And of course, the best way to prove you are not a “sleazeball” is to try to get your son’s teacher fired for allegedly calling you one:
Hugh “Skip” McGee, one of Wall Street’s best-paid bankers, has launched an extraordinary attack on staff at his son’s exclusive private school after a teacher allegedly claimed that all investment bankers are dishonest “sleazeballs”.
Mr Mcgee, who is Barclays Capital’s global head of investment banking, penned a rambling five-page letter to the board of trustees of Houston’s Kinkaid School, asking that the teacher and two other staff members be fired.
In the letter, Mr McGee, who is alleged to have an eight-figure salary, claims that history teacher Leslie Lovett has a “leftist invective” which “is neither accurate nor part of the approved curriculum”.
The banker, who was global head of investment banking at Lehman Brothers until its collapse last year, goes on to claim that the teacher told his son John Edward’s 11th-grade class “that somehow both Lehman and Barclays made a bunch of money on the Lehman bankruptcy, and that all investment bankers were ‘sleazeballs’ and dishonest”.
Okay, maybe it was wrong to call him a sleazeball. Asshole might have been the more appropriate epithet.
It’s unfortunate that investment bankers are considered bankers. Bankers take in deposits and make loans, yet all that “investment bankers” do is finance investments: they don’t supply credit at all to the “little people.”
I suppose it would be better if we called them “investment financers” rather than using the word “banker” to describe them.
And yes, they are sleaze-balls.
You would think that a teacher-parent conference would be the appropriate first step. But I guess this guy is used to summarily firing anybody who doesn’t kiss his rear-end.
By the 11th grade, kids in high school should be able to take their teacher’s opinions with a grain of salt. I imagine most of them don’t listen to their teachers when they tell them to obey themselves (at least, not ALL the time), you would think that they could deal with these issues as well.
I suspect that this kid’s household is one where Dad is a powder keg waiting to go off. Often in such households, the other members learn that the best way to avoid becoming the target of such rage (over triffling things) is to make sure it is directed at somebody else – either tattling on the siblings, or finding some other person against which this martinet can direct his rage.
Another possibility is that this kid, from a wealthy and powerful family, is accostomed to teachers having to toe the line around him, under threat of being fired if he tattles on them to his dad. You can imagine how those kids turn out as adults.
# 1: I’m not sure if “investment financier” is a good term, either. It seems to me that they really are brokers who get HUGE profits simply by marrying the “deal” (sale, merger, divestment, etc.) with the “money” (wall street brockerage or investment firms, venture capitalists, etc.).
An interesting book to read which reveals a lot about the world of investment banking (at least in the 1980’s) is <a href="Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco. It also gives a lot of background information about how the tobacco industry works.
In a very small sense, McGee is probably right. It’s quite possible that at least one investment banker, somewhere on the planet, is neither dishonest nor a sleazeball. Even if no such person has yet been seen by anyone, you can’t prove a negative.
Not-a-sleazeball is less unlikely, I believe, than not-dishonest.
I further note that it’s evident you won’t find not-a-sleazeball among the investment bankers in the McGee household. There’s no information currently available to me about the dishonesty-quotient in that family.
There should be a bounty on them! About the same amount as on a skunk, possum or any other varmint.
Good for the banker. I bet Goldy’s kid’s teacher degraded bloggers as a profession, I’m sure Goldy would be quick to complain.
@ # 3 I said: “Another possibility is that this kid, from a wealthy and powerful family, is accostomed to teachers having to toe the line around him, under threat of being fired if he tattles on them to his dad. You can imagine how those kids turn out as adults.”
Re-reading that statement, the answer to the question “how those kids turn out as adults” is rather obvious.
They turn out to be Republicans. ;)
@1, @3 Another fairly apt term I’ve heard in the past is “vulture capitalists”.
He’s arguably not only a dishonest sleazeball,* he’s thin-skinned, too. I mean, c’mon, a Wall Street titan feels threatened by a teacher? Or is this big shot throwing his weight around just to show he can?
* I have no personal knowledge of whether Mr. McGee is dishonest or a sleazeball, or not. I’m simply reiterating news reports and/or opinion from the public media. In any case, Mr. McGee is a public figure, but even if he isn’t, I’m judgment proof anyway, but in any case if he wants this leaky rabbit hole, he can have it.
@1 They used to be called “financiers.”
@4 It seems to me that not being a sleazeball would disqualify a person from working on Wall Street. The hiring managers don’t want nice people. Nice is weak. They want wolves.
