Reply #67: Wall Street Secret Society Kappa Beta Phi Adds Dealmakers With Lehman Rite

[Demeter]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-15/wall-street-s-secret-society-inducts-members-with-lehman-video.html

Kappa Beta Phi, the banking fraternity founded before the 1929 stock-market crash. that counts Wall Street’s most senior executives and regulators among its past members, held its annual induction dinner behind closed doors at the landmark New York hotel on Jan. 13...Kappa Beta Phi hasn’t always been publicity shy. In March 1930, just after the group was founded, articles in the Wall Street Journal announced members and new inductees who had done “rugged and valorous deeds to win the approbation of the charter members.” One article mentioned a publicity committee and its leader.

The rituals and secrecy of more recent decades create an aura of exclusivity and sends the message that “we’re special, you don’t get in here very easily,” said Willard I. Zangwill, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. The event also offers a sanctuary for wealthy members to mingle in confidentiality, he said.

“You’re interacting more freely with people on your level,” Zangwill said. “If you’re a billionaire, it might be harder to get along with somebody who’s struggling economically.”

The group gives officers titles including grand swipe, grand smudge and grand loaf, according to a 2009 dinner program posted on the Journal’s website. One loaf was Herbert F. Boynton, who later became chairman of the National Association of Securities Dealers, a predecessor of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority...A successor there, Mary Schapiro, now chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, is also a member, the Journal wrote in its description of a ceremony. She hasn’t been a member of the group for 10 years, SEC spokesman John Nester told Bloomberg News...

According to a 1961 U.S. tax court memorandum, one member paid $30 in fees in 1954. One of the people at last week’s dinner couldn’t recall the current cost. He said, while yawning, that his accountant wrote the check.