Jimmy Cayne

Where There Is Pot Smoke, There Is Ex Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne

Moe Tkacik | May 12, 2009, 11:51AM

We tore through the first big Bear Stearns book this year, William Cohan's House of Cards, in hopes of some substantiation of reports that the bank's former CEO (and former billionaire; he's now a "mere eight figure-aire) Jimmy Cayne liked to smoke weed. But Cohan skipped the issue entirely, as he had in a Fortune interview with Cayne last year. We might say we read those 468 pages in vain, except that we are not convinced marijuana played a significant role in the financial crisis, especially since the Cayne depicted and quoted by Cohan sounds more like an angry drunk than a stoner. Here's an abridged version of his rant about then-New York Fed President Tim Geithner:

"The audacity of that prick in front of the American people announcing he was deciding whether or not a firm of this stature and this whatever was good enough to get a loan," he said. "Like he was the determining factor, and it's like a flea on his back, floating down underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, getting a hardon, saying, 'Raise the bridge.' This guy thinks he's got a big dick. He's got nothing, except maybe a boyfriend. I'm not a good enemy. I'm a very bad enemy.

But he is also a marijuana enthusiast, according to Street Fighters, the new book on Bear written by Kate Kelly (a "cunt...whose capability is zero" according to Cayne.)

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Topics: Bear Stearns, Jimmy Cayne

Timothy Geithner

Only A Taxpayer Would Mistake Tim Geithner For A "Banker"

Moe Tkacik | April 21, 2009, 3:11PM

Too often a tedious standoff between the somnolent/dry and the grandstanding/gratuitous, Congressional hearings about the financial crisis have nevertheless produced a few moments of existential clarity. (We refer, obviously, to the time in December when Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings asked Neel Kashkari if he was a "chump", which was surely a question on the lips of anyone who had glimpsed the then-TARP overseer's high school yearbook photos.)

But Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's appearance before a the TARP oversight panel this morning yielded a similarly exchange when AFL-CIO Associate General Counsel Damon Silvers dared to accuse Geithner of being a "banker":

Partial transcript after the jump.

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Topics: Elizabeth Warren, Jimmy Cayne, Timothy Geithner