All Articles Tagged "goldman sachs"
Goldman Sachs Exec Comes Back To New York To Lead New Division
New York native Valentino Carlotti is back in the U.S. to head up Goldman Sachs’ new Institutional Client Group. The exec spent five years as president of the bank in Brazil. Now, in the latest installment of Black Enterprise‘s Cool Jobs series, Carlotti talks with the site about his new position, which is playing a major part in the company’s sales and trading division. That division brought in 57 percent of the bank’s first quarter revenue.
“My new role allows me to leverage my knowledge of how to navigate the entire firm, and the strong relationships developed across the firm with the product and functional skills I have built over my career,” he says in the interview.
While the number of African Americans on Wall Street is “small,” Carlotti says it’s definitely an industry worth pursuing. To learn more, visit BlackEnterprise.com.
Morning News Roundup: Yahoo’s New Chief, Goldman Sachs Tanks
- Google’s Marissa Mayer is named Yahoo’s chief executive. She’s the fifth person to hold the spot in five years. And she’s faced with the daunting task of rebuilding a company that has lost its luster.
-The price of gas dropped in June, a welcome change. However, food prices crept up a bit, a topic we discussed in some detail yesterday.
-Goldman Sachs is creating an in-house bank to lend money to rich people and big corporations. It’s the bank’s attempt to remake its business in the face of harsh economic realities. The company just announced pay cuts, job cuts, and a steep revenue drop — 14 percent — to $16.6 billion.
-President Obama is hitting his GOP opponent Mitt Romney hard over the former Massachusetts’ governor’s failure to disclose his tax return information. Romney is already reeling from questions about his involvement with Bain Capital, the private equity firm he says he worked with until 1999. Paperwork suggests his involvement with the company may have lasted longer.
-Last week was Savannah Guthrie’s first as co-host of the Today show. And though the program had hoped to retake its longstanding commanding lead in the ratings over GMA with the ouster of Ann Curry, it was not to be. GMA beat Today by 350,000 viewers and came close to overtaking the show in the 25 to 54-year old demographic.
More on Madame Noire Business!
- Behind The Click: Tara Roberts, Co-Founder of GirlTank
- Entrepreneur Spotlight: Wedding Photographer Amber Knowles on Building Her Studio
- How CARA B Naturally’s Founders Launched A Natural Skin & Hair Care Company For Ethnic Children
- Entrepreneur Spotlight: Meet The Women Behind The Groupon of Black Hair, The Fly Cut
- Do Black Designers Skip Over Black Models to Gain White Customers?
- How She Made It: Alia Jones-Harvey, Producer of A Streetcar Named Desire
For-Profit Colleges Finally Pay The Price
As it turns out, those colleges that play commercials demanding that you “get off of your couch” and get an education aren’t really interested in whether you actually get up or not. As long as you sign your name on the line, and ultimately pad their bottom line, you can pretty much just stay seated. The Justice Department and four states have filed a multibillion-dollar fraud suit against the Education Management Corporation, claiming that the for-profit college company was not eligible for the $11 billion in state and federal financial aid it had received from July 2003 through June 2011, The New York Times reports.
The company, which operates schools under the names Art Institute, Argosy University, Brown Mackie College and South University, is being accused of falsely certifying that it was complying with the law, making it eligible to receive billions in student financial aid. They will also have to answer to whistle-blower’s claims that the corporation paid recruiters based on how many students they enrolled. But what is more troubling, and on a level that transcends the fraud against the government, is the fraud these people were committing against students in low-income communities.
First, the schools target students who are in dire financial need, and make their financial situations even worse. For-profit colleges “now serve more than 10 percent of the students enrolled in higher education, yet account for about half of all defaults on student loans,” the Times reports. Could this be because graduates of these programs can’t find the plethora of jobs non-existent jobs promised to them by recruiters? “The complaint said the company had a ‘boiler-room style sales culture’ in which recruiters were instructed to use high-pressure sales techniques and inflated claims about career placement to increase student enrollment, regardless of applicants’ qualifications,” the Times says. And speaking of those qualifications, these colleges really don’t require any. All you need is a name and a willingness to sign it on a sheet of paper. “Recruiters were encouraged to enroll even applicants who were unable to write coherently, who appeared to be under the influence of drugs or who sought to enroll in an online program but had no computer,” the Times reports. “According to the suit, recruits were also led to exploit applicant’s psychological vulnerabilities – for example, a parent’s hopes of moving a child out of a dangerous neighborhood.”
