Most Dealbreaker readers have been working from home for the better part of three months now. While perhaps initially an appealing novelty at worst and a heady glimpse of a brighter, happier, more permanent future at best, for many the bloom is very much off this particular rose, driven away by the constant noise produced by children; the nauseating claustrophobia of an Upper West Side apartment, the crushing boredom of that Hudson Valley Airbnb or, worst of all, sharing a roof with one’s parents; the realization that perhaps, before all this started, you saw your significant other the exact right amount; or the nostalgia for a cold beer at the bar by the office or a very large stake on the company or client’s dime.

“When you just look and say that the only thing that a company has to worry about is making a profit, it gives that company a pass not to pay attention to pay equity, not to pay attention to gender equity, not to pay attention to racial equality. Not to pay attention to a whole host of social factors that at the end of the day are the basis and the foundation of a strong, vibrant society,” Jones said…. Jones challenged the teachings of Milton Friedman, the U.S. economist who famously argued in 1970 that companies exist solely to maximize profits. The fund manager blasted that view as “very narrow, myopic and transactional” and blamed that idea for helping to undermine the social and civil rights changes sought throughout the 1960s.

The NYSE had determined that Hertz’s shares are “no longer suitable” for listing on the exchange, after the company filed for bankruptcy after the May 22 closing bell….

The stock plummeted 39.7%, to pace all of the NYSE decliners, to close at $2.52. Trading volume reached 215.3 million shares, enough to make the stock the most actively traded on major U.S. exchanges, according to FactSet.

The stock’s selloff comes after it tumbled 24.4% on Tuesday, to snap a 3-day streak of gains in which the stock skyrocketed 574% to close at $5.53 on Monday. That closing price was 888% above the record low close of 56 cents on May 26 following the bankruptcy announcement.

Sculptor Capital Management said on Wednesday that Chief Investment Officer James Levin will become chief executive officer… on April 1…. Levin, who joined Sculptor in 2006, had been slated to take over the helm in 2018, but Och suddenly changed his mind around Christmas 2017 to reassert control…. As CIO Levin is responsible for the SCU Credit Opportunities fund… which… had a rocky start to the year with double-digit losses….

During face-to-face recruitment, would-be members of Zbellion are given instructions for going to sites on the dark web that allow them to access sophisticated malware to siphon funds from corporations, financial institutions, and nonprofits that support “the establishment.” The gains are then converted to Bitcoin and distributed to “worthy recipients” including fellow Zbellion members who claim financial need…. In the world of JLASS 2018, Gen Z’s most militant members have essentially taken to privately taxing large corporations and other institutions to combat income inequality or, as the war gamers put it, using the “cyber world to spread a call for anarchy.”

MJS stopped paying promised dividends on its bonds and collapsed into liquidation last year…. The court appointed liquidator’s progress report just published reveals that the £35 million of assets MJS’s director Shaun Prince claimed were in the company when the liquidation was started was actually more like £7 million.

It says that the company’s affairs are being investigated by Thames Valley Police, and that the liquidator and his staff have been assisting with their investigations.

In spite of some well-earned skepticism, Chewy.com has not precisely charted the course of its predecessors, infamous Internet bubble disaster Pets.com. A year after its initial public offering, Pets.com had been dead for three months, its very name sold off to the same company that went on to create Chewy, PetSmart. A year after its initial public offering, Chewy has more than doubled in value and is rolling in revenue from all of those people who thought adopting a pet in the middle of a pandemic was a good idea.

Hassett Sees Another Stimulus Bill From Congress Before August Recess [WSJ]White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Tuesday the odds of a “Phase Four” stimulus package “are very, very high,” even if data on output and jobs continue to surpass expectations…. Mr. Hassett said he expects the economy to add another 3.5 million to 4 million jobs in June. Even so, he said, work remains to be done by Congress to ensure that a solid recovery takes root.

Tudor Jones Says Time for ‘Humble Pie’ About Stock Market [Bloomberg]“If there was a franchise for humble pie, oh my lord they’d be a mile long to own that, because we all had huge gulps of it -- me included,” Jones, the founder and chief executive officer of Tudor Investment Corp., said Tuesday during a webcast held by The Economic Club of New York….The reaction was “unlike any response that we’ve ever seen before, and so this is not your garden-variety recession,” Jones said. “Our citizenry has more cash now than they had...

Hong Kong may not be the largest financial center in Asia. Hell, it’s not even the largest financial center in China anymore. But it is still the regional hub for the hedge fund industry, boasting more funds that Singapore, Japan or Asia, and more assets under management therein than all of the others combined.

