Carol Loomis

"It was the year of the derivative. From last spring on, as if a blockade of ice had suddenly given way, bad news about these exotic financial innovations started to flow, and victims, corporate and public alike, began to wash ashore. In the wake of billions of dollars in losses since then, opinions about these new-age instruments have drastically hardened. “Derivatives,” observes Richard Syron, chairman of the American Stock Exchange, which trades the species called puts and calls. “That’s the 11-letter four-letter word.” The word’s elevation to pejorative status is probably justified, but not simply because wild market swings turned many derivatives players into big losers last year. What magnified those losses and sent a troubling message to regulators was disturbing instances of managerial blindness, desperate behavior, even outright fraud."

"… When Fortune published its 2013 list of the world’s 50 Most Admired Companies, five among them were 25 years old or less. Four were the usual suspects from tech land: Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google. The oddball in this party of five was BlackRock (BLK), formed in 1988 by Fink and seven partners. They’d been Wall Streeters, at First Boston and Lehman. They were sell-side bond experts, but not just any sell-side experts. They were inventors and traders of the complex asset-backed instruments–like mortgage-backed securities–then newly available. Fink’s transformative idea was that the buy-side half of a trade needed help to understand these products. So his band re-created themselves as asset managers. … … BlackRock has been a supernova stock, shooting from a 1999 IPO price of $14 a share to about $320 recently. That’s 22 times the original price, and today the company has a market value of about $53 billion. Justifiably proud of this climb, Fink is fond of pointing out that it dwarfs that of the S&P 500 (up not even one time for the same period) and also wallops that of many well-known stocks, such as Berkshire Hathaway (up three times)."

"We were playing bridge at Kay Graham's apartment in New York — over on the East Side. I think the other two players were my husband John Loomis and a friend of ours, John Gillespie — although the constitution of the bridge game sometimes changed. And they wanted a picture for Fortune Magazine, where I worked. And they said "Let's get one at the bridge table." So I went over and sat down and pulled my cards back — tried to look exactly like we were playing. And Warren, on the spur of the moment, leaned over to look at my cards — and I broke into laughter. It was perfect. It was a great example of his sense of humor, which is very, very extraordinary. When people say something to him, his instinctive wish is to say something funny back."