Jezebel: morgan stanley

It's One Of Those Days For Everyone, Random Wall Street Guy

Megan — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:30:27 EDT

The Dow lost about another 450 points today even though the federal government has decided to buy out (read: nationalize) anything they need to to keep out economy from collapsing. [Washington Post]
Speaking of, Morgan Stanley might merge with Wachovia, which would make Goldman Sachs the only remaining stand-alone investment bank in the United States. Seriously. [NY Times]
But it's all going to be okay because the Bush Administration might use the end of its term in office to create a whole new agency dedicated to buying up all the bad debt and defunct financial institutions that its policies created in the last 7.5 years. Hey, did I mention the word "nationalization" already? Good. [NY Times]
Hey, look! Something shiny! Don't watch the end of capitalism! Lori Drew is moving her family to an undisclosed location. [St. Charles Journal]

Hillary Clinton canceled an appearance at an anti-Iran rally because the organizers thought it would be a supercoolfun idea to put her on the dais with Sarah Palin less than two months before the election and didn't think it necessary to inform her. Um, obviously. [Associated Press]
The polls show McCain and Obama pretty damn tight in too damn many battleground states. [Marc Ambinder]
Known elitist Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild and former major Democratic figure says all kinds of unbelievable crap about why she's now supporting McCain, but the funniest part is when she says it's about voter disenfranchisement and didn't know that the Republicans are actively seeking to disenfranchise legal voters in the general election to help he new best buddy. Ok, here's a woman you can hate on. Please, enjoy. [Huffington Post]
McCain and Palin will be doing their deathly tango on Larry King tonight (and feel free to use this as an open thread if you're not watching Project Runway), but before that Swampland's Ana Marie Cox and I will be liveblogging her own torture: sitting through a McCain townhall meeting. Join us back here at 7! [Think Progress]

Zoe Cruz Told Mortgage Traders To "Cut Losses," But They Thought She Was Just High On Crack

Moe — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Zoe Cruz is the subject of a long and kind of slow-boiling New York profile this week. Before she was sold out and thrown to the dogs by her old mentor at Morgan Stanley, Zoe Cruz was the most powerful woman on Wall Street. That is not saying much about her status in the ranks of powerful humans on Wall Street, of course, but it's good enough to sell a cover of New York in a year when the whole "Women In Power: Fuck This, There Really Is No Way To Win Is There?" meme is still relatively hot. Okay. So Zoe is powerful and widely disliked, which happens to men too but with nowhere near the persistence as w/r/t women, and... business office politics market conditions blah blah blah whoa now here is something that absolutely would not go down the same way had Zoe been a dude: While giving a year-end management speech to her fixed-income division, a "mid-level executive" interrupted the speech to say: ""Are you high? Because I really don't know what you're talking about."

"High?" Cruz asked. "You mean stoned?" "Yeah, exactly," he said. "Smoking it." Everyone in the room laughed—except Cruz.

She fired the asshole for "unrelated reasons" six months later, but it probably won't surprise you that this same division decided to make a risky bet into mortgage-backed securities — not the subprime ones, but the AAA ones that were supposed to be okay — in 2006, and Zoe kept an eye on the trade because it made her a little nervous, and asked them to calculate the potential loss in the occasion of a market meltdown, and when they came back with the number $3.5 billion she told them unequivocally to cut their losses, and they basically ignored her, and then the bank lost a shitload of money and she got blamed. They dispute that it happened exactly that way, but seriously, would you believe these fuckers? They were probably high.

According to a person briefed on her story, Cruz told both Daula and Shear, "I don't care what your view of probability is. Cut the position." The risk was too great, even for her. But whether Cruz actually gave that order is in dispute. Shear and Daula have denied she told them to cut the position. And by August, with the market in free fall, the Hubler bet had gone badly sour. Shear and Daula had managed to extract the company from $1.8 billion of the trade but had missed a crucial window of opportunity to untangle another $1.5 billion, a position that would metastasize into much more severe losses. In Cruz's view, the two men had ignored her orders and put the company in an untenable position. They "deferred to Howie [Hubler] instead of listening to Zoe," says one Cruz ally. Jay Dweck, a former Goldman Sachs executive who had recently joined Morgan, was heard by three people to say, "At Goldman, this isn't happening. When they say get out, they get out. At Morgan Stanley, when Zoe says get out, people start negotiating."

The story casts Zoe in the Greek and scrappy and ambitious and pretty and "fierce" and smart irrepressible-overachiever Tracy Flick mold you hear about Hillary Clinton. This might have been true, or she might have had a sparkling worldly incandescent intellect everyone is overlooking because of institutionalized systemic sexism. (To be sure, she once used the term "enheartening," which is not quite as bad as "embiggening" but is still not a word, in a public speech, so that was unfortunate.)

The Crash Of Morgan Stanley Executive Zoe Cruz [NY Mag]
Earlier: Women Are Underrepresented In Corporate America. Corporate America Is A Laughingstock. Coincidence?

Being A "Superfemme" Doesn't Sound So "Super-Fun"

Jessica — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 15:00:00 EST

Today, the Times of London, takes a trip across the English Channel to attend the "Women's Forum" in France (the Women's Forum sees itself as the female equivalent of the World Economic Forum) and is shocked to discover that many of the WF's high-powered participants are not al busted barren. These "superfemmes" or, women for whom "power, glamour and domestic bliss go hand in hand" include legions of lady CEO's and i-bankers who are mostly married, clad in Louboutins, and ruthlessly ambitious, just like male CEOs (except for the stilettos). Isabelle Seillier, the head of investment banking at J.P. Morgan, France, says, "I met my husband when I was 16 years old and I knew it. You need to find the right partner. That is critical. You can't do it alone."

Seillier seems to subscribe to the Linda Hirshman school of feminist achievement — the idea that women will only achieve social equality when they achieve economic equality. But it's not as if these women actually get to spend any time with the children and husbands they support. Of her children, Seillier says: "I wasn't there for every dinner when they were younger - I work until 10pm - but I think it was worth it. They're proud of me now." Maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but I think BOTH parents should try to be home for dinner at least a majority of the time. What's the point of having children if they're going to be exclusively cared for by the help? "I have a woman who does my hair, a woman who does the shopping, a woman who helps find nice clothes. The key is to be very, very organized," Seillier informs us. And rich, we might add!

Perhaps the desire to be home for dinner is what's leading the march of women away from the highest ranks of Wall Street. With the firing of Zoe Cruz, a top executive at Morgan Stanley, the number of powerful women on Wall Street continues to dwindle. An article about Cruz in the Saturday NY Times intimates that she was axed because she was personally disliked by a number of other executives, all male. It remains to be seen whether their dislike for her had anything to do with her gender.

All Hail The Superfemme [Times of London]
Top Ranks of Women on Wall Street are Shrinking [New York Times]
Homeward Bound [American Prospect]