“I got a London call last week from a Bob Apfel, a Brooklyn neighbor (and fellow Oberlin College graduate),” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “‘Two weeks ago,’ he began. ‘I completed the debt restructuring of Greece.'”
“Greece, as you may recall, was facing bankruptcy this spring, unable to make good on debts worth, on paper, more than $270 billion. In a series of complex restructuring transactions, the country’s Finance Ministry had offered to settle for a fraction of the bonds’ paper value,” P.E.D. reports. “But getting roughly 100,000 bondholders scattered around the globe — from Russia to South Africa to Kazakhstan — to sign off on the deal on a tight deadline was going to be a logistical nightmare.”
“‘I wanted to do something different,’ Apfel says. ‘So I bought 100 iPads… It was the largest financial transaction in the history of the world, and we couldn’t have done it without the iPad.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apfel’s Apples.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” and “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Apart from the fancy headline, what the hell did the iPads do that a PDF document couldn’t?
Try reading the actual article before posting nonsense.
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“I wanted to do something different,” Apfel says. “So I bought 100 iPads.”
The Apple (AAPL) tablets, equipped with a custom-made debt-restructuring app, were handed out to the leadership team, including representatives from the Finance Ministry, the Hellenic Exchange (the Greek equivalent of the NYSE), the Bank of Greece (their version of the Federal Reserve) and the three external banks that managed the deal, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Lazard.
The idea was to give the participants a rich set of analytic tools and real-time, secure connections to both the global clearing systems and the back offices of banks around the world.
“During the lead-up to the launch,” says Apfel, “members of the financial leadership team were spending over half their time on the road, meeting with investors or financial overseers from the EU and other parts of the troika. There was a palpable need to create a financial decision-makers’ platform that could follow the financier – not vice versa.”
Toward the end, things got pretty exciting.
“I watched hundreds of millions of bonds being ‘slam dunked’ as these guys were running down the halls,” says Apfel. “Split-second decisions were made that couldn’t have been made without the data platform.”
That must have been all Greek to him.
But we should give him a break – after all testicles are not known for their intelligence.
yeh, it’s the big guy right in front that has the brain!
Greece is the liberalTards template for what they want to do to the US!
LOL… maybe his left nut is missing also?
It’s fascinating that MicroSoft introduced the Windows Tablet PC in 2001 and Apple didn’t show up until some nearly ten years later. Generically the tool is the same, but Apple’s excitement, design, quality and ease of use has brought about the revolution that MS had envisioned.
Difference being that the windows Tablet PC simply didn’t work, Apple’s iPad did.
(yes I know the windows tablet powered on, but that was about all it did well. It was huge, heavy, sort lived and a truly horrible interface. Like Apple’s newton pad from a decade before that (’92 I think) it all added up to a product that just didn’t work in real world situations (actually the newton, produced a decade before the “windows tablet”, was a lot closer to a usable product)
When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.
+1
He used a customized app and 100 iPads? Holy crap, make him Chairman of the SEC. Content consumption, indeed!
What a fucked up article! Greece has no debts, bankers have and they load them up on countries! This is the hoax of the century and Italy comes next, and then the rest of EU… This hoax is also coming to USA… FAST… Get ready because this is going to be a HELL…. Of a ride.
And before you start stating the false BS that you saw in the latest “news” report while you were dumbing yourself in front of the “dumbing down box” in your favorite banker’s channel, I live in Greece so I’m “boots on the ground” and no fucking channel can tell me what is going on because I’m actually LIVING it! So, those 100 iPads (which I happen to own one) didn’t saved Greece jack shit… It just added more blood money to the Deutche bank account and Soro’s accounts!
Mmkay.
Anyway, hooray for Apple and Greece!
Whatever you say, but maybe you should read up on the concept of governments selling bonds.