And most of those hedge fund managers probably expected it to stay that way for another couple of decades, as under the treaty that returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, Beijing was bound not to incorporate the city-state into its own, rather more repressive political regime for 50 years. But China’s a good deal more powerful now than it was 23 years ago, and Britain a great deal less influential, and so it decided to accelerate things a bit. So, uh, how much should those hedgies worry?

US stocks surge, erasing 2020 losses [CNN]The Dow finished up 461 points, or 1.7% higher. The S&P 500 ended up 1.2%, erasing its losses for the year. The Nasdaq Composite ended up 1.1%, its first record close since February.The market rally came on the same day economists officially declared the United States is in a recession, ending the longest economic expansion in American history.

Robinhood traders cash in on the market comeback that billionaire investors missed [CNBC]Robinhood — and other major e-brokers — saw a flood of new clients, seeing a “generational-buying moment” during the coronavirus market sell-off. The Silicon-Valley start-up said it saw a historic 3 million new accounts in the first quarter, while stocks experienced their fastest bear market and worst first quarter on record…. “We see a lot of buying activity of specifically industries that were impacted by the pandemic,” Robinhood co-founder and co-CEO Vladimir Tenev said at the Piper...

More than two dozen Bangladeshi suppliers are in similar “deep trouble” after Sears Holdings allegedly canceled or withheld orders. “[Sears Holdings] is not paying us,” Chowdhury said.

The suppliers have been informed by Transformco’s shippers that “the buyer has abandoned the cargo,” the lawyer’s wrote in a letter, seen by Apparel Insider, to Transformco. “The carriers are now threatening to sell or destroy the goods….”

Transformco, the lawyers added, has “now led the suppliers over a financial cliff that has jeopardized their businesses and impacted the jobs of thousands of their employees” who face “severe hardship and even starvation” due to what they call a “breach of contract.”

Nasdaq Overtakes NYSE in Coronavirus-Era IPOs [WSJ]Companies going public in 2020 have raised $12.2 billion in IPOs at Nasdaq, compared with $10.9 billion at the NYSE, Dealogic data show. Nasdaq lagged behind the NYSE for much of the year but pulled ahead after hosting several large debuts last week including that of Warner Music Group Corp., which raised more than $1.9 billion in the year’s largest IPO to date….Nasdaq is planning a push to attract more companies to switch over from the NYSE, and it expects to have an advantage thanks to its lower costs, Nelson Griggs, Nasdaq executive vice president, said in an interview.

Fed Debates Whether to Reinforce Low-Rate Pledge With Yield Caps [WSJ]Fed officials are closely studying the experience of Australia’s central bank, which in March set a target of 0.25% for the country’s three-year government-bond yield and which has so far managed to keep it there without significant asset buying.For the U.S., caps might work like...

In 2011, Dealbreaker posted a piece entitled “Former Goldman President John Thornton’s Greatest Motivational Hits.” As of January 2019, the piece was published on the Dealbreaker website as part of a site-wide “update” performed during that year. Mr. Thornton recently became aware of that post and informed Dealbreaker that it contained at least six fictitious quotations that were falsely attributed to him. Dealbreaker responded promptly by removing the post from its website. In addition, Dealbreaker hereby fully and completely retracts that post and has agreed to publish the following statement: John L. Thornton, currently Executive Chairman of Barrick Gold Corporation and formerly President of the Goldman Sachs firm, recently discovered an article posted on the Dealbreaker website that falsely attributed to him six fabricated supposed quotations. The article, entitled “Former Goldman President John Thornton’s Greatest Motivational Hits,” was originally published on the...

A former trader at Bank of New York Mellon Corp. —who alerted authorities to the bank’s pattern of overcharging big clients on currency trades—was awarded a $50 million whistleblower payment.

The award, the largest of its type made by the Securities and Exchange Commission, comes more than a decade after the trader, Grant Wilson, began assisting authorities with the currency-trading investigations….

Mr. Wilson assisted the government for two years while working as a currency trader at BNY Mellon… Mr. Wilson provided extensive documentation, including his descriptions of how the bank processed trades that resulted in client overcharges. BNY Mellon told customers its service was “free of charge” and designed to help clients “minimize risks and costs.”

Prison authorities had determined Madoff was likely to die within 18 months of kidney disease. Sample had argued that Madoff was confined to a wheelchair and wanted to contest claims by prosecutors that he has failed to show remorse…. [U.S. District Judge Denny] Chin said in his written decision Thursday that in 2009 “it was fully my intent that he live out the rest of his life in prison.”

