Financial Times – In the hard-bitten Detroit of the film 8 Mile, the protagonist played by musician Eminem wins an expletive-filled rap “battle” in a dingy warehouse.
A world away, on Park Avenue, New York, Andrew Feldstein, co-founder and chief executive of BlueMountain Capital Management, sees in one of his favourite movies a lesson for Wall Street.
“He’s about to walk away [from the ‘rap off’] – and then he has this brainstorm right before he goes on the stage. He goes out there and he raps it up, he basically exposes everything about himself, and then he turns to his competitor and says: ‘now what are you going to say?’”
This same strategy, Mr Feldstein argues, was used by Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, when he volunteered details of failings in risk management that lost the bank more than $6bn last year betting on credit derivatives.
