So now we know. Bloomberg LP, the company founded by and named after our Mayor Mike, basically has a nanny-cam on every significant trading desk in the world. And these traders are ripping mad.
Exclusive reporting by The Post’s Mark DeCambre brought to light the news that Goldman Sachs recently confronted Bloomberg with suspicions that reporters at the company have been using its terminals to monitor the comings, goings and clickings of employees at the Wall Street firm.
As a result, Bloomberg now has decided to restrict its journalists’ ability to tap into log-in and other data from its paying subscribers.
In other words, the company let reporters snoop on its own clients.But at about $20,000 a year, the Bloom-berg terminal is probably the most expensive terrestrial spying device on the planet.
The fact that Bloomberg has allowed reporters access to what it calls “customer-relationship data” has raise more tempers than eyebrows.
“I can guarantee you, there are lots of people, including every account holder with Bloomberg, who would like to know more about this function that Bloomberg disabled after getting complaints from Goldman Sachs, and whether there are any other functionalities out there that Bloomberg personnel can access to monitor individuals’ account habits,” said one large bond fund manager
On Friday Morgan Stanley, officials were still attempting to access the extent of the privacy issues and if any breach was made pertaining to what Goldman had fussed over with the giant media empire.
One insider said that Morgan Stanley one of Bloomberg’s biggest clients, didn’t have any specific issue with snooping with were surprised at the snooping scandal involving its closest rival.
One banking exec said that its ironic that these banks, which make their money off information, find themselves so in the dark about their vulnerabilities with Bloomberg.
Sources inside JPMorgan told DeCambre Friday that their execs are steaming mad, since some in the bank smelled a rat prior to Bloomberg reporters breaking the “London whale” trading story.
A source in the bank says multiple Bloomberg reporters had called the bank during the height of its trading scandal asking about traders — prompted by the fact that the reporter noticed they had not been logged into their systems.
A JPMorgan source said that it was galling to the bank to learn (through The Post story) that its initial suspicions were justified and that the practice was widespread. The source added that it was not an acceptable use of the firm’s data.
The city’s fast money hedge funds also blasted the revelations.
“Yeah, it bothers me — it bothers me a lot,” one executive at a Park Avenue fund said about the revelations.
“Imagine the amount of information that could be gleaned by monitoring the searches and key strokes at the mergers and acquisitions departments of the major Wall Street firms? It makes me very queasy,” he says.
Without a Chinese wall between its reporting and terminal-selling operations, Bloomberg has put itself into a corner, forcing it to reveal that “limited customer data has long been available to our journalists.”
And while this apparently doesn’t include “position data, trading data and messages,” according to Bloomberg, the scandal goes both deep and wide.
One savvy hedge-fund manager described it as Orwellian, noting that even limited access by Bloomberg journalists is chilling from a privacy and security standpoint. It’s one reason he doesn’t link his real-time portfolio into the Bloomberg network.
Yes, it took a firm created by our own mayor to finally make the folks at Goldman Sachs look like they’re not paranoid after all.
In fact, right now their privacy concerns and those of JPMorgan look downright sane. And no wonder: When it comes to the business of business information and data, Bloomberg LP is as close to a monopoly as one can get.