Insurance company earnings calls are normally staid affairs. But Hartford Financial Group had a sudden burst of excitement yesterday as its largest shareholder, hedge fund titan John Paulson, joined the call. He hammered CEO Liam McGee for not being more specific about his plans for increasing shareholder value at the company, which saw its shares […]
In an interview after the Super Bowl, New York Giants Head Coach Tom Coughlin reflected on his team’s remarkable success. Coughlin’s secret for brining out the best in his players was simple: he told them he loved them. According to the New York Post, Coughlin recalled his speech to his players the night before the […]
Here’s some free advice for Mitt Romney: Release your income tax returns now. Right now. Don’t wait “until April” as you’ve said in the past, or give a vague estimate of your effective tax rate, as you did earlier today. Do it now so you can address facts, instead of conjecture and speculation. According to […]
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook column profiles Paul Levy, a PE manager who makes a good defense of private equity: “We want to build businesses,” Mr. Levy said earnestly. “Nobody wants to fire people. We want to retain all of the value-added, high-quality people that work at these companies. But it’s like any other endeavor. If […]
There’s long been a debate about whether a company’s culture makes any difference in how it performs. Culture often is derided as the “soft stuff” that is nice to have but not really essential to a company’s success. Indeed, Sandy Weill once famously quipped that culture was “something they put in yogurt.” (Of course, we […]
I was catching up on holiday reading and came across this excellent New York Times piece on Ernest Shackleton written by Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn. Shackleton’s ambitious journey to reach the South Pole ended in failure but became a triumph of leadership, courage and determination as he brought his entire crew safely home […]
As reported today, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has introduced guidance for financial firms related to reporting of their European debt exposure. The SEC issued its recommendations to address the inconsistent approach firms have used to disclose their risk to sovereign and private borrowers: “In response to our comments on their disclosure documents, registrants […]
As 2011 disappears in the rear-view mirror, here’s my list of noteworthy risk-takers over the past year. These are the people and institutions that took risks intelligently and won. The list of risk-bumblers – those who mishandled critical situations – is certainly longer (UBS, Olympus, Yahoo, MF Global, I could go on) but their woes […]
Were it not for the missing customer funds, the collapse of MF Global would be hailed as an example of how well the financial system worked. That’s a very big “if,” of course, and the loss of customer funds is a scandal all its own. But the market worked – and that’s an important lesson. […]
At this hour, executives and MF Global are huddling with bankers and lawyers, trying to come up with a deal to sell the firm. It must seem like a surreal exercise, since just days earlier the firm held a solid investment-grade credit rating and a market cap of $620 million. Now, as its clients turn […]