notdead:

lowendtheory:

The basic version is this: John Paulson is a wall street whiz and Hedge Fund owner. He went to Stern way back when and was inspired by (not making this up) a class lecture given by Robert Rubin to go into Wall Street. A couple of years ago, he picked a bunch of subprime mortgages, convinced Goldman Sachs to bundle them together and sell them to investers, and then bet against them. He then made billions when they went belly-up… Because he picked them… To go belly-up… A fact the buyers did not know.

The SEC began investigations and fined Goldman $550 Million dollars for fraud (since they were selling packages they knew would fail). Paulson, on the other hand, gets away scotch [sic] free, and a Billion dollars richer. Remember, of course, next time you look over your taxes, that Paulson pays a %15 tax rate, since as a Hedge Fund manager his earnings are all considered capital gains. You waitresses and steel workers are suckers!

So, and this is all true, NYU’s fundraising apparatus got wind of this and, rather than be embarrassed that one of their alums was acting like this, decided to try to hit Paulson up for some cash. “I suspect what happened is that, as a researcher was going through the database for Stern, they realized that John Paulson was an [alumnus] of the school and he was capable of making a gift and they began to engage him,” said Debra LaMorte, senior vice president for development and alumni affairs.

The result: a cool $20 million dollar donation for NYU.

Ph.D. Octopus • Adventures in the Corporate University 

i knew there was a way in which NYU could directly be blamed for the economic collapse!

High five to whoever connected these dots.