Channeling the Arrogance of Youth - Peter Williams

Peter Williams

"We like our stores to be more than just shops. I went to a gig at our Kings Road store once – all the clothes were put away, it was sweaty and beer was spilling everywhere – just like a real venue."

Inspired by my fellow finance blogger's post about inglot's success story I would like to tell the story of a guy named Peter Williams, 35 who founded Jack Wills.
Jack Wills is a preppy youth fashion brand that relies on British heritage and values. 


Straight after Peter left college 11 years ago he founded the brand out of pure arrogance and impertinence. Now  he is chief executive of an upcoming international brand with a lot of potential. 
His idea of doing business differs from Wojciech Inglot's. He feels like his imperium should grow slowly. He does not hurry from capitol city to capitol city in order to buy the next location for a new flagship store. 

"Last night, while sitting in a bar, I watched a video on my iPhone of some of our staff cycling to work. The five British shop assistants share a big house two miles from the new store we opened last month in Nantucket island, off the coast of Massachusetts. They have posted online a video of themselves riding pink and blue Jack Wills bicycles, promoting the shop as they commute." 

"Opening stores in the US is the culmination of three years of building our brand here from scratch. Many British retailers who try to make the leap across the Atlantic fail because they think “we’re a big brand in the UK, of course Americans will have heard of us”. Once people knew about us, our British look was really popular and I think we’ll make it."

He initiates events in order to promote the brand, and he said in an interview that the US was already speaking about the brand half a year before the first store even arrived in New England. Jack Wills, which is targeted at university students, thrives on word of mouth and viral marketing. Which to me is a success, that outgrows all these fancy revenue numbers from Abercrombie & Fellows. Peter Williams and his idea of a brand that is an event, a lifestyle, a tribute to its heritage and a very preppy fashion accessory is one of the most impressive business models that I have ever come across.

HIRE ME!!! :)

Video of the founder about his founding years:

Channeling the Arrogance of Youth

Greg Smith - The Guy with the pure conscience?

hedgeco

Greg Smith is a Stanford graduate who worked in the New York office of Goldman Sachs before moving to London.

Smith grew up in a middle class family in Johannesburg in South Africa before moving to the US. His father was a pharmacist and his mother is thought to have been a housewife.

He went to King David School in the Linksfield area of Johannesburg, which is a private school for Jewish families.

Smith studied economics for four years at Stanford University and graduated in 2001. He had been working at Goldman Sachs for 12 years. Now he quit with an open letter which discribes very critical how employees measure success on how well they can take advantage of their clients' trust.

This is by far not the first time the integrity of Goldman Sachs has been called into question. It was widely implicated in the global financial crisis. In a civil lawsuit, the US Securities and Exchange Commission claimed that in 2006 Goldman created and marketed a product based around doomed sub-prime mortgages and sold it to investors, earning $1 billion.

The company was accused of failing to disclose to investors key information on the product - including that it had bet against it - and its worrisome risks. As the housing market began to fall, Goldman Sachs reaped the benefits and profits soared.

But the collapse in value of these mortgage-backed securities played a major role in the financial meltdown of 2008.

As many individual investors and pension funds had invested in the packaged products, risk was spread throughout the economy. As it was not clear exactly what bad debts were being packaged and sold, banks became apprehensive about lending to each other in fear they would be lumped with a bad deal. The government was forced to lend banks money to restore liquidity.

“A little thieving is a dangerous art, But thieving largely is a noble part;
As vile to rob a hen-roost of a hen, But stealing largely makes us gentlemen.” 

Goldman Sachs, which settled the civil suit for $550 million, was also accused of withholding information from clients in 2010.

During the crisis in 2009 Goldman Sachs got the unpleasant nickname "Vampire Squid". The Rolling Stone Magazine posted an article where the author writes:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405#ixzz1ukJH4L2O

So much for the history of the man and the firm he worked for. Smith writes in his open letter: "It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as "muppets", sometimes over internal e-mail." Smith has received strong support from many of his friends and colleagues, who have called him a 'legend' and praised him for speaking up against the corporate culture.

A male friend, who declined to be named, said: ‘I’m guessing he’s got some money saved up but not millions. I can’t imagine he is going to get a job working for any of the big banks after this either. ‘He’s thrown his career away for his principles. I admire the man and I admire his courage, but there is no way I’d do it myself’.

