Which Skinny Blonde Will Get the Pretty Apartment?Will Ellen Pompeo steal the Chelsea Club penthouse out from under Cameron Diaz’s undeviated button nose? “Page Six” reports that Pompeo paid a visit to 444 West 19th Street, an apartment that Diaz has visited, a source told New York, numerous times. The 3,418-square-foot four-bedroom, on the tenth and eleventh floors of the building, has six private terraces, “Jajoba hardwood floors,” and floor-to-ceiling windows (which provide, according to the Core Group, which is marketing the building, “blinding light” — apparently that’s a good thing) and costs $5.5 million. Pompeo can afford it — she just got a big raise. But maybe the price is too high for Diaz, who hasn’t appeared in a movie since 2006’s abysmal The Holiday? She was recently spotted looking at a two-bedroom in the Silk Building, a bargain at $1.699 million. To channel Brandon Davis, this must mean she’s practically poor.
Eyes On The Pad [NYP]
Camerondominium Hunt W. Chel. to E. Vill. [NYM]
Chelsea Club [Core Group NYC]
company town
Being Filthy Rich Means Never Having to Say You’re SorryFINANCE
• Fortune searches Davos for financiers to express contrition over the current credit crisis but comes up empty. The closest anyone has come, the magazine notes, is the chairman and chief executive of Moody’s Corp, who said, “We and others have to retool our processes In hindsight, it’s clear to us that there were fundamental failures in key assumptions supporting our analytical models.” Quoth Fortune: “That’s probably a little too mealy-mouthed and much too late to console people who bought the mortgage-backed commercial paper to which Moody’s and its rival Standard & Poor’s gave a top-notch AAA rating — only to discover it was actually junk.” Snap! [Fortune]
• Just how big a fraud did Jérôme Kerviel, the rogue French trader, pull off? Before the bank caught him, he had taken out positions worth 50 billion euros. But some argue that he was responsible for only 1.5 billion euros in losses, and the bank’s board lost the other 3.4 billion euros unwinding his positions way too fast. Meanwhile, top executive Jean-Pierre Mustier told the Times: “I was speaking to a competitor, this competitor called me and said, ‘You are living what is a banker’s worst nightmare.’” Imagine how dramatic that must have sounded in French. [FT, NYT]
• Bonuses now in the bank, Goldman rewarded bankers for a record-setting year with a special surprise: layoffs! [Deal Journal/WSJ]
in other news
Ellen Pompeo Weds at City Hall, Cheers Up Knicks FansGrey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo got married, shotgunNew York style! The smoky actress secretly tied the knot with her longtime beau Chris Ivery in City Hall on Friday. Despite the fact that both of their hometowns are in the Boston area, the pair opted for a simple ceremony witnessed by Mayor Bloomberg himself. “They are over the moon,” Pompeo’s spokeswoman, Jennifer Allen, told the Boston Globe. Last month Pompeo told People that she hadn’t started planning, despite the fact that she’d been engaged to Ivery for over a year, so this may have been a spur-of-the-moment thing. While they were here, the newlyweds snagged courtside seats at Sunday’s Knicks game. How cute! At least there was one functional relationship down there that fans could root for.
‘Grey’s’ Pompeo quietly ties knot in Big Apple [Boston Globe]