Paterno’s Way Turned Penn State Champs Into Wall Street Bankers

The path from football to Wall Street is well-worn. Now the championship-winning 1986 team at Penn State University is retracing its steps.

Playing for Joe Paterno, the 84-year-old Brooklynite who’s in his 46th season as head football coach, is tougher than Wall Street, said John Shaffer, head of junk-bond sales at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), who will join Paterno and other former teammates-turned-bankers this weekend to mark the 25th anniversary of the school’s most recent national football title.

“That pressure, that competition I tried to replicate on Wall Street, but I just couldn’t,” said Shaffer, 47, the team’s starting quarterback.

Others planning to attend a ceremony at Beaver Stadium in State College, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 8 at halftime of the University of Iowa game are Matthew Johnson, 46, head of global equity syndicate at Barclays Plc (BARC) and a former nose tackle at Penn State, and Lance Lonergan, 44, co-chief executive officer at Weeden & Co., a backup quarterback in 1986.

Paterno, whose 405 wins are the most among major-college football coaches, taught more than the game, the former players said. They have applied the traits and principles they learned at Penn State, such as teamwork, coping with failure and leaving the game on the field, they said.

BofA, Oracle, Blavatnik, Morgan Stanley, AT&T, Wells Fargo in Court News

Bank of America Corp. (BAC)’s Countrywide unit was sued by Sealink Funding Ltd. in New York over $1.6 billion of residential mortgage-backed securities the fund purchased between 2005 and 2007.

Sealink filed the suit against Countrywide in New York State Supreme Court Sept. 29, seeking unspecified compensatory, rescissory and punitive damages. Sealink is a fund created to manage Landesbank Sachsen AG’s riskiest assets after the German lender almost collapsed.

“Countrywide was an entity driven by only one purpose --to originate and securitize as many mortgage loans as possible into” mortgage-backed securities “to generate profits for the Countrywide defendants, without regard to the investors that relied on the critical, false information provided to them with respect to the related certificates,” lawyers for Sealink said in the lawsuit.

Sealink filed a similar suit Sept. 29 in the same court against JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) over $2.4 billion worth of residential mortgage-backed securities purchased between 2005 and 2007.

Dan Frahm, a spokesman for Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America, didn’t immediately return a voice-mail message seeking comment on the lawsuit. Jennifer Zuccarelli, a spokeswoman for New York-based JPMorgan, declined to comment.

Falling Wages Threatening U.S. as Consumers May Reduce Spending

Ninety-one percent of people in the U.S. labor force have a job. That may be the extent of the good news for these Americans, whose incomes tell a darker story.

Take-home pay, adjusted for prices, fell 0.3 percent in August, the third decrease in five months, and personal income dropped for the first time in two years, the Commerce Department reported last week. The declines followed news from the Census Bureau that median household income in 2010 fell to $49,445, the lowest in more than a decade, and the poverty rate jumped to 15.1 percent, a 17-year high.

Salary and benefit growth “has been going nowhere,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “One of the key reasons the recovery has stalled is that real incomes have fallen.”

Christie Would ‘Cannonball’ Republican Field, Face Challenges

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie -- on the brink of deciding whether to run for president as Republicans shower him with entreaties to do so -- could catapult to the front of an unsettled party field, strategists say, even as he would face a difficult road to nomination.

For Republicans yearning for a truth-telling figure and fresh face, Christie, 49 -- brash and plainspoken, with a reputation for slashing government spending and taking on labor unions -- would appear to be an ideal candidate.

Gold Climbs as European Crisis Spurs Demand

Gold advanced for a third day on concern that Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis may not be contained, spurring investors to buy the metal to guard their wealth against a potential slowdown in the global economy.

Immediate-delivery gold climbed as much as 1.4 percent to $1,647.35 an ounce, and traded at $1,646.98 at 2:50 p.m. in Singapore. The precious metal, which reached an all-time high of $1,921.15 on Sept. 6, climbed 8.2 percent in the three months to Sept. 30 for a 12th quarterly advance. December-delivery bullion gained as much as 1.7 percent to $1,650 an ounce in New York.

European finance chiefs meet in Luxembourg today to discuss how to protect banks from the fallout of a potential Greek default even as the country approved further austerity measures needed to secure an aid payment and second rescue package.

Sony Tumbles to 24-Year Low on Outlook, Yen

Sony Corp. (6758), Japan’s biggest exporter of consumer electronics, fell to its lowest level in 24 years in Tokyo trading on speculation the yen's strength and slumping demand for television will hurt earnings.

The stock dropped as much as 6.2 percent to 1,413 yen, the lowest intraday level since June 10, 1987, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. They changed hands at 1,418 yen at 1:17 p.m. The shares have dropped 52 percent this year.

Ex-Morgan Stanley MUFG Strategist Kinmont to Start Hedge Fund

Alexander Kinmont, the equity strategist who wrote “The Irrelevance of Japan” report in 2002, is planning to start a hedge fund focused on the country after leaving Morgan Stanley MUFG Securities Co. in July.

Kinmont, formerly a managing director of Japan equity strategy at Morgan Stanley MUFG in Tokyo, is heading Tokyo-based Milestone Asset Management Co., he said. The company currently offers a long-only fund and is planning to start a long-short hedge fund later this month to profit from rising and falling stock prices, he said, declining to elaborate further because it is still being planned.