and then there was this--
Taking Up the Defense of Jack Grubman
By James J. Cramer
05/31/2002 12:04 PM EDT
Editor's note: Jim Cramer's column runs exclusively on RealMoney.com; this is a special free look at his column. For a free trial subscription to RealMoney.com, click here.)
Read More
Click here for the latest from James J. Cramer
This column is a defense of Jack Grubman, the telecommunications analyst at Salomon Smith Barney. No, don't skip it; read on. It will open your eyes the same way I meant to open your eyes in Confessions of a Street Addict.
First, the article that leads The Wall Street Journal today about how Jack Grubman "helped call the shots at Global Crossing (GBLXQ:Nasdaq - news - commentary - research - analysis)" has no business being called "news." It has no business being called news because everyone who had ever taken a call from that firm during this period knew that Jack was calling the shots at Global. You knew it because he told you so, nearly every single day.
Hey, here's a news flash for you: The Journal could have written the same story about Qwest (Q:NYSE - news - commentary - research - analysis). In fact, Grubman's been calling the shots at Qwest since Qwest was created. Heck, I think he created it; he's always been buddies with Phil Anschutz, the biggest shareholder, and Joe Nacchio, the CEO. He's never hidden that either. Anybody who ever saw, heard or read Grubman during this period knew this.
And you know what? He was right to do it. That's right, he was right to do it. You know why? Because we are all kidding ourselves about what happened in the late '90s. We are all acting naively now. We are all mad because we all lost so much money. But we sure as heck weren't upset when Grubman was making us money hand over fist. Not when Grubman told us to buy Rochester Tel and it made us money when it got the bid. Not when Grubman told us to buy U S Worst and it got a bid. Not when Grubman told us that Qwest and Global were going to levitate higher, and they did.
We loved that Grubman was the ultimate insider. We didn't care that he made fortunes for himself; he was making fortunes for us. We loved the guy; he was a nice guy, a good guy, a connected guy, and we applauded that. Every firm on Wall Street wanted Jack Grubman to work for them. Every firm. He personally changed the whole profile of analysts from green eyeshade researchers to deal men making money for everybody.
And then it ended. But nobody told Grubman. He kept right on liking it. You know what? I think he kept liking it because he went from skeptic, as he was in the '80s when he was the hardest-working analyst on Wall Street, to believer, where he was when things crashed.
Now he is paying the price for staying too long. He is the goat of the game. He is the subject of shocking revelations on the front page of The Wall Street Journal -- shocking revelations that anyone who took a call from Smith Barney in the last decade would know about. Shocking!
So now it's Grubman's time in the box. It's his time to wrack up the legal bills and fight for his life for doing what every one of us thought was the right thing to do for so long.
Grubman's crime was being more successful than any of the rest of us. And that he stayed on too long.
If you think Grubman committed a crime, believe me, you are applying laws to his behavior that didn't exist at the time. They are hindsight laws. They are second-guessing laws.
So let's keep lynching Grubman. Oh yeah, he deserves it. He made a ton of money. He was cocky and sure of himself in the end, full of hubris and arrogance.
But as we haul the rope up and kick the horse out from underneath him, let's at least remember that Grubman for years did exactly what we wanted him to do: made us a ton of money. Can we remember that as we put him in an early grave?
I know I was early in pointing out the conflicts Grubman had. They were deep and wide. And broad. And tangled. I told everyone about them. If you read me or heard me on TV, you know that the Journal's story wasn't news. You were warned.
Doesn't matter.
People who were warned aplenty now want him hanged, so hanged he will be.
But let's not kid ourselves. Jack was everything that Wall Street ever wanted him to be, the most successful player of my generation.
Nice epitaph
thestreet.com
---------------------------------
and this----http://forum.fuckedcompany.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/487853.html |
