Carol Loomis

Larry Fink, 61, tall and outgoing and passionate about his business, is the chairman, CEO, and co-founder of the largest asset-management company in the world, BlackRock. ”

On the rare occasions when my family talked about business, the subject was Kansas City's Boss Pendergast and his potential for muscling my dad's small gravel-and-sand operation. ”

A buyback is itself a special kind of acquisition, made at prices that are typically a bargain compared with those a company must pay for an outside purchase. ”

If a company's stock is undervalued - as many managers believe theirs is - a repurchase may offer the best payoff of all. ”

Every regulatory speech on derivatives takes a bow to their hedging 'benefits.' Less publicly, regulators pay their respects to derivative profits, a blessed relief from the banks' troubled loans to less-developed countries, highly leveraged companies, and real estate swingers. ”

The good thing about a dealer's derivatives portfolio is that it is marked to market. ”

In the 1987 stock market crash, according to the conclusions of the official Brady report, colossal sales of stock index futures by so-called portfolio insurers - whose investment strategies depended entirely on these derivatives - greatly exacerbated the 500-point market decline. ”

By late 1953, going to New York on vacation, I had lined up several Time Inc. interviews - and what they did was give me a lifelong appreciation of the importance of luck in getting a job. ”

I will confess that almost all my inspiration has come from one emotion: fear. And terrible dread of the moment when I will finally be exposed as a fraud. ”

Carl Icahn, corporate raider by trade, is creative, a scrambler, and certainly not to be underestimated. ”