Facebook Remarks by Myself re: Neil Diamond 21 May 2011

 I love the rich mellowness of his voice and the simplicity of lyrics. He says a lot with very little. 
I never went to any Diamond concert but here I go with my story about Neil Diamond. I used to start work at 7AM in Rockefeller Center. On some days I would get off the express bus and walk over to 48th to a particular deli “Scott’s” that served a very tasty and cheap bacon and egg sandwich to go. This was in I think July 2001. Well anyway Scott’s is just off NBC’s glass front on the street for the Today Show. Well on this day at 6:30 the plaza was packed with 1,000 people and Neil was doing a warmup for the Today show at 7 AM. The crowd was absolutely on top of every music note and lyric, screaming, clapping, jumping. I stood across the street and listened for a bit and then sadly had to get to work three blocks away. 
I remember walking along dark streets and hearing echoes of “Cracklin Rosie” bouncing off the walls of skyscrapers and remember it because it happened a couple of weeks before 911. I remember Neil Diamond with not only a fondness for his music but the memory I have of him in NYC before NYC changed on 911. Whatever.


Facebook Remarks by Myself re: Neil Diamond 21 May 2011

Facebook remarks by myself re: James Baldwin 21 March 2017

Baldwin was an interesting dude. Remember reading his autobiographical novel Notes Of A Native Son at Temple. Can't remember if it was for Eng Comp. or Poli Sci.. One interesting note was that I was having a late Christmas dinner with friends up around 112th and Broadway when I lived near Columbia around 1981. It was a Chinese restaurant. At the next table was Baldwin chain smoking, his presumed male spouse and a drunk giggly French girl in her twenties, a college reporter I think, she breaking in from time to time in French and English. I remember when he died, His memorial service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine down the street drew record crowds in excess of 3,000 people in attendance.
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Some of what he wrote sticks with me. His being a kid outside the public library at 42nd and 5th Ave and a nasty Irish cop telling him he didn't belong there. He belonged up in Harlem. Oh yeah? Yeah right. As a kid when an adult tells you that you can't do something, something in the species or genes that wants to prove the old cracketr wrong. lol

Facebook remarks by myself re: James Baldwin 21 March 2017

Rudolph Giuliani - Republican Mannequin for Mayor 1989

I have told this story a number of times to friends and it has a lot of logistics in it instead of all words.

To begin with, I used to work in a German Bank in Rockefeller Center and did not start work until 10 A.M. because I did not go home until the Federal Reserve Bank closed at 6:30 P.M. or beyond every evening in order for banks to settle on Fed Fund balances in every banks reserves with the Fed. A complicated formula which I will skip here. 

As a result I many times took a leisurely bus ride on the "6" bus up from the Staten Island Ferry. I did so because I was not that fond of subways and I was in no rush and each morning I would read the New York Times on the ferry and continue to do so from the seat of a bus as it traveled north through the Village and up Sixth Ave. (Avenue of the Americas and or "6"th Ave.)

On this particular Spring day around May was about to get off the bus and exit straight from the bus stop into 30 Roc and I walked through that building's lobby on my way to the next Roc Center building where I worked on the 37th floor of the International Building (45 Rockefeller Center).

That is the building with the statue of Atlas in front on Fifth Avenue and across from Saint Patrick's cathedral. On a side note, the windows of this old building were metal framed and you could open the windows in this pre-war skyscraper. Air Conditioning put in after the war and in the winter when the radiators were giving off too much heat, we used to crack the windows open an inch or two to balance the heat with the winter cold pouring in the window. 

And on another note, outside my desk in an open office plan, we could witness the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree every year. And in the front office of our manager on the Fifth Avenue side of the building you could look down on Saint Patrick's and witness the columns of police and firemen in formation marching north on St. Patrick's Day or even witness the hearse of deceased Yankee's manager Billy Martin and his casket being carried into the cathedral's front door for his funeral, as I have with one memory.

Well I am trying to exit the 6 bus and a taxi is blocking the spot where the bus stops in front of the 30 Roc building. I see that the bus driver sees me in the exit well and tells me, calls back to me, he has to wait for a green light to let him pull ahead and I could exit. 

