
Inside the Secret Society of Wall Street's Top In-House Lawyers - geodel
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-14/what-top-bank-lawyers-were-doing-at-secret-versailles-summit
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jpatokal
> The gatherings, which were described by several people familiar with them
> who asked not to be identified, tend to feature discussions of nuts-and-
> bolts issues such as managing relationships with the board and whether
> compliance personnel should receive stock incentives.

That's some Illuminati-level secret society stuff right there. Clickbait much?

~~~
jsprogrammer
Conspiracy to fix wages? Trafficking in insider information? And, the
anonymous source doesn't give further details?

I don't know what Illuminati have to do with this post, but I'm sure
compliance personnel, at least, would like to know what is said at remote,
private discussions between high-level representatives of competing firms.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _I 'm sure compliance personnel, at least, would like to know what is said
> in the discussions about them_

It's not common practice to record office conversations. Neither is it common
to forbid offsite meetings.

~~~
FireBeyond
Why should an attorney for a competing firm be party to any discussion as to
your future compensation?

~~~
totalZero
There's a higher-level discussion wherein the compliance guys are supposed to
be the watchmen, but if you give them stock or options, then they are suddenly
incentivized to do whatever is most profitable for the firm. That's the
discussion mentioned.

The counterpoint is that, if you have strong regulators, then they will sniff
out the funny business anyway. The resultant fines would hurt the bank's
stock, which would still be negative for the compliance personnel.

There, we just had a discussion as to compliance workers' future compensation.
And we're not even in the business!

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vosper
In summary: A group of people who work in the same field get together
periodically to talk shop. Just in nicer digs than your average Meetup.

~~~
patio11
This is a very old story:

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and
diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in
some contrivance to raise prices."

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

~~~
Kalium
Damn, my nights drinking with other programmers have clearly been very much
wasted!

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aub3bhat
>whether compliance personnel should receive stock incentives.

I don't this is about underpaying them but rather about legal complexities of
inherent conflict of interest between compliance and stock based compensation.
E.g. You don't want a compliance officer to look in the other direction to
ensure her stock appreciates. This seems like a reasonable question/topic for
a meeting of lawyers.

~~~
jsprogrammer
They are conflicted themselves; secretly (sources won't even reveal their
identities) managing board relationships and deciding on compensation matters.
The question is reasonable, the secrecy isn't. The question should be
addressed openly.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _the secrecy isn 't_

They won't reveal their identities _to Bloomberg_. This is like saying "Apple
won't release attendance and transcripts of its executive meetings to the New
York _Times_ ; therefore, they are up to no good".

~~~
jsprogrammer
Seems more similar to, "Jobs and Schmidt are emailing and we think it's about
wages".

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jimjimjim
the author seems desperate to imply some "elite" conspiracy dan brown style
mysterious global cabal.

in reality, every person in every social/business position wants to hang out
with people in similar positions.

devs go to dev conferences, cio's go to cio events, archivist librarians go to
archive/library conferences, gas station owners go to oil company events in
Hawaii.

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denzell
How is this different to software engineers meeting up?

Software engineers getting together to talk about which programming language
is best, what software to use, etc..

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Havoc
Isn't that level of coordination against competition laws?

