When they are employed wisely, derivatives make the world simpler because they give their buyers an ability to manage and transfer risk.
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.
In meeting the challenges of organic growth, BlackRock has the advantage of having an executive team greatly respected for what it has accomplished.
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.
The options and futures traded on exchanges are derivatives contracts.
In general, the hedge funds were clobbered by the 1969 bear market, ending up in many cases with records that were worse than those put together by aggressive mutual funds denied the luxury of short sales.
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.
Carl Icahn, corporate raider by trade, is creative, a scrambler, and certainly not to be underestimated.
The 'Fortune' I came to work for on Jan. 25, 1954, was a monthly, with pages significantly larger than what you're reading; 'art' covers that did not relate to stories inside; and a newsstand price of $1.25.
Approaches to determining stock values vary, but fundamentally, each company judging itself undervalued is saying that its future stream of earnings justifies a higher price than the stock market is willing to accord it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I didn't want to be a 'Fortune' writer who was constrained in any way.
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.
The good thing about a dealer's derivatives portfolio is that it is marked to market.
Throughout his remarkable business and government career, Robert Rubin, now 65, has both worked exhaustively at reaching well-founded conclusions and rejected the idea that anything - and he means anything - can be a 'provable certainty.'
The speed and trajectory of BlackRock's ascent have been breathtaking.
Wage concessions are difficult to quantify, since their magnitude depends on many operating variables.
