly insidious since it provides little or no value to employees. It is derisively referred to as a “kickback” by 401(k) critics.
.. And keep an eye out for unnecessary fees that may be eating up your nest egg. These include commissions, also known as “loads,” 12b-1 marketing fees, insurance-related charges, “wrap” fees and transaction expenses.