British Petroleum Losing One of its Smartest Guys

BP today announced that, by mutual agreement with the BP board, Tony Hayward is to step down as group chief executive with effect from October 1, 2010.

This must be a real blow to BP to lose one if it's smartest guys. BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said: "The BP board is deeply saddened to lose a CEO whose success over some three years in driving the performance of the company was so widely and deservedly admired."

Now, this guy is really smart and will leave BP will a huge hole to fill (no pun intended). I'm talking smart, folks. Not your average CEO. This guy was smart enough to sell 1/3 of his BP stock (223,288 shares) on March 17–a month before the explosion. Don't you wish you had those kinds of smarts?

It would appear his smarts rubbed off on some of his buddies, too.

Goldman Sachs officials must have been privy to Hayward's smarts because they bet millions of dollars on the likelihood of the oil rig explosion only days before it happened! Maybe they just have some pretty smart folks over there too. After all, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of GS, directed 44% (4.6 million shares) of BP stock to be dumped three weeks before the explosion. Yeah, there's another smart American.

This isn't the first time that those guys over at Goldman Sachs dazzled us with their brilliance. You may recall that just prior to 9/11, Goldman Sachs shorted airline stocks (making themselves a bundle of money); and before the financial catastrophe that began a couple years ago, GS shorted mortgage company stocks, fueling the real estate collapse in America.

Gosh, there are smart people all around us. David Sidwell, Risk Committee Chairman of UBS, the wealthiest Swiss bank and the world's largest wealth manager, also dumped BP stocks massively (i.e., 99% of the banks holdings, or 2.1 million shares,) as did Wachovia/Wells Fargo.

I'm pretty impressed with all the smart folks in the world. They are making millions of dollars off events that somehow bewilder the rest of us. Too bad these BIG smart people don't share some of their wisdom with us, the small people, as BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg likes to refer to us.