Since the letter was published on that Wednesday morning, Goldman Sachs shares are down by 3.35 per cent to $120.37 a share in afternoon trading.

hedgeco

But of course Goldman's management claim that the views of Mr Smith represents a minority opinion at the firm.The firm writes: 'We are far from perfect, but where the firm has seen a problem, we've responded to it seriously and substantively. And we have demonstrated that fact. We were disappointed to read the assertions made by this individual that do not reflect our values, our culture and how the vast majority of people at Goldman Sachs think about the firm and the work it does on behalf of our clients. It is unfortunate that an individual opinion about Goldman Sachs is amplified in a newspaper and speaks louder than the regular, detailed and intensive feedback you have provided the firm.

It is more than obvious that Goldman Sachs has problems with its image. The only question I have, is why Smith did not leave during the crisis. Why did he stay? Because of money? If Greg Smith had his eyes truly open, he would have had the same issues six years ago as he has now.

Asma al-Assad - a Modern Marie Antoinette?

Worldpress

أسماء الأسد: "ماري إنطوانيت" سوريا؟ ‎

When I first started to investigate I had no clue about how hard it would be to find facts that are trustworthy or information that would help to nail my thoughts down. The person I wanted to hunt down this time was Asma Al-Assad, the first Lady of Syria.

My interest in Arabic countries is based on the fact that I started to learn Arabic recently. I had the ongoing rebellion in Syria in mind and the billions of dollars that Mubarak owned in my memory when I read that Asma Al-Assad grew up in London and studied finance. Before she married she worked for Deutsche Bank then for the investment firm JP Morgan.

Why would an ambitious and smart woman like her go back to her slow moving country to marry a future dictator? – I could not find an answer to this question, but nobody can tell me that she did it because of love. 

What I did find is some more information about her life and her interest in finance:

She attended King’s College University of London and graduated in 1996 with first class honors degree in Computer Science.

In 1997, she started to work at Deutsche Bank in London as an analyst in the Hedge Fund Management section of Sales and Trading. She covered clients in the Far East and Europe.

In 1998, she joined the investment banking division of JP Morgan, London. She specialized in Mergers and Acquisitions for Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical companies. During the three years she spent at JP Morgan, she was sent to their Paris office for 9 months and to the New York office for 18 months, where she advised and executed four large merger transactions for both European and American clients.

After leaving JP Morgan in November 2000, she returned to Syria and married Bashar Al-Assad in December 2000.

Since then you would hear that she set up various charity organizations and that she held different meetings with several First Ladies from all over the world. You would have seen some pictures of her three sons and of her kind husband presenting her with flowers. She represented the perfect image of a kind-hearted caring mother for the state.

Vouge

In February 2011 the lifestyle magazine Vogue published an article about Asma and her husband. The author had the exclusive opportunity to interview both Bashar and Asma before the revolution. Sadly, Vogue's article has been almost entirely scrubbed from the internet. Of course a Bounty Hunter like me has the contacts and resources to find the last copy available on the internet. 

Here are three extracts from the article:

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East … It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men … Muslim veil are forbidden in universities … a place without bombings … and kidnappings.

Asma: “What I’ve been able to take away from banking was the transferable skills—the analytical thinking, understanding the business side of running a company—to run an NGO or to try and oversee a project." She runs her office like a business, chairs meeting after meeting, starts work many days at six, never breaks for lunch...

Asma: “As a banker, you have to be so focused on the job at hand that you lose the experience of the world around you.”

Click For Full Text

Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun 

A more Up-to-Date article on El-Shaab, an Arabic website, describes Asma al-Assad as the "Marie Antoinette" of the Syrian State. (أسماء الأسد: "ماري إنطوانيت" سوريا؟) It claims that Asma is just the cold lioness that fights for the "pope of the tyrants" and that she makes sure that she does what is necessary to support him.

As all further sources let me down and my Syrian friends are too scared to say out loud what is in their heads, I can only speculate. I think that Asma’s sense for good and bad is distracted by her will to be successful. There are several hints about her important role in the financial affairs of the family al-Assad which would equal the affairs of the state, but nobody could confirm. 

To me Asma is more than just a First Lady. Why would she be satisfied with Charity Organizations and her job as a mother when she has an excellent education and a very competitive personality? There has to be another clue… and as I said in my previous entry, it is just a matter of time till I find it.

