What Comes Around The year 2008 is often referred to by many in the markets as the ultimate ”annus horribilis”. That is a bit hard for me to reconcile because where my personal “annus horribilis” was rightfully 2007 based on the the disastrous episode with the Bear Stearns Asset Management hedge funds that hit the wall of the CDO (collateralized debt obligations) and sub-prime mortgage crisis, that was also the joyous year (earlier in the…
The Dinner Table In the world of banking, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that most big firms manage somehow to insure that their top two people are not so fervently politically aligned that when (notice I did not say “if”) the opposing party takes office, the firm is not left without sympathetic inroads into the halls of power, perhaps when they need it the most. I have never figured out exactly how that process…
Secrets of the Digital Universe I feel I owe you all some resolution on several unanswered mysteries that have been plaguing me for the past few months. I have found over the past fifty years that the old medical school adage to “think horses, not zebras” is more true than not and and serves us well when trying to solve mysteries. The complicated conspiracy theory of the dead neighbor having set up a ruse to…
Captain Bob It was in 1989 when I was running the Global Derivatives business of Bankers Trust. I was in London, one of our three big offices in the Derivatives business, in addition to New York and Tokyo. Suddenly I had an E.F. Hutton moment when the entire trading room goes quiet for a moment as someone from the derivatives desk yells over to me across the floor the Robert Maxwell is on the phone…
Home Ownership They say that pride of ownership means everything and I sometimes understand that and at other times ponder its wisdom. It has always appealed to me to think that this life is all about dust to dust and that in the long run, none of us own anything other than the love we give and the love we take with us. Everything else is flotsam and jetsam. I know that some families like…
What Goes Around In November 1985, I was sitting in my corner office on the third floor of 280 Park Avenue. I used to call that the “cafe” office because it was close enough to the street to feel a part of the hub-bub out on Park Avenue and yet it was above it all. To be clear, I was thirty-one years old at the time, which is almost hard for me to imagine in…
The Pain of the Number Last summer, when I knew I would be moving out to San Diego, I reached out to several schools in the area that had graduate business programs to see if there was any interest in my credentials as a ten-year-member of the faculty at Cornell’s business school and a forty-five year Wall Street business manager. The folks at the University of San Diego showed interest and I went at the…
Cactus Flowers Many years ago (almost thirty) I was a banker with an office on Park Avenue. In fact, I had a corner office facing in the preferred Southeastern direction so that I had a lovely view down towards the Beaux-Arts Helmsley Building (what used to called the New York Central Building) that frames the visual end of midtown as Park Avenue traffic goes through regal archways in the building’s base to circumnavigate the old…
In Search of Content We have heard for twenty years, ever since the internet took serious root with the advent of widespread broadband, that content would be king. Like with many business imperatives, timing is everything and the world was not ready yet for content to be king twenty years ago. I would argue that to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the platform is the message and over the past twenty years there has been a great…
Gigging I alternate in thinking that I am on overload one minute and on pause the next. As soon as I find myself thinking that my situation is unique and a direct outgrowth of my own choices and circumstances, I read something or see something on cable news that makes me see people talking about exactly the same syndrome. Let’s think for a moment about that all-important baseline. My baseline is that I am 66…