Most of us have had mentors and when it came to becoming a writer three of mine were the late Bill Rivers at Stanford who taught me to think and not just report, legendary book editor Bob Loomis at Random House who felt I might be able to stack enough of those thoughts together to fill a book, and a guy most of you know as Adam Smith, who let me copy his style.
Smith, named after the English economist and writer, helped start both New York and Institutional Investor magazines while at the same time punching out books like The Money Game and Paper Money — huge best sellers that taught regular people how the financial […]
Thirty years ago, when I was working for a time in Saudi Arabia, I saw a public execution. I didn’t attend an execution, I didn’t witness an execution, I just happened to be there. There was in the center of this town a square and in the square were gathered hundreds of people. I was working in a building next to the square and looked out the window to see what was causing all the noise. At that moment a prisoner was brought forward, his arms bound behind him. He was dragged up the steps to a platform and there fell to his knees. Another man whom I quickly came to understand was the executioner […]
LIBOR, the London InterBank Offered Rate, has been in the news lately as heads begin to roll in London and soon New York now that it’s clear LIBOR was manipulated by big banks, affecting the value of hundreds of trillions worth of financial instruments. This is a complex topic and it will be awhile — perhaps years — before it is clear how or even if you and I were damaged by these shenanigans, but everyone seems to agree that it can’t be allowed to happen again. But how? To make this happen I think we need a new understanding of what “transparency” means in financial transactions in the 21st century.
