Cablevision Systems Corporation founder and chairman Charles
Dolan just keeps on bidding. Although the bidding for the Boston Red Sox closed formally on Dec. 20, his latest $790 million bid (including $40 million in assumed team debt) to buy the team, submitted late Monday night, keeps throwing the talks into disarray. Negotiations among the competing parties Read MoreTwo years after AOL's Steve Case beguiled Time Warner's Jerry
Levin with a thrilling vision that new-era growth would propel the merged company far into the next decade, Richard Parsons, the C.E.O.-designate for AOL Time Warner, formerly declared the dream dead. It happened on Jan. 7, in a State of AOL Time Warner conference call. "We Read MoreThis past Sunday, Dec. 30, was yet another gruesome night at
Madison Square Garden. The New York Knicks, Cablevision's supposed jewel, blew another one-in epic fashion. Playing the Magic, and up by 10 with three minutes–plus to go, Allan Houston and Latrell Sprewell watched stone-faced as the closing seconds dribbled through the floorboards. Spike Lee shook Read MoreOn a Friday morning in early November, JP Morgan Chase's Vice Chairman James Bainbridge Lee Jr. received a phone call from his Executive Committee colleague Marc Shapiro, also a vice chairman at the bank. The Enron crisis was building, the stock was plunging and JP Morgan Chase, as main lender to the company for the Read More
When the French grand bourgeois and senior Lazard-Frères partner and chairman Michel David-Weill anointed Bruce Wasserstein on Nov. 15 as his successor to lead Wall Street's last major partnership, the appointment resonated in two ways. First, it marked the end of Mr. Wasserstein's 24-year run as an establishment-flouting deal maker. Second, for Mr. David-Weill, it Read More
On Friday, Nov. 9, AOL Time Warner chief executive Gerald Levin
mounted a podium at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Times Square and started in on a speech to a hall packed full of investors. The host was J.P. Morgan, and Mr. Levin-fresh off the company jet from business in China, and then the Harry Potter Read MoreOn a steamy November day just hours after the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, Mike Mayo, Prudential Securities Inc.'s curmudgeonly bank analyst, was telling a packed room of investors why bank stocks stink.
"We are cautious on the banks," Mr. Mayo said. "More and more, we see them relying on hot money for their funding-and Read MoreTwo days after the markets reopened in September, Laura Martin, a managing director and influential research analyst for Credit Suisse First Boston, downgraded all 11 entertainment and cable-industry companies in her portfolio, among them Disney, Viacom, USA Networks, MGM, Comcast and Insight Communications.
"If the 2002-2003 period is as bad as prior reported declines, the worst Read MoreJack DiMaio, a 34-year-old managing director for Credit Suisse First Boston, will earn somewhere in the region of $15 million this year, guaranteed.
The figure itself is not so unusual. Mr. DiMaio is no obscure trader-he's a division head, running North American fixed income for CSFB. What's more, bankers on the Street, even during these dark Read MoreLeo Hindery, the cable veteran and chief executive of George
Steinbrenner's new sports station, was on a conference call, oozing his special brand of confidence and boardroom bonhomie. It was Sept. 10, and he was announcing the culmination of months of negotiation: the formation of the YES network, born out of the burgeoning YankeeNets sports empire. Read MoreOn Sept. 14, President George W. Bush finally came to Wall Street. The following Monday morning, so did Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, to preside over the New York Stock Exchange's opening bell.
The President rose to the occasion: Casually dressed but charged with adrenaline, he had one of those great Presidential moments as, megaphone in hand, Read MoreLehman Brothers managing director John Kasich kicks back in
the plush leather chair in his corner office high atop 3 World Financial Center and starts weighing in on his latest investment-banking deal. "It's a small company in the health-care space," he says. "Today, we set up a call with the C.E.O. and C.F.O. Tomorrow, I'll be Read MoreRemember how George Steinbrenner used to have back-door negotiations with Billy Martin that seemed more like Truman and Stalin at Potsdam than a managerial hiring? Mr. Steinbrenner's at it again, only this time he's in pursuit not of a field manager but a cable C.E.O., and not Billy the Kid, but a 53-year-old cable veteran–probably Read More
Another Bush in the White House, another flagging stock market, another stumbling economy. And, if the mutterings and whispers from Washington, D.C., are to be believed, the West Wing crowd is engaged in another round of Greenspan grumbling.
NewsMax.com, an obscure far-right Web site (board members include Alexander Haig and Arnaud deBorchgrave), reported on Aug. 7 Read MoreThe markets have
crashed; the buyers are in retreat. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley both announced cutbacks in their retail stock-flogging ranks. Analysts like Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker and Merrill Lynch's Henry Blodget have been named in class-action suits filed by investors. Retail brokers, the weary men on the front lines, have lost their clients' money-as Read More