Just then I see Rudolph Giuliani exit 30 Roc in a dark pin striped suit, where NBC has it studios  btw, no doubt talking on air about his run in the local Republican mayoral primary for his first unsuccessful run for mayor, that he has just announced his participation in, and he is surrounded by an entourage of several handlers. 

I can see that these handlers leave Giuliani and go running into the street near the back of my stuck bus and they appear to be hailing down a circling limousine. Seeing this through a back window of an older bus. 

The handlers leave Rudy and he just stands there motionless, no emotion, no eyes blinking etc. (lost in mental space?)  I look at him and am surprised at his motionless being, and not even looking in the direction of his scurrying aides in the street. 

He is standing there like a literal mannequin for a few seconds before one of his handlers return and escorts him by the arm into the street and limo. 

The light turned green. The bus moved to its designated stop. I exited and went to work. 


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Donald Trump's Bad Loans At Bankers Trust NYC - 1980s 1990s - Deutsche Bank

Wolfgang was a vice president, Private Business Loan division, at the New York City based branch of a German bank that I worked at in the late eighties. Wolfgang would joke after he had a few beers on Friday afternoon before closing time that his younger brother by half a dozen years was a foot taller than himself as Wolfgang had been born in the early 1950s and there was not enough food to go around in post-war Germany and so he grew up stunted so to speak. Of course as an employee of a German company he expected lifetime employment and his apartment in Manhattan was subsidized by the bank. Subsidized so much that he and a few other of the senior German staff had their cash invested in foreign exchange in our trading room. The irony of all ironies and I checked the story out was that that trading room had once been a separate office space when the building was built in the 30s, and  the headquarters of the British spy network in America headed up some Canadian up to and including World War II in this old art deco building in Rockefeller Center. That once that trading room had met a goal of how many percent it targeted and made on arbitrage it stopped for the day, usually mid afternoon, the traders some American and some German bullshitted and the Dutch trader in charge would start to break out the Becks, the preferred German beer for a preferred German bank.

And an American working in the lower echelons of support in Money Transfer, the Dutch trader would on many Friday afternoons, Friday afternoon being the weekly time to share a beer with comrade workers in the name of fellowship etc., the Van man, his name began with "Van der ...", he to hand out Becks to us peons in the ranks of Money Transfer just outside the Trading Room. And of course it would be impolite to refuse. And my supervisor did not object, an Irish American such as myself did not object to fellowship with our employer higher ups. But our manager, an Irish American, (the Germans like the Irish - neutral in the war lol) who would not insult the management of a German Bank would caution me, us, that if anybody makes a mistake and we lose money because of the Beck's, well you would be on the unemployment line, the lifetime employment thing was carried over to the American workers of that bank in a surreal sort of way, but only the regular German employees, German interns shipped in for six month as a time from Deutschland, were the only ones being fire proof. LOL

And it took some time for me at the Friday afternoon beer fests in the Board Room to realize how different a company can operate in America sharing the profits in its meager matters to staff.

The only other company I had experienced almost the same lifetime employment, profit sharing etc was when I started out as a clerk in Money Transfer at Bankers Trust in NYC.

And to give you an idea of what banking was like under Glass-Steagall was like, it probably was more like the bank following all these rules and whatnots, was finished around mid-afternoon, as least for the executives, meetings done, quotas met etc. The thing I was involved in, in Money Transfer was the daily dance with the FED, the Federal Reserve Bank, and on a daily basis for other smaller banks in each Federal Reserve region. The New York Fed was the premier forum for money and careers, and on a daily basis as part of a two week average of what a bank had to have on hand in its account at the FED was the most important thing on the Planet.

Of the ten largest banks in America, nine were in New York City, and the tenth was in California, Bank of America. Other banks in Chicago etc. kept accounts with New York Banks and indirectly was covering their two week average of reserves to be part of the system and follow all the rules of sound banking.

The Fed closed everyday at 6:30 P.M.everyday. That bank's could not be below their reserve requirements of they would be heavily fined. The big nine were the major players. So if say Chase, was below its own target for the day of its targeted two week average with the Fed in reserves, it had to shop around to buy money, and or Federal Funds, from other banks, to meet its goals. So if Chase could not find money at a rate it wanted to pay, all the other banks on the streets turned into sharks and would sell Federal Funds over and above their averages, at shark rates to Chase in order for the Fed to close on time. Chase has not met its goal and or reserve target and requests, for a fee and or fine, a 15 minute extension of closing time, while Chase nickels and dimes more reasonable blocks of Fed Funds to some in on target.

