His innovation: a machine to deliver information on bond prices and models for comparing those prices, helping traders decipher the "fair value" of securities, a process that had been time-consuming and often inaccurate.īloomberg remedied the situation by delivering the elusive information instantaneously, offering his machine (named, with characteristic hubris, for himself) as a level field on which buyers and sellers could meet, breaking the lock the "sell side" had on pricing bonds. Back then, Bloomberg was a flamboyant pretender with a revolutionary system for making "real time" real. The financial world has changed strikingly since 1982, when Mike Bloomberg installed his first terminal. But when that number goes negative, the Bloombergs will go." "When you have a kid producing $20 million a year, give him three Bloombergs. "But when the going gets tough, that's going to stop," Delaney predicts. We have to be careful not to depend on our machines." "The one thing computers have done," he continues, "is let us make bigger mistakes. Yet while Bloomberg has become the establishment, he maintains the aura of the new kid on the block, projecting an image that's equal parts Horatio Alger and Warren Buffett: self-made, forthright, a change agent who's suspicious of hype. With more than 100,000 users around the world, the Bloomberg, as his eponymous product is known, has become Wall Street's most indispensable tool, delivering real-time data on more than 800,000 stocks and bonds, a rich array of historical information, and 4,500 original daily news stories to the likes of SEC chair Arthur Levitt, Bundesbank head Hans Tietmeyer, Disney CEO Michael Eisner, and Bill Gates, to name just a few celebrity clients. The contradiction eludes them: In 18 years, Mike Bloomberg has turned himself into a baron of real-time financial information and news, building from a $10 million severance check a $2 billion-plus business structured around the very technology he's warning against. "He has the kind of energy that doesn't exist out there anymore," one budding financier gushes. The audience - mostly young Wall Street traders - is smitten.
We are getting carried away by technology, by the tools." "We are replacing teachers with television, and we are relying on numbers in the workplace to tell us what to do. Bloomberg - a trim 5' 9", thinning brown hair streaked by silver, dressed in Wall Street's uniform of starched white shirt under pinstripe Paul Stuart suit - lectures the crowd on the perils of seductive technology, like a high school instructor. Amid the grandeur of the hotel's banquet hall, there is a tattiness befitting a man who claims to hate pretension, who speaks every day to his mother (still living, he tells the group proudly, "in the house we grew up in"). The alumni dinner at the New York Hilton, where Bloomberg is the keynote speaker, is in keeping with this media mogul's preferred persona. It's typical Mike Bloomberg, wanting to have it both ways: imperious man of the people, coarse billionaire, earthy business leader, accessible control freak. "So I got her dates in every city in China." Remembering that I'm also at the table, he glares in my direction.
And what's a 16-year-old going to do on a business trip?" He pops another carefully buttered piece of bread in his mouth. "My daughter is tall and busty and blonde," Michael Bloomberg is telling a table of Boston College graduates.
Can Mike Bloomberg, self-made man's man and master of the real-time financial news universe, learn to think out of the box?
0 kommentar(er)
