Posted 6:48 PM by Blah blah

Johnny Got Married! (Photos)

Oh my God, Johnny and his Korean girlfriend Sehee just got married!!! (I'm probably the last to know. Serves me right for not keeping up with what's going on with bloggers' lives.)

Here are their cute wedding reception pix! Here's a cutie pic of the couple (on the left).

Wow. I met Johnny and Sehee last year in Berkeley, where they live. Many many wishes for a lifetime of happiness, you two!

That said, I'm going on blog vacation for a while. The next wedding, coming up in May, is for Raven and Mona. See you guys after a break.

Posted 7:27 PM by Blah blah

Sad Day for the Financial World (Business)

S.E.C. Chastises Morgan Stanley's Chief for Comments (NY Times):

"Morgan Stanley's efforts to play down its role in the Wall Street research scandal appeared to backfire yesterday, as the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission released a blistering letter addressed to the firm's chief executive.

William H. Donaldson, the commission chairman, said in a letter dated Wednesday that he was 'deeply troubled' by comments from Philip J. Purcell, the Morgan Stanley official, which he said 'evidence a troubling lack of contrition.'

He warned that Morgan Stanley could face further legal action if it continued to deny having acted badly in the research scandal, which was the subject of a $1.4 billion industry settlement."

Regulators Reach Final Settlement Against Wall St. Firms (NY Times).

"The $1.4 billion settlement by 10 firms and 2 well-known stock analysts reached tentatively last December but completed in the last few days, resolved accusations that the firms lured millions of investors to buy billions of dollars worth of shares in companies they knew were troubled and which ultimately either collapsed or sharply declined.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, state prosecutors and market regulators accused three firms in particular - Citigroup's Salomon Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch, and Credit Suisse First Boston - of fraud. But the thousands of pages of internal e-mail messages and other evidence that regulators made public today painted a picture up and down Wall Street of an industry rife with conflicts of interest during the height of the Internet and telecommunications bubble that burst three years ago.

At firm after firm, according to prosecutors, analysts wittingly duped investors to curry favor with corporate clients. Investment houses received secret payments from companies they gave strong recommendations to buy. And for top executives whose companies were clients, stock underwriters offered special access to hot initial public offerings....

In a reflection of regulators' concerns about the prospect for conflicts of interest at Citigroup, Wall Street's biggest bank, the settlement bars its chairman and chief executive, Sanford I. Weill, from communicating with his firm's stock analysts about the companies they cover, unless a lawyer is present.

But the regulators found fault with every major bank on Wall Street.

In addition to the three firms accused of fraud, five others - Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Piper Jaffray and UBS Warburg - were accused of making unwarranted or exaggerated claims about the companies they analyzed. UBS Warburg and Piper Jaffray were accused of receiving payments for research without disclosing such payments.

And Salomon Smith Barney and First Boston were accused of currying favor with their corporate clients by selling hot stock offerings to senior executives, who then could turn around and sell the shares for virtually guaranteed profits.

The two banks agreed to end that practice, known as spinning....

The firms also agreed to abide by what officials said were significant new ethics rules and to build barriers between investment bankers and stock analysts in hopes of relieving analysts from the business pressures that many succumbed to during the 1990's. For example, the compensation of analysts is to be based on the quality of their research, not their contribution to the firm's investment banking business....

Any top Wall Street executive directly involved in investment banking, however, would be barred from discussions with his company's analysts under the terms of the agreements....

In addition to the restitution, the firms also agreed to pay $487.5 million in penalties, $432.5 million to fund independent research, and $80 million for investor education. Mr. Blodget agreed to pay $4 million and Mr. Grubman $15 million to settle the charges against them.

The fines, restitution and other penalties were divided as follows: $400 million will be paid by Citigroup; $200 million each by Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch (which includes an earlier Merrill settlement of $100 million); $125 million by Morgan Stanley; $110 million by Goldman Sachs; $80 million each by Bear Stearns, J.P. Morgan, Lehman, and UBS Warburg; and $32.5 million by Piper Jaffray."

Analysts to Pay Millions in Fines (NY Times):

"Henry Blodget, the former Internet analyst at Merrill Lynch, and Jack B. Grubman, the former telecommunications analyst at Salomon Smith Barney, are expected to pay almost $20 million in fines and penalties and agree to be barred permanently from the securities industry today, according to a person briefed on the investigation. The sanctions are to be disclosed when regulators announce the final agreement in the $1.4 billion investment banking research settlement....

[E]very time an investment banker wants to speak with an analyst a lawyer or compliance officer must be either present in the room or patched in via telephone. For bankers and analysts used to spending weeks together on the road pitching new deals, it will be a new and somewhat colder world."

Posted 8:30 AM by Blah blah

Sex and the Single Senior (Thoughtful, Quirky)

Inspiring! Go girl! Why am I not surprised she lives in Berkeley?

Sex and the Single Senior (NY Times):

"Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me."

And how. Ms. Jane Juska placed this personal ad in The New York Review of Books in the fall of 1999. Over the course of a month, she received 63 responses and spent the better part of a year following them up, an experience she recounts in her first book, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance (Villard). It turns out that Ms. Juska did indeed have a lot of sex with a lot of men she liked, and still does, having seen one of them as recently as that morning. He's 35. Which might explain the lower-back problem....

Some postmenopausal women feel a lessening of sexual desire, or at least are said to. That was apparently not her experience. "No," she said firmly. "I was probably even more interested because I wasn't as afraid as when I was younger, of not doing it right or, well, being thought randy."...

She finished her second glass of sauvignon blanc. "The best part of all this is that I have a writing life now," she said. She is working on a second book, about teaching. "The other huge surprise," she said, "was finding intellectual partners, which is almost as exciting as the sex, in some cases more. To be able to talk to a really smart man, who says, `I would value your opinion on this.' Where I grew up you had to bow and scrape to the nearest man and keep your mouth shut."