Damn It Feels Good To Be A Banker

Pickens to NBC: My Army Will Get to You and You Will Run My Ad

For those of you following the Pickens Plan these last two months, the legendary oilman turned de facto national energy policy director has not seen a camera he doesn’t like. And for good reason… no one likes paying $4 a gallon for gas. So if people in Iran are converting their cars to natural gas so that they can sell us more oil at triple digit prices, we ought to know about it, NBC.

We have four new ads which are either on the air, or ready to go on the air. The ads have been “cleared” by every network… except for NBC which has refused to clear a :15 second ad about Iran.
In the ad Boone talks about how the Iranians are moving quickly to vehicles powered by natural gas so they can free up their $120 a barrel oil to sell to us. Boone says: “Get this one. Iran is changing its cars to run on natural gas and we’re not doing a thing here…”
The problem? NBC wants us to PROVE that “we’re not doing a thing here.”
Sometimes you just have to wonder.

Fannie and Freddie Rally

Stocks post modest gains, slightly below session highs. Nine of the ten sectors are posting a gain. The energy sector (+1.3%) is no longer the leader, overtaken by telecom (+1.3%) as crude futures, up 1.2% to $117.64 per barrel, give up some gains.
Crude oil traded up as much a 2.9% at $119.63 earlier in the session.
Financials are up 0.5%, with Fannie Mae (FNM 6.17, +0.55) and Freddie Mac (FRE 4.44, +0.47) once again leading the way as traders speculate about the future of the two government-sponsored enterprises. Over the last five sessions, shares of Fannie and Freddie are up 39% and 34%, respectively. However, the gains do not come even close to making up recent losses. During the last 30 sessions, shares of Fannie and Freddie are still down 34% and 36%, respectively.

Why dressing for success now means looking like hell.

Get on an elevator in any Manhattan office building, and there's a good chance you'll find yourself surrounded by them: the tattersalls, the windowpanes, the mini-checks of Brooks Brothers' fleet of Non-Iron Dress Shirts.

Inoffensive? Yes, as are the often-accompanying oxfords with Nike Air technology in the soles. But as the patterns blend together, they start to form a vaguely disturbing picture.

Gone is the time when the Patrick Batemans of the world could hold pissing contests over the microscopic differences in their business card stocks, dismissing peons for the inferior weaves of their suits. These days, there are fewer distinctions between industries and power levels. Pretty much everyone looks more like they belong in tech support than in a partners' meeting. (View our slideshow to see how the captains of industry dress.)

That's because somewhere between His Girl Friday and casual Friday, between black-tie and BlackBerrys, our workforce morphed from Mad Men into marathon men—and the race is not to the sartorial top, but to the bottom of the laundry pile.

When the dotcom bubble burst, many predicted an end to Teva-wearing C.E.O.'s and even the curtailment of casual Fridays. Clearly the second tsunami of tech money, which brought twentysomethings in hoodies to the head of the conference table, has helped keep that from happening. But tech chic only has so much to do with the dressing down of the workforce. As Bill Clinton might say, it's "the economy, stupid.

"Before sitting down to write this, I emailed a bunch of friends in various professions and asked them about their work wear. The men overwhelmingly responded with an affinity for the aforementioned stiff shirts from Brooks Brothers, as well as half-brags about their disheveled appearances at the office. "I wind up wearing my lunch more often than not" one wrote [subtext: because I eat at my desk every day]. "I wear pleated-front pants because they're more comfortable," another admitted [subtext: I eat at my desk every day—and every night].

If you look good, you're obviously not working hard enough. Outdoing the next guy in terms of looking put-upon is the new pissing contest.

In a world where profits are down, bankruptcies are rampant, and the most entrenched I-bankers are getting the heave-ho, you can't afford to look as though you spared an extra second thinking about the cut of your Charvet shirt. Did you go shopping for a Breguet instead of billing that extra hour? Are you interviewing? Because seriously, who wears a suit these days? Who has time for that?

With subprime losses piling up, it's not just cubicle-bound young analysts who are being subjected to this sort of scrutiny. After all, Angelo Mozilo always looks like he put a lot of thought into his clothes. Company shareholders are more concerned with what the stewards of their wealth actually do. "Hey, nice suit, asshole. How much did it cost me?"

