“No one really has any idea of the risks these banks are taking and therefore the threat they pose to the financial system at any point in time,” says Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a nonprofit that advocates for tougher financial regulations.
Those risks may be diminishing, at least for the CDO business, as new deals remain scarce and older ones unwind or pay off. For Tsesarsky, that means plenty of time to contemplate what’s next on the 4-mile walk he often takes between his office and the home on Central Park West he shares with his wife, who’s a rabbi, and their four children. There’s plenty to keep him busy: He sits on the board of an Upper West Side synagogue that calls itself the oldest Jewish congregation in the U.S., and he contributes to pro-Israel and Jewish causes. He once bought plane tickets for 250 Russians immigrating to Israel and joined them on the trip. “People on Wall Street become jaded and think that money is all that’s important in life,” he told the Jewish Week in 1999. “The indifference really bothers me.”
Yet Tsesarsky is always searching for the next profitable trade. “He has this ability to see the long game, and he has this feeling for the market and where it’s going,” Finkelstein says. “When he sees opportunity, he jumps on it.”
Campbell and Griffin cover banking and finance in New York and London, respectively.