He noted that Madoff’s lawyers then had asked for a sentence of as little as a dozen years, hoping their client would again see “the light of day.”/“I was not persuaded,” Chin said. “I did not believe that Mr. Madoff was deserving of that hope. Nothing has happened in the 11 years since to change my thinking.”

But this administration was not likely to let a group of credit artists like minded to President Trump and his Cabinet cronies twist in the wind forever. So in place of PPP or a similarly direct bailout of the reviled industry, it would like to offer this potentially even more profitable indirect assistance, opening America’s 401(k) plans to the kind of heavy losses currently enjoyed only by the very rich, and opening a rich vein of potential fee income to the industry delivering them, one that will dovetail nicely with the expansion of the term “accredited investor” to anyone who completes a relevant BuzzFeed quiz.

Recent college graduates who were due to start at Evercore later this summer will get $15,000 if they defer their start date until January and $25,000 if they wait until next summer to join, said recruiters who are in touch with incoming employees…. Banks have nowhere to send these new employees. The offices of banks and investment firms, like most in white-collar industries, have been largely empty since March. The hands-on training that is important for new workers is now impossible, as are the kind of social events that would normally help integrate them….

No bank has rescinded offers en masse, but all are tweaking their onboarding and training to go virtual.

He apparently he went all-in on Luckin and lost his entire life savings in the process. “Now I’m broke af,” he wrote, posting this screenshot of the carnage….

When pressed by the mob as to why he would take sink all that cash into such an obviously sketchy position back in January, StopFapForever, who says he still runs two business that should allow him recoup the losses within a few years, did his best to explain.

“It was before corona, lockdown and fraud,” he said. “Nobody knew back then. It went from 17 to 51 in 2 months from Nov to Jan. Could have just kept going instead of explode.”

After getting hammered overnight, he shared the expensive lesson he learned. “I’m gonna just invest in ETFs, gold and bonds for the rest of my hopefully long but quite useless life,” he said.

It may be hard to remember such a time, but once, former Fortress Investment Group executive made, rather than lost, money on cryptocurrencies. And with the money he made, he bought a private jet.

That’s pretty standard for people like Mike Novogratz. But, unusually for the hedge-fund and private-equity set, and especially unusually for a guy whose behavior can resemble that of some, shall we say, more aggressive police officers, he felt kind of bad about it. So he decided to give an equal amount of money away to a worthy cause, to salve his conscience. But what worthy cause?

Jobless claims, total unemployment level worse than expected [CNBC]“Even as states reopen, claims in the millions are an indicator that the economic pain of the COVID-19 crisis is still acute,” said Daniel Zhao, senior economist at job placement site Glassdoor…. Continuing claims, which provide a clearer picture of how many Americans remain unemployed, totaled 21.5 million, a gain of 649,000 over the past week, also worse than Wall Street expected….The numbers came the day before the Labor Department releases its nonfarm payrolls report for May. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones are expecting a decline of 8.3 million and a 20.5% unemployment rate, more than double the highest previous level since the Great Depression.

The investigation… could result in an enforcement action against Deutsche Bank as soon as this month, before the first anniversary of Mr. Epstein’s arrest on federal sex-trafficking charges….

The investigation focuses, at least in part, on the bank’s decision to continue doing business with Mr. Epstein even after employees raised concerns, according to the people. Compliance officers in the bank’s anti-money-laundering operation alerted the federal government to several transactions in which Mr. Epstein sent money overseas in 2015, while employees worried about the reputational risks of doing business with a registered sex offender. Ultimately, senior bank executives opted to maintain the relationship with Mr. Epstein because it was so lucrative.

In addition to setting up dozens of accounts for Mr. Epstein, Deutsche Bank served as his lender from 2013 until last year, even as other banks considered him off-limits.

Infini Capital Management Ltd. is gauging investor interest for full loss insurance on a new class of shares in a fund it launched last year…. “This offering is to hopefully get some investors over the edge who might still have some concerns about being an early investor in Infini,” Chief Operating Officer Michael Friedlander said in an interview.

U.S. small business program handed out virus aid to many borrowers twice [Reuters]The money mistakenly handed out could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars that the government and lenders - which made the loans - have been trying to identify and recover in recent weeks, one of the people briefed on the matter said….The error was caused by a blind spot in the SBA’s loan processing system which failed to see when some borrowers submitted applications multiple times typically with several different lenders, three of the sources said.Information provided by the sources, which include industry executives and borrowers, as well as Reddit posts, suggest at least 1,020 duplicate deposits were issued. While that is a tiny fraction of funds disbursed under the huge program, it could amount to roughly $116 million dollars based on average loan sizes.