Florian Homm - the Target

Getty Images

Who is Homm?

Homm is a larger-than-life version of the hedge fund archetype and not just because he is 6ft 6in (over 2 metres). A specialist in the world of small companies, an expert in German business and a serial entrepreneur. He started his first investment company at 18, has worked at Merrill Lynch, Fidelity and Julius Baer, and has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Economics, cum laude. His skill was in picking smaller companies, often taking big stakes in names such as Borussia Dortmund, the German football club. 

He raked in millions with short sales and gilding falling market prices. He invented losses, spread rumors and negative breakdowns. The stock market regulator BaFin intervened, reprimanded and imposed a fine. Homm complained "Incompetent Regulators," and smiled because of the penalty. The SEC has it in for Homm since 2005. When Homm’s Absolute Capital Management (ACM on Bloomberg) was taken private in April 2009, the assets had decreased from $ 3 billion to $ 2.3 million. This creates enemies. In the same year Homm disappeared.

F1 Online 

Where is Homm?

The world is split into two shades. Countries in which Florian Homm has been sighted since his disappearance are dark. Countries which are in the extradition treaty are light. A legend shows the number of clues per country. Striking dark is South America: Panama, Venezuela and Brazil. 

This map is pinned to a wall in my office. I am a private investigator. Some might say I am a bounty hunter. Homm's "enemies" are my customers. They feel betrayed and want revenge. And of course they want their money back. It is my goal is to recover my client’s money before the police can lock Homm up in jail for at least ten years. I think that it is only a matter of time untill target Homm is caught. The only question is who catches him first, me or the police. 

Homm's case is not an exception. Bounty hunters like me are in great demand. We act in a legal twilight zone and try to be discreet. Five years ago I had to stop investigating for some time because there was a picture of me in a newspaper. I changed my face since then. Now I am back on track of financial delinquents like Homm. These people, or targets as I like to call them, can not be handled like an average criminal. These people are greatly intelligent and streetwise. What makes it even harder to catch them is their money. They simply buy their way out of precarious situations. 

When a Politician underestimates the Power of Money

 © Bild: 2012 DPA/ Bildfunk/ Robert Schlesinger  

It is a big day in Germany.

And it is not because the FC Bayern München won a match against Dortmund.

It is because our Federal President Christian Wulff resigned. Well of course the “Wulff-Affair” started because of money…

“Bild”, a German yellow press newspaper, became curious when Wulff bought a new house and there was no name registered in the cadastre. They tried to publish some of the facts and became even more curious when Wulff tried to deter them from doing it. 

The Federal President has to unfold his income and spending to a governmental office. The office is also authorized to ask questions about relationships with businessmen. 

After Wulff's panic reaction the state started to investigate and Wulff answered “No” when he was asked if he had a business relationship with one of his older friends who runs a big trading company. It turned out that Wulff did not deal with his friend Egon Geerkens but with his wife Edith Geerkens. 

Wulff received a loan amounting to 500.000 €. The problem was that Egon Geerkens led the negotiations concerning the credit terms for his wife. The given interest rates were very low. In return Wulff took Egon Geerkens with him on several political trips where he had the chance to expand his network of business relationships. 

After these facts became public Wulffs image was in danger because again “Bild” was eager to detect the whole story. 

Shortly before Christmas he admitted the truth of the upcoming charges and shifted the 500.000 € loan to a bank. At that point 50% of the German citizens did not consider Wulff as a trustworthy person anymore. 

“Bild” did not stop their enquiry at this point because again the loan conditions where far better than any normal German citizen would receive. It turned out that the “BW-Bank” was one of the main financial contacts that Egon Geerkens held and that he again helped Wulff getting very low interest rates. 

Along with the 500.000 € loan Wulff had to face allegations of trying to influence media. An unjustifiable holiday at a friend’s house did not help to improve his image either and last but not least he lied to the German nation. 

In my opinion the Federal President must be a trustworthy and honest person who can not be influenced by anything else then by his or her own conscience. Considering that the Federal President is there to serve the nation his or her conscience should represent whatever is best for the country and not for him- or herself.

As a logical result of his wrong orientation and his dishonesty, today was Wulff’s last day as our Federal President. 



(Wulff: "I fear I was not always linear in my doings..." Blue Man: "That means that he should have taken the money straight from Geerken and not loop way from his wife...")