We don’t yet know how much Bob Diamond was paid for running Barclays last year. We do know the bank will cap cash bonuses at £65,000 (about $100,000), joining a growing list of banks that have bowed to shareholder and public pressure to curb payouts. Barclays could have reported Diamond’s compensation yesterday, but it decided […]
Three months after