In fact, it's not uncommon for the messiest guy in the office to also be the most heralded, a phenomenon that has made its way into popular culture. In Dana Vachon's recent novel, Mergers & Acquisitions, the only clear hero is the poor overweight slob to whom all J.S. Spenser's dirty work has been outsourced. The other guys—the ones who can tell the difference between a Turnbull & Asser and a Thomas Pink shirt "blindfolded"—are not so laudable.

Women can take even more criticism if they seem overly concerned with their dress—often at the hands of female superiors. "I'm more 'fashiony,' which is definitely misunderstood and under-appreciated in my line of work," wrote a V.P. at one of New York's better banks. Sport more tailored and modern clothing and you get hit with a double-whammy—not only are you not working hard enough, you're trying to distract everyone else from their business.

If you think that's all hooey, I'd ask you to recall the time Hillary Clinton showed up on the Senate floor revealing a centimeter of cleavage under her rose-colored blazer. No one went so far as to accuse her of trolling for a date, but no one exactly congratulated her on the outfit either. (Or glance at the wardrobes of such titans as Meg Whitman, who just stepped down from her post as eBay's C.E.O., and Irene Rosenfeld, head of Kraft Foods. For them, the way to success was brains, hard work, and separates from Talbots).

There are, of course, the rare exceptions to the rule. Julie Macklowe, portfolio manager for Sigma Capital Management, was recently recognized as an "It" girl by Vogue. And, speaking of that venerable title, fashion is perhaps the one industry where showing up looking like a slob or like a buttoned-up matron can get you into hot water. Don something less-than and you could face the same question: "Who has time for…that?"

Traders' raging hormones cause stock market swings

The behaviour of impetuous teenagers is often blamed on hormones, but could the economy be suffering from the same influence? Research from the University of Cambridge suggests that the movements of money in the financial markets are correlated to stock traders' levels of two hormones: the steroids testosterone and cortisol.

John Coates and Joe Herbert took saliva samples from 17 male traders on a London stock trading floor twice daily over the course of eight days. They monitored the traders' levels of testosterone, the hormone most often associated with aggression and sexual behaviour, and cortisol, the so-called stress hormone.

They tracked those levels against the amount of money that a trader made or lost, and against the variation in the market. What they found was that when the traders made more money, they had elevated levels of testosterone. When the markets were particularly variable, they had elevated levels of cortisol.
In control?

But which is the cause and which is the effect? A further analysis showed that traders who started their days with elevated testosterone made more money than those who didn't. One trader went on a six-day winning streak, making twice as much money each day as the previous one. Over that period, his testosterone levels rose steadily, some 74 per cent.
"The popular view is that experienced traders can control their emotions," Coates says, "but in fact their endocrine systems are on fire."

There is a point of diminishing returns; too much testosterone leads to too much aggression and reckless decision making.
And while elevated cortisol levels probably contribute to better risk management in volatile situations, neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen of Rockefeller University, New York, says long-term elevation can ravage the body with anything from cardiovascular disease to arthritis.
Helplessness
"It also leads to shrinkage of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, brain regions associated with decision making and factual memory," McEwen says. "Meanwhile it contributes to growth in the amygdala, a region associated with emotional memory and anxiety."
That can lead to a condition called "learned helplessness", in which people feel that their actions in risky situations don't matter.
"What concerns me is not how far down the markets go, but for how long," Coates says. "I've been a trader, I know that learned helplessness can happen."

Defeat or victory
So both the short- and the long-term effects of the hormones can contribute to the overall health of the markets. "Maybe bubbles and crashes are coming from these steroids," Coates says. While it may be that less money would be made, "maybe if more women and older men were trading, the markets would be more stable."

Bob Rose, Director of the Mind, Brain, Body and Health Initiative at the University of Texas Medical Branch, did experiments in the 1970s with monkeys showing the rise and fall of testosterone with social interactions. "We know testosterone can be responsive to defeat or victory, but the directionality wasn't clear," Rose says. "We like to think of ourselves as emancipated from these biological processes, that the intellectual and emotional are totally separate. I like this study because it argues against that dualism."

Christian the Lion - Reunion!