And what makes matters worse, the Education Management Corporation is 41 percent owned by Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street giant that has a proven record of not touching these graduates with a ten-foot pole.
At the very least, I hope this suit will result in a moratorium on all commercials that demand I turn off the TV and attend their schools. Ideally, I hope the Justice Department wipes the floor with these fools.
Magic Johnson Relieves Goldman Sachs of Some Debt
(Radio-Info.com) — Inner City Broadcasting’s debt will be changing hands, says TheDeal.com, so Goldman Sachs can finally take it off the books. Inner City’s controlling Sutton family played hardball during the 2009 financial crisis, when Goldman and GE Capital were squeezing ICBC over $230 million in debt. Politicians got involved, and Goldman and GE backed off. Now Goldman finds a solution to holding the delinquent debt – it sells it to Magic Johnson Enterprises and Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies.
Life after the City: from Goldman to Africa
(Financial Times) — “My working life has something of a pattern to it: work at Goldman Sachs for six years and then leave to do something in Africa. “I’ve owned the Africa.com domain name for around 10 years. In 2000, I was hired to help the firm that owned the domain name figure out what to do with it. When that organisation disbanded, I was fortunate enough to secure the ownership of the domain name. “I left Goldman for the first time in 1995 to run a policy consultancy in South Africa, and being in Johannesburg at that time was an enlightening and empowering experience for me as an African-American. ”Nelson Mandela had just become president and everything about the country felt new. With everybody forging new relationships, being a foreigner in the country was no disadvantage. ”I was welcomed with a warm embrace by everyone I met, black and white, and felt very much like a part of the South African community. “While there I co-founded the Student Sponsorship Programme that is now in its 10th year and helps integrate academically talented but poor black South African students into private schools that were previously all white. I’d been involved with a similar volunteering initiative while at Goldman.
Entrepreneurial Training from Goldman Sachs
(Businessweek) — Jessica Johnson did not have time to mourn her father’s death in 2008. “He passed on a Saturday, the funeral was the next Thursday, and Friday was payday,” she recalls. “We had 16 families depending on us and five clients who needed our services. We had to figure out a way to make it work.” The unexpected death left Johnson, 36, and her brother in charge of their third-generation family business, Johnson Security Bureau in the Bronx. Although neither had prepared for succession, both left jobs to work in the company their grandparents had founded in 1952. “I went to business school, but that really prepared me to go to work for somebody else,” says Johnson, who had worked in pharmaceutical sales.
Entrepreneurship with Robert Spencer
(Black Enterprise) — Spencer is co-head of equity derivative sales for one of the world’s most powerful investment banks, managing the business and overseeing a team that executes trades on clients’ behalf and offer trade advice in the Japanese market. Spencer also oversees the day-to-day operations of the sales team and business planning.
Earnings and Revenue Decline at Goldman Sachs
(New York Times) — Battered by volatile markets and a sharp reduction in trading gains, earnings at Goldman Sachs dropped 83 percent in the second quarter to 78 cents a share, making it the worst quarter for the giant investment bank since the depths of the financial crisis in late 2008.
Goldman Faces $1 Billion Suit
(Wall Street Journal) –An Australian hedge-fund manager filed a lawsuit seeking more than $1 billion in damages from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., accusing the Wall Street firm of fraudulently selling a “now notorious” financial instrument called Timberwolf. The collateralized debt obligation collapsed when housing prices tumbled in 2007, resulting in steep losses to the $78 million invested by Basis Capital, the hedge-fund manager. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks at least $56 million in damages related to Goldman’s alleged “false representations” and more than $1 billion in punitive damages.
Clients Worried About Goldman’s Dueling Goals
(NYTimes.com) — As the housing crisis mounted in early 2007, Goldman Sachs was busy selling risky, mortgage-related securities issued by its longtime client, Washington Mutual, a major bank based in Seattle. Although Goldman had decided months earlier that the mortgage market was headed for a fall, it continued to sell the WaMu securities to investors. While Goldman put its imprimatur on that offering, traders in the same Goldman unit were not so sanguine about WaMu’s prospects: they were betting that the value of WaMu’s stock and other securities would decline.




