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Wikipedia: Jeremy Grantham

It’s been a long drought for IPOs, but venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs are hopeful that 2010 will be the year they rain down on the Valley once gain. Earlier this year, a handful of IPOs trickled out, such as OpenTable, Rackspace, and A123Systems. But what people are really waiting for is another Netscape moment—an iconic IPO which will whet investor’s appetites and open the floodgates for others to follow.
Below is our list of the top ten IPO candidates for 2010 in the technology industry (and, no, it doesn’t …

The Puget Sound Business Journal for months has asked the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), the federal agency that regulated Washington Mutual, to release internal communications between WaMu’s regulators.
The newspaper made its requests under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, the decades-old law that requires federal agencies to disclose public documents.
Of particular interest were internal emails, which could help explain why regulators seized the bank in September 2008 even though WaMu appeared to meet regulatory standards for operating banks, despite its burden of bad loans. (You can read the …

Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations‘ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the …

Taxpayers are taking another hit as strapped local governments fork over billions in fees on investments gone bad

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is struggling to save his city from fiscal calamity. Unemployment is at a record 28% and rising, while home prices have plunged 39% since 2007. The 66-year-old Bing, a former NBA all-star with the Detroit Pistons who took office 10 months ago, faces a $300 million budget deficit—and few ways to make up the difference.
Against that bleak backdrop, Wall Street is squeezing one of America’s weakest cities for …

U.S. electric sports car maker Tesla Motors plans to go public soon, two sources familiar with the matter said, amid growing interest in green technology and battery-powered vehicles.

An IPO filing from the six-year-old start-up, best known for its $109,000 all-electric Roadster, is expected any day, said one of the sources. The person did not give a specific time frame, although IPOs typically take several months.

Tesla spokesman Ricardo Reyes declined to comment on what he called “rumor or speculation.”

Tesla would mark the first public offering from a U.S. automaker since …

Palm Beach billionaire Jeffry Picower, described as the biggest beneficiary of Bernard Madoff’s fraud, died on Sunday after he was found lying at the bottom of the pool at his home, police said.

Emergency services were called to the oceanside mansion after Picower, 67, was pulled from the pool by his wife and a housekeeper and he was later pronounced dead, the Palm Beach Post reported quoting police and Fire Rescue officials.

Police were investigating the death as a drowning, the newspaper said. It reported he was not breathing when he …

An incredibly powerful new documentary finally lets those who’ve lived it tell the story — from the “creative” financiers to the home buyers duped by brokers.

The producers of the new documentary, American Casino, don’t tell you about the causes of the economic meltdown that’s caused so much pain around the world.
They don’t tell you how Wall Street, having lobbied furiously to free itself from public-interest regulation, created a furious demand for mortgage-backed junk, which they had laundered into supposedly solid investments with an assist from friendly — read “bought …

After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.
The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like …

Americans are angry at Wall Street, and rightly so. First the financial industry plunged us into economic crisis, then it was bailed out at taxpayer expense. And now, with the economy still deeply depressed, the industry is paying itself gigantic bonuses. If you aren’t outraged, you haven’t been paying attention.
But crashing the economy and fleecing the taxpayer aren’t Wall Street’s only sins. Even before the crisis and the bailouts, many financial-industry high-fliers made fortunes through activities that were worthless if not destructive from a social point of view. And …

Thousands of top traders and bankers on Wall Street were awarded huge bonuses and pay packages last year, even as their employers were battered by the financial crisis.
Nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008, according to a report released Thursday by Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York attorney general.
At Goldman Sachs, for example, bonuses of more than $1 million went to 953 traders and …

From the moment I left Yale and started working for Goldman Sachs, I’ve felt uneasy interacting with those who don’t.
It’s not that I think less of Goldman outsiders than I did while I remained among you. It’s just that I feel your envy, and know that nothing I can do or say will ever persuade you that I am no more than human.
Thus, like many of my colleagues, I have adopted a strategy of never leaving Goldman Sachs, apart from a few brief, spasmodic attempts to make what you …

Are investment banks run for employees or shareholders?

IT WAS once famously asked of Wall Street: “Where are the customers’ yachts?” Shareholders of investment banks have not seen much of the spoils either, given the events of the past two years. As business booms once more, rather than reward their owners with an extra big chunk of profits, most investment banks seem likely to favour their employees again. In the case of Goldman Sachs, shareholders received $4.4 billion of profits during the first half of this year while staff were …

Up until about two weeks ago, Matt Taibbi’s favorite Goldman Sachs’ market observers, the folks over at the Zero Hedge blog, had been continually commenting over the past six-plus months about how Goldman had all but cornered the market on program trading within the NY Stock Exchange. (Program trading is the automated stock trading via computers by firms specially authorized by the NYSE to facilitate same.) Clearly, according to Zero Hedge publisher Tyler Durden, something was up.
A couple of months ago, we also learned through Zero Hedge that Goldman …

There are smart ways to raise money and regulate the market, but Wall Street is working to kill any meaningful financial reform

Last month, when the US Congress failed to pass a bankruptcy reform measure that would have allowed home mortgages to be modified in bankruptcy, senator Dick Durbin succinctly commented: “The banks own the place.” That seems pretty clear.
After all, it was the banks’ greed that fed the housing bubble with loony loans that were guaranteed to go bad. Of course the finance guys also made a fortune guaranteeing …

A Cal State professor thinks Google’s stock is a pawn for options market manipulators.

Is Google’s stock a pawn for options market manipulators? That’s a common refrain on Internet message boards, and now an academic is lending some credence to the conspiracy theories.
Jerry W. Liu, a finance professor at California State University, East Bay, studied the market for options written to buy or sell Google ( GOOG – news – people ) stock near earnings release dates for the first 34 months of its publicly traded life. He came away …

36 South Investment Managers Ltd., whose Black Swan Fund gained 234 percent in 2008, is raising money for a new hedge fund, betting that government efforts to pump money into economies could result in hyperinflation.
The Excelsior Fund targets returns that will be five times the average annual rate of inflation of the Group of Five economies — France, Germany, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. — should the rate exceed 5 percent, Jerry Haworth, co-founder of the firm, said yesterday. Raising $100 million for the fund would be a …

Carlos Araya used to order lobster, filet mignon and $200 bottles of red wine at the Palm Restaurant in midtown Manhattan.
Now, he seats customers at its Tribeca branch.
Mr. Araya, 38 years old, lost his job in 2007 as a crude oil trader on the New York Mercantile Exchange. After visiting dozens of headhunters with no luck, he applied in August 2008 to be a host at the Palm to support his wife, two young daughters and mortgage payments. His salary has plunged from $200,000 to $25,000. (Read more at: …