The construction and sale of the collateralized-debt obligation Abacus required Goldman Sachs’ Fabrice Tourre to keep the parties on both sides of the deal — hedge-fund manager John Paulson and Goldman clients — happy. In the meantime, as e-mails released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations reveal, it seems the Fabulous Fab was also juggling two women: Marine Serres, a fellow Goldman colleague in London, and Fatiha Boukhtouche, a PhD student at Columbia University.
It was to Serres that Fabrice addressed the now-famous e-mail quoted in the SEC’s complaint against him, on January 23, although they excised the bits in which Fab justified what he was doing — as well as his gushy sentiments about Marine.
Darling you should take a look at this article … Very insightful … More and more leverage in the system, l’edifice entier riqsue de s’effondrer a tout moment … Seul survivant potentiel, the fabulous Fab (as Mitch would kindly call me, even though there is nothing fabulous abt me, just kindness, altruism and deep love for some gorgeous and super smart French girl in London), standing in the middle of all these complex, highly levered exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of these monstruosities !!! Anyway, not feeling too guilty about this, the real purpose of my job is to make capital markets more efficient and ultimately provide the US consumer will more efficient ways to leverage and finance himself, so there is a humble, noble and ethical reason for my job ;) amazing how good I am in convincing myself !!!
This might be some of the nerdiest pillow talk we have ever read, but it worked for Marine, since she eventually replied
One week later, Fab sent the following e-mail to Fatiha.
When I think that I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: “Well, what if we created a ‘thing’, which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?”) it sickens the heart to see it shot down in mid-flight … it’s a little like Frankenstein turning against his own inventor ;) Anyway I don’t want to bore you with my stories, I’m going to look in the yellow pages for the phone number of the ABX market and I’ll send it to you, because I believe that a soft and sensual feminine intervention is necessary for Fab’s survival
Kisses
Amazingly, this also worked, as Fatiha replied:
We’d say that the ABX has never figured so prominently in anyone’s pillow talk before—but then, we haven’t seen John Paulson’s personal e-mails.
