About 15 years ago I was Chairman of the Advisory Council of the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. I had been very active in the school as an alumnus since almost 1990 and had both served on the Advisory Council and then acted as its Chairman for a number of years. Back in 2003 I was inducted into the the Johnson School Hall of Honor and had my face placed in bronze…
For the better part of fifty years, my career was a moveable feast with me doing different things every few years. For many of those years this was not of my doing, but rather a function of moving where I was asked to go and doing what I was asked to do. Early on I adopted a persona of someone who liked new challenges and embraced change and that image became who I was. I…
I spend a lot of time going back and forth about whether I like excitement or calmness in my life. I can’t tell if I feel more this way about life than others, but I certainly expect that I am not alone in this quandary. When things are too exciting, I yearn for stability and normalcy and when things get too normal, I get bored and start seeking out excitement. Sound familiar? If I broaden…
I turn 72 in a few weeks and I’ve been living out here for six years, which means I’ve been retired for at least five years. Retirement is one of my favorite topics to write about for some reason, and always has been since I started writing for fun forty years ago. I am not sure where this obsession with retirement comes from, but it probably originated just about forty years ago when I took…
When I awoke to the news alert from the Financial Times that President Trump had announced a U.S. invasion of Venezuela resulting in the capture, seizure and removal of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, presumably to some U.S.-controlled location, I was not totally surprised. I then watched this morning as Trump and Secretary of “War” Hegseth, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio standing behind nodding, spoke about the unprecedented aggressive military action. Something Hegseth…
Lets get real for a moment. We’ve all seen the various economic and demographic projections for 2050. We know that there are three winners in terms of economic output. They are, unequivocally and with no particular order, the United States, China and India. If you look at current population level as a guide (all economists understand the relationship between population and economic growth), this makes sense. In rank order, based on 2025 data, the ten…
Australia just launched what is being called the world’s first ban on social media for children under 16. It takes effect today (December 10, 2025). What the law does is that it prevents Australians under 16 from creating or keeping accounts on age-restricted social media platforms. That means the government is deactivating a huge number (over 1 million) of social media accounts that transgress that standard. There are no parental consent exceptions. Even with parental…
In 2011, while I was trying to launch a hedge fund that would have bought defaulted mortgages from the FHA at levels attractive for them and, we thought, very attractive for us. We had an enlightened plan to fix a lot of the broken mortgages that were the detritus of the subprime collapse. It seemed both noble and profitable and our story was compelling enough to attract $1.5 billion in capital from one of the…
In 1985 I was running the largest merchant banking unit in my bank, something called the New York City Division. It was what all my peers aspired to do, but I found it sort of boring to be doing things like helping ITT do its next acquisition or helping Ron Perlman at Revlon reshape his juggernaut. I was asked to go up to talk to our Vice Chairman, who said the Management Committee wanted to…
My dear friend Frank is the guy who mentored me in the handling of private equity investment. He was a venture capitalist long before it was even known how cool it was to be a venture capitalist. Frank is a Marshall Scholar who attended the London School of Economics just when America was entering the 1960s. He did a stint in the Army like any good red-blooded American male did in those days, but luckily…