Goldman goes cheap.

We read in the New Yorker that one deal toy vendor reports some interesting news from Goldman: employees are required to pay for their own tombstones — the deal commemoration kind.

“Goldman recently sent an e-mail to employees announcing that they would have to start paying for their own deal toys…”

Wow. Deal toys are useless, but soon there will be nothing left in banking culture. What’s next? Bankers working 9 to 5 (oh wait…)

Let’s say you don’t work for Goldman and you can still order those pricey toys. At least be on trend. Popular now: magnetic globes.

This spring came what Kern called “the tiny-globe craze.” [Stephen] Sokoler rolled his eyes. “Oh, don’t start with that,” he said. “You know those things you see in Sharper Image, where there’s a base and a little globe just floats over it?” (They work by means of magnets.) Somebody at Merrill decided to order a hundred of them to celebrate an M. & A. deal, and all of a sudden everybody had to have one. “It was a real pain in the ass,” Sokoler said. “People were calling my cell phone in the middle of the night, saying, ‘It’s not floating!’ And you’d have to, like, walk them through it. You’d say, ‘Yes, it is floating—you just have to hold it in the right place.’ ”