Goldman Has an Unhappy Loan Customer
Also Bridgewater, airlines, pigs and CVRs.
I guess it’s a little weird that you don’t see more clients suing their investment bankers over the financial advice that they got. I mean it happens occasionally on derivative trades gone wrong, and of course there are shareholder lawsuits against banks for conflicts of interest in mergers-and-acquisitions advisory work, and Carl Icahn has some specialized fun, but for the most part you don’t really see a company’s chief executive officer hire bankers to advise her on a merger, get that advice, do the merger, realize that the merger was bad and the advice was worthless, and turn around and ask the bankers for her money back.
I say it’s a little weird just because the value of the advice is so subjective and uncertain, while the price is so high: Surely someone has paid a bank $20 million for advice, gotten the advice, and thought to herself “really, $20 million, for this?” People get insanely litigious about dry cleaning; you’d think some CEO somewhere would decide to fight her bankers to the death over their fees.