I don't know how much of all this is computerized but in the eighties when I was in banking that is how they did that. And so it was a two way street. Banks need Fed Funds and buy them and the Fed Funds average on reserve cannot exceed a certain amount. This all over and above so-called assets. This is what the Fed says you should have on hand be meet possible runs on the bank and based on the assets he say you have in your bank in terms of cash and loans. So buying and selling Fed Funds and as close to the vest as possible was the name of the game. 

I came in a temp and I had what I thought was a silly job. I was tearing off tickets for a teletype machine and calling major customers with figures in numbers Fed Fund monies. And the deal was something like this. Your major companies, that sell farm equipment, horde grains in the market, make soap bubbles in Ohio, etc must have a checking account with cash in it and the checking account paid no interest. So what these major Fortune 500 companies did was with the help of a loophole and senior management closing their checking accounts everyday at 5 P.M. and then loan the money to the Fed Fund traders to buy and sell at lucrative rates and then next morning see the totals of principle and interest of their overnight loan to my bank. 

I suppose all this kind of boring. That the banks with Glass-Steagall rules were run like some utilities and they could only make so much money on a daily basis in a way and a lot of the extra cash, profit, got siphoned off into profit sharing, all employees, clerks and VPs alike all in the same profit sharing plan. Pretty good too. Some people there in mere clerical jobs after 20 years employment had something an average of 50k stock in the company, by not taking each yearly payment, but plowing it back into the plan. 

About halfway through my five year stint at Bankers Trust that there was a changing of the guard from the old management to new management at the Board level and that change was now into creative derivatives and Chinese Checkers investments that were the forerunner of hedge fund things. I left the bank to do some writing. Friends stayed on and found work with other banks as the corporate culture began to change. Could never understand why Bankers stock remained like a blue chip item when I kept hearing about the degradation of the quality of customer BT now handled. 

That Donald Trump's bad loan of 50 million was common knowledge in the ranks in the early eighties though it never made it to the newspapers. They kept him and his loan on the books as an asset. Starting to cook the books for a decade and a half of internal decline until Deutsche Bank bought them out in 1998. They starting screwing their biggest and best customers like shit having them invest in losing derivative logarithms, so easy then with computers etc. Their logic, management's or so I heard, was that they would find other big customers to replace the ones that had done their banking at Bankers for decades. Sounded a bit coked up to me but hey I am nobody in the scheme of such things. I sold my BT stock to support myself and my attempts at writing. The real money was in the fees in the packaging of loans, like the ones they had with Donald Trump. Sound familiar. Sound like a prelude to a crash. 

Trump's dealings with Deutsche Bank date back decades

But BT stuck by him. It's unclear if the bank got all of its money back, but it did collect a $10 million payment in 1996 when Trump took his restructured hotel and casino company public, a deal BT helped underwrite.

But the firm's zeal for cash also led to big legal and public-relations problems, starting in 1994 when Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings sued the bank for misleading them on derivatives deals. Tapes surfaced of BT employees describing how they duped clients. "That's the beauty of Bankers Trust," one broker boasted.

Around the same time, New York state auditors discovered that executives routinely pocketed unclaimed customer cash in what prosecutors described as a vast slush fund. The bank pleaded guilty in 1999 to three felony charges and agreed to pay a $63 million fine as part of a settlement with state and federal authorities.

"It's not every day that a bank cooks its books," a then–federal regulator observed.

The bank's ultimate undoing began in 1998, when Russia defaulted on its sovereign debt and uncorked a worldwide panic. BT lost nearly half a billion dollars in 12 weeks, which essentially forced its sale to Deutsche Bank. Now, the long history of that relationship with Trump is in Mueller's hands. He will surely have some fascinating material to sift through.

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So I am wondering if BT in the eighties (the glory days of Saint Ronny) and nineties was already on life support on Russian money filtered in loans through Deutsche Bank. One has to wonder when Donald did his deal with the Devil, but I already have the opinion on record that Donald got turned at @Penn.

Shards of 911 - Postscript - One Bankers Trust Plaza - 130 Liberty Street NYC