Michael L. Corbat has kept a relatively low profile since taking the helm of Citigroup in October 2012. And that appears to be just fine with the bank he runs, Susanne Craig and Jessica Silver-Greenberg report in DealBook.
“To be a prominent face of Wall Street at a time when banks are feeling the heat from federal authorities on a number of fronts clearly has its drawbacks. Mr. Corbat’s counterpart at rival JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, has been widely viewed as the point man for the bank as it wrestles with investigations by at least seven federal agencies, several state regulators and two foreign nations. And under Mr. Dimon, JPMorgan has in just a few years gone from a Washington favorite to a magnet for government scrutiny.
“The low-key approach taken by Citigroup â€" which faces a number of investigations of its own â€" has not gone unnoticed inside JPMorgan. Some board members and executives there have recently pointed to Mr. Corbat in privately discussing the apparent advantages of a more self-effacing approach in a chief executive. The perks of a lower profile have become clear to Mr. Dimon, too, according to people close to him who note he has recently refrained from giving interviews to focus, in part, on client meetings.
“JPMorgan’s board, of course, remains solidly behind Mr. Dimon. But at least two directors, people close to the board say, have also privately acknowledged that Mr. Dimon’s previous offhandedness toward authorities â€" including his referring several years ago to the former Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner as “Timmy†â€" at times rankled regulators, adding to the steep challenge the bank faces as it now tries to mend those frayed relationships.â€
A STRONG MONTH FOR HEDGE FUNDS Â |Â November is shaping up to be the month that puts many hedge funds solidly in the black for the year, at least judging by the performance of two closely watched portfolios, Matthew Goldstein reports in DealBook.
David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital reported a 4.7 percent gain for the month, putting the firm’s flagship fund up about 19.1 percent for the year, according to an investor with knowledge of the matter. Another firm that reported early, Daniel Loeb’s Third Point, also had a strong November, Mr. Goldstein reports. Its flagship fund, Third Point Partners, was up 2.7 percent for November and is now up 23.2 percent for the year, while the more leveraged Third Point Ultra fund is now up 33.4 percent for the year, after rising 3.6 percent in November.
T-MOBILE’S BRASH C.E.O. KEEPS RIVALS OFF BALANCE  | T-Mobile had all but been given up for dead two years ago, when its owner, Deutsche Telekom, agreed to sell it to AT&T and was already describing the business as a “discontinued†operation in its financial statements. But then came John J. Legere. Named chief executive of T-Mobile in September 2012, after the antitrust division of the Justice Department sued to block the proposed merger and AT&T threw in the towel, Mr. Legere quickly started shaking up the industry, James B. Stewart writes in the Common Sense column in The New York Times.
“Mr. Legere not only looked but also acted the part of the ‘disruptive’ competitor beloved by antitrust regulators but all too rare in most concentrated industries (there are just four major cellular carriers). He branded T-Mobile the ‘Un-carrier’ and took square aim at the staid giants of the industry, AT&T and Verizon, publicly describing them with language that can’t be printed in this newspaper,†Mr. Stewart writes. “This might have been dismissed as little more than a colorful stunt, given the depth of T-Mobile’s problems. But then the results started rolling in.â€
How did he do it? When he joined T-Mobile, “We had a limited time window and a sense of urgency,†Mr. Legere told Mr. Stewart. “We were losing over two million customers a year. So we moved as fast as we humanly could. My board wondered if we were doing too much. But the fact is, speed has become one of our biggest weapons. The current industry is arrogant, stupid and slow, which gives companies like T-Mobile a real competitive advantage.â€
DELIVERY BY DRONE?  | If Jeff Bezos has his way, Amazon’s future delivery system will run on drones. On “60 Minutes†on Sunday night, Mr. Bezos, the Amazon founder, floated the notion of using drones to deliver packages, showing Charlie Rose a video of a tiny helicopter seizing a package from a warehouse and airlifting it to a house. “I know this looks like science fiction. It’s not,†Mr. Bezos said. Still, he cautioned that there were “years of additional work from this point.†The hardest challenge, he said, would be convincing the Federal Aviation Administration that this is a good idea.
ON THE AGENDA Â |Â The ISM manufacturing index for November is released at 10 a.m. The restructuring expert James E. Millstein is on Bloomberg TV at 10:30 a.m. Claudio Del Vecchio, the owner of Brooks Brothers, is on Bloomberg TV at 3:30 p.m.
SCORSESE’S WALL STREET EPIC  | Martin Scorsese’s new movie, “The Wolf of Wall Street,†is the last of the Oscar season movies to surface, Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes report in The New York Times. Completed just last Wednesday and scheduled for release on Christmas Day, the two-hour, 59-minute cinematic romp through the securities business is Mr. Scorsese’s longest film ever.