I haven’t laughed this hard in quite a while. Maybe the teacher should just start a blog.
investment bankers can’t be blamed. they’re greedy little monsters. they’re like children. only children like candy and bankers like money.
then there is obama. and he is throwing money at the bankers like its going out of fashion.
so… why are we angry at the children? we should be angry at the candy pusher.
note to private school teachers: don’t hate on rich people.
Platy @ 13: Nope, it was George W. Bush who insisted that Congress give him and his treasury scty authority to give a trillion dollars directly to banks and Wall Street investment firms, under the threat that they would be responsible for another “great depression” if they refused. They assured them that the Treasury Secty would act prudently, but there just wasn’t time to make detailed plans about how the money was going to be spent, who was going to get it, and what controls were going to be imposed on how the money was going to be spent, or requirements for accounting for the use of the money.
Of course, as soon as they got the authorization, they immediatly GAVE approx. one-third of the money to selected banks and investment firms, which was used mostly to buy up other banks and investment firms. Some of the money appears to have been used to pay stockholder dividends and executive bonuses, as well. But to this day, no one really knows how much money was given to who, or what they did with it, or how the administration selected who was going to be the shark that got the money and who was going to become the meal which was gobbled up by the sharks. We don’t know, because there were no strings attached to the use of the money.
We can tell a little bit because many of us received notices in the mail from Citibank that our credit card terms are being changed. I was surprised when we received several such notices, because we have never banked with Citibank and don’t have any of their cards. But it turns out that Citibank used their government money to buy up the credit card operations of several major stores, so that now our Sears, Macy’s, Target, etc. credit cards are now actually issued by Citibank. Of course, since there isn’t much competition left, they simply trippled the interest rate and imposed ungodly penalties for late payments, overdrafts, etc. We just paid off our Sears card, and it’s being cut up this weekend.
Now when Obama was faced with the result of the Bush Economic Disaster, and the looming collapse of the two of the three major U.S. car manufacturers, he reluctantly gave them money but only after imposing significant restrictions on them, including having a government representative sitting on the board, salary & bonus restrictions on executives, and insisting that the GM CEO resign rather than benefit from the carmaker’s collapse. Republicans howled – not so much because money was spent, but because they dared to attach strings to the request, thereby making it a “socialistic” takeover of the car industry, according to Republicans.
@2 “You would think that a teacher-parent conference would be the appropriate first step.”
I have taught for 30 years and I can tell you that a parent like this has no interest in a discussion. They just want revenge. I have seen this happen to many a teacher for lesser “crimes” and the parent usually goes straight to either the superintendent or the media.
I had a son of a former Fisher Broadcasting VP in my jr high math class. When I gave his kid a detention, the man was going to take me to court. I said to him, ” I think that is an excellent idea. I have a huge file of documentations of every time your son has disrupted class and has been rude and disrespectful. I would love to show it to the judge. Let’s do it!
I never heard a peep out of him again.
Rhp6033: Did you miss the comments from certain HA Libtardos earlier this year mentioning the TARP was a positive thing? That didn’t include ylb arschloch. He’s a fool lost in space. Did you forget Turbotax Tim Geithner was one of the original proponents on TARP. Die you forget Senator Obama approved TARP when he was asked?
@2
It would be in a public school!
@14
Totally.
If investor banker boy doesn’t like the private school teachers, he could always send his kid to public schools.
I’m sure his actions teach his son all sorts of valuable lessons , but I haven’t a clue what those lessons might be.
@13 “then there is obama. and he is throwing money at the bankers like its going out of fashion.”
Why did you leave Bush out of this diatribe? The first $700 billion thrown at the bankers was thrown by Bush.
@16 People like Clemmons usually have parents like him. Mrs. Rabbit grew up with a kid whose mom tore into anyone who dared criticize her little boy. He ended up in prison for murder.
@17 Puddy is for Hooverism and Great Depression 2.0.
The less you pay teachers, the more they don’t give a rat’s ass about losing their job.
You can make more money as a garbage man than you can as a public school teaher — and they make nore than private school teachers.
It’s not inconceivable that a well educated teacher could use the issue with the ‘investment banker’ as a plus when applying at a small business that has had their credit line cut due to the actions of sleazeball investment bankers.
RHP6033 @3,
I read “Barbarians at the Gate” years ago. Great book!. Another great book of that ilk is “Liars Poker” by Michael Lewis. He was a Lehman bond trader who, in his words, often “blew up” his client to make a trade for the firm. Even if these guys “killed” their clients, they still made money for the firm!
Anyone catch the last installment of Frontline? Bankers are a moraless, money-worshiping virus which has infected the American political system.
FYI – Kinkaid was the school W attended before he got shipped back east to Philips.
@16;
That story made me smile.