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Focusing on the House and St. Louis

Published: Oct 02, 2008

 Finance       
Yesterday’s bipartisan Senate vote on that little $700 billion federal bailout thing looked like a first-week-of-the-college-football-season score, with the yays beating down the nays 74 to 25 (with 1 no vote). Now all eyes move back to the House where reps will fight it out tomorrow in a rematch of the big vote that took place Monday afternoon. Early reports from the floor are saying many in Congress will flip-flop and the new deal is expected to pass.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, though, all eyes are on the Gateway City, the host of the first and only (so don’t miss it) vice presidential debate pitting Joseph “Loose Cannon” Biden against Sarah “Our Next Door Neighbors Are Foreign Countries” Palin. It should be a great battle, and excellent fodder for Saturday Night Live’s staff writers.

Though not quite a comedic scribe, Alice Schroeder does manage to squeeze in a few funny facts about Warren Buffett in her authorized biography of the Oracle of Omaha entitled Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business Life. Consider these, which were noted in a recent New York Times review of the 976-page tomb: “In church in Omaha, [Buffett] would calculate and compare the life spans of those who composed hymns. In a Roman Catholic hospital after a bout of appendicitis, he collected the nuns’ fingerprints to save in case one ever committed a crime. At 14, he made enough money delivering newspapers to file a $7 tax return. He deducted his watch and bicycle as business expenses.”

I don’t know about you but I can’t stop imagining how in the heck the little Oracle convinced those sisters to let him fingerprint them.

At any rate, a few Brothers were in the news today, as three Lehman bankers took jobs with heavy hitting hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. In other high-level personnel moves, it was announced that Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain will become the president of global banking, securities and wealth management at BofA when it completes its acquisition of Merrill, expected to be sometime in early 2009.

Also in early 2009, coming to a newstand near you (which you knew was coming, it was just a matter of time) is a special issue of Playboy entitled "Women of Wall Street."  According to the magazine's photo editor Gary Cole, "When the news gets bad, then maybe that's a chance to make people smile by coming up with something that puts a different twist on it."  Playboy says it's currently searching for women formerly or currently employed by financial services firms, and is "especially interested in those with more senior job experience." 

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