The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 12 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Mack hung up on Geithner, Bernanke, and Paulson over $2 buyout demand
“I go over and pick up the phone, and he said, I'm on here with Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson. You know, we want you to sell your firm. And I said, well, you know, out of respect for you, I called Jamie Dimon, and he'd only pay me two dollars a share. And Guy A…”
Jamie Dimon rejected Tim Geithner's demand to buy Morgan Stanley for $2
“Tim Geithner, who ran the New York Fed, called me and said, look I can't have Morgan Stanley go out of business. I want you to call Jamie Dimon and he will buy your company. No, we're desperate. I called Jamie and he said, John, I don't want your company. He s…”
Hedge funds borrowed Morgan Stanley's own repo money to short its stock
“A number of the hedge funds would come in and borrow money from us through, through a repo account. And then they would take that money and use it to short our stock. And it wasn't just us. They did it to Lehman. They did it to us.”
Every Chinese citizen and leader Mack met claims Taiwan belongs to China
“You ask any Chinese leader, Taiwan is part of China. So what's going to, how's, how's that going to play out? I've never met and I've met a lot of Chinese citizens and leaders. Every one of them says the same thing.”
Mack: Trading floor performance is visible purely through facial expressions
“You could tell what was going on just by looking at people's faces. You didn't have to hear any dialogue, and the person who was smiling was writing big tickets, and the person who was down and had their head down and walking around drinking coffee was not doi…”
Japanese partners Mack trained years earlier wrote the check saving Morgan Stanley
“And, you know, they're the ones that wrote the big check that got us out of the bind.”
Mack launched golf clinics for female executives to combat male networking advantages
“One of the things we started doing as I got more and more comfortable in the job, it was clear that on a Friday afternoon at two o'clock, a lot of the men would disappear to go play golf from May to September. And all of, most of the women were still there wor…”
Mack: Morgan Stanley trained rising Japanese partners in New York annually
“We used to bring over one or two of their up and growing partners to work with Morgan Stanley in New York for 12 months.”
Mack: Mary Meeker pushed Morgan Stanley to expand heavily into tech
“Yeah, well thank, you know, you got to get a lot of credit to Mary Meeker, because when she was the analyst way back then, she really pushed the firm to get a lot more involved in tech, and we did, thank God.”
Early Morgan Stanley partners were almost exclusively Princeton, Yale, or Harvard alumni
“And it was a private partnership. I would say, of the 35 partners, 20 of them probably went to Princeton. And the rest of them probably went to Yale or Harvard.”
Mack: Early Morgan Stanley had 400 to 500 people as a partnership
“We were back then, we were a small private, ah, partnerships. It wasn't a huge firm of a thousand people. It was probably four or 500 people.”
Wall Street trading floors 35 years ago paused midday for Frisbee games
“You go back 35 years ago, you walk on a trading floor, you'd see a Frisbee going across the trading floor. Someone would flip it and go over there. You'd see a delivery guy come in with, you know, 20 boxes of pizza and people kind of socializing, and for a per…”