According to Heidi Moore of The Guardian…
Wall Street is a place where memories are short,
profit is amoral, and money is the only thing that settles all the scores.
That's why financiers and CEOs are largely destined
to overcome any scandal. Money and influence reserve a permanent place at the
trough of money. It's usually absurd to hope that any kind of setback – a loss,
a bankruptcy, a harrowing proximity to eight insider-trading convictions – will
leave a mark.
They never do.
Disgrace is not a functional term in a business
that is still, at its core, based upon relationships with a closed circle of
people.
For the powerful movers of money in this country, second
acts are not the exception – they are very much the rule.
If you doubt that, you need only keep watching the
life and career of hedge-fund manager Steve Cohen. In a traditional
middle-class morality tale, he'd be in disgrace after a
judge last week told his firm, SAC Capital, to pay
the largest-ever fine for insider trading – a cool
$1.8bn – to federal regulators.
SAC, which is the first firm to ever
become a convicted felon, will abide by a five-year period of probation.
But this isn't the middle class, and Steve Cohen is
not some hapless homeowner caught helplessly in foreclosure. He is rich, and on
Wall Street that means he has leverage. He can negotiate for his own redemption
– like so many of his fellow billionaires before him.
"Can Steven Cohen move on from SAC's insider
trading past?" Frontline
asked this week, and the answer is that he already
has. Without even a moment of silence for the past of SAC Capital, Cohen's
second act is already underway, with a new firm called Point72 Asset Management
that exists solely
to manage his multibillion-dollar fortune.
Cohen is not just any hedge-fund manager. If Wall
Street had a Godfather, it would be Cohen. He ran SAC Capital, a $15bn hedge
fund with a trading floor in Stamford, Connecticut, where he controlled
every aspect – including temperature and sound.
In order to maintain tombstone silence, phones were set to blink instead of
ring.
Temperatures of 70 degrees forced traders to stay alert all day, spurring
the firm's fashion armor: black fleece jackets with the SAC Capital logo – like
a very rich, very exclusive street gang. Video cameras observed every employee.
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