About John Gappe

I am the FT’s chief business commentator and this blog is about business, finance, media, technology and related matters. I live in New York so there is a bias towards US topics but I range more widely. Comments and criticism, which hopefully are at least as interesting as anything I write, are welcome.

A weird day on Wall Street

This was a weird and wonderful day on Wall Street; one for the history books.

First, we learnt that David Rubenstein of Carlyle Group had bought a copy of the Magna Carta for $23.1m and plans to keep it on display at the National Archives in near his office in Washington. He did it, he told the Wall Street Journal, to "repay a debt I have to the country".

Talking of debt, Morgan Stanley then declared a $9.4bn write-down on mortgage securities, mostly run up by a single trading desk, which is quite a lot of money for a few people to lose. It said it was taking a $5bn capital infusion from China's sovereign wealth fund and John Mack, its chief executive, would give up his annual bonus as penance.

Finally, we had a conference call to match - and indeed surpass - for strangeness the one held by Bear Stearns in the summer at which Jimmy Cayne, its chief executive disappeared halfway through the call and Bear's stock fell sharply.

This time, the conference call was held by Sallie Mae, the giant mortgage securitisation group. It started amiably but Al Lord, its chief executive, then got into a tussle with analysts about how much information he was divulging. The call ended with Mr Lord saying testily to his head of investor relations head: "Let's get the (expletive deleted) out of here" and Sallie Mae's shares dropping 21 per cent.

You might have thought that staying on a call long enough to answer questions and remaining polite would not be too much to ask of a chief executive trying to retain confidence in his company. These are strange times indeed.