How Wall Street rivals joined together against Bloomberg

Susanne Craig and Jessica Silver-Greenberg of The New York Times write Friday about how Wall Street rivals Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan joined together to complain to Bloomberg about how its reporters were using the Bloomberg terminal to snoop on its bankers.

Craig and Silver-Greenberg write, “Goldman’s public relations chief, Jake Siewert, a former Treasury official, called his counterpart at JPMorgan Chase, Joe Evangelisti, with a simple question: ‘Do you have any issues with Bloomberg?’

“Before he could finish his sentence, Mr. Evangelisti began rattling off his grievances, say people briefed on the call. At the top of the list was a Bloomberg News article in 2011 that likened the strife in an Italian town after a bad deal with JPMorgan to the fallout from the Nazis’ occupation in World War II. He also mentioned another episode when a Bloomberg reporter surreptitiously obtained an access code to listen to a private conference call for senior executives.

“The two men shared one major concern: they believed that Bloomberg reporters were using the company’s data terminals to monitor Wall Street sources — the executives at the banks that were spending thousands of dollars a year to use the data-rich machines.

“That phone call lifted the lid on a long-simmering, but seldom discussed, tension between Bloomberg and Wall Street. This article is based on interviews with many of the people with whom Mr. Siewert spoke.

“There had long been suspicions among public relations executives that Bloomberg reporters might be using terminals to check up on bank executives. But one Wall Street chief executive, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, said recently, ‘I hate it when something happens that hadn’t occurred to me, and this situation certainly hadn’t.'”

Read more here.