Will the picture do for crooked stock traders what Mr. Scorsese’s “Goodfellas†did for the mob, or will it become a problem for the executives at Paramount? “For Paramount, the stakes are not inconsiderable. Though the Viacom-owned studio had spring-summer hits in ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ and ‘World War Z,’ it is running last among the major studios, with only about $823 million in domestic ticket sales, roughly half those of first-place Warner Brothers,†The Times writes.
Akamai Technologies to Buy Cybersecurity Firm  | Akamai Technologies said it would buy Prolexic Technologies, a cloud-based cybersecurity provider, for about $370 million. REUTERS
Pearson to Sell Financial News Group for $623 Million  | Pearson, the publisher of The Financial Times, put Mergermarket up for sale earlier this year, and the private equity firm BC Partners emerged as the buyer. DealBook »
Australia Blocks A.D.M.’s $2.7 Billion Bid for GrainCorp  | The rejection of the takeover by the American agribusiness giant raised doubts about the coalition government’s pro-business pledges. DealBook »
American-US Airways Merger Cleared  | The merger of American Airlines and US Airways has cleared its final hurdle as a federal bankruptcy judge approves American’s reorganization plan, reports Jad Mouawad of The New York Times. DealBook »
Orange to Sell Dominican Telecom Business  | Orange, the French telecommunications company, will sell its Dominican unit for $1.4 billion to Altice, a Luxembourg cable and broadband provider that is expanding its presence in the Caribbean. DealBook »
Commuter Train Accident in the Bronx Kills 4 and Injures Dozens  | More than 60 passengers were injured, 11 critically, after all eight cars of a Metro-North train from Poughkeepsie veered off the tracks on Sunday near the Spuyten Duyvil station along the Hudson River, officials said. NEW YORK TIMES
Commercial Mortgage Securities Make a Comeback  | The Financial Times reports: “Worldwide issuance of securities backed by revenues from commercial mortgages has nearly doubled this year to the highest level since 2007 as U.S. and European banks pile back into property lending.†FINANCIAL TIMES
Wall Street’s Need for Speed Approaches a Natural Limit  | Strike Technologies, a company racing to build networks of microwave radio transmitters linking financial hubs around the world, says its technology can beam market data at about 95 percent of the theoretical speed of light, The Los Angeles Times reports. LOS ANGELES TIMES
Hilton Aims to Raise Up to $2.37 Billion in I.P.O. Â |Â Hilton Worldwide, which is owned by the Blackstone Group, said in a filing on Monday that it planned to price an offering of 112.8 million shares at $18 to $21 a share. REUTERS
Private Equity Transaction Fees Under Fire  | An unidentified “senior private equity insider†has filed a whistle-blower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission to take aim at “transaction fees†collected by private equity firms, Crain’s New York Business reports. CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS
Markit May Add New Directors Ahead of Possible I.P.O.  | Financial News reports: “Markit Group, the 10-year-old financial information provider now worth an estimated $5 billion, is this week expected to appoint a majority-independent board for the first time in the latest sign it may pursue a public listing next year.†FINANCIAL NEWS
A Backlog of I.P.O.’s in China  | Stocks fell after China’s securities regulator announced plans to lift a 13-month moratorium on initial public offerings in January, as investors pondered the glut of 760 firms waiting to go public, Quartz writes. QUARTZ
A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail  | The web currency appeals to right-wing thinkers. But private sector money is a fantasy. Currencies need political authority to raise taxes or to pass laws to unwind monetary excesses, Edward Hadas of Reuters Breakingviews writes. REUTERS BREAKINGVIEWS
Fed Zeroes In on a Weak Link in Finance  | “Regulators have spent the past five years trying to siphon risk out of the financial system, but the Federal Reserve sees one major piece of unfinished business: short-term funding,†The Wall Street Journal writes. WALL STREET JOURNAL
Mortgages Without Risk, at Least for the Banks  | A part of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law is being challenged by a coalition that wants to drop risk retention for mortgage loans, Floyd Norris writes in his column for The New York Times. DealBook »
Turning the Wheels of Justice, and Making Room for Springsteen  | Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, has an office with official portraits, plaques and seals adorning the walls â€" but also the constant sound of music filling the air. An interview with Edward Lewine for the Workspace column in The New York Times. DealBook »
A Trusting Couple Thrown for Two Loops  | The lawyer for a Miami Beach couple says their names were forged on mortgage documents, Gretchen Morgenson writes in the Fair Game column in The New York Times. And now the title insurer has refused to make a settlement on most of the properties involved. NEW YORK TIMES
