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.
Carl Icahn, corporate raider by trade, is creative, a scrambler, and certainly not to be underestimated.
There is a certain oddity to Larry Fink having problems in Washington. He is a strong Democrat who has close ties to President Obama and has often been rumored as set to take a big administration job, such as Secretary of the Treasury.
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.
From the minute I got to 'Fortune,' I loved my job. I knew myself to be a virtual dunce about business, and I was wide-eyed about how much I was learning.
It is the instinctive wish of most American businesspeople, even those unlikely to be directly affected, that General Motors not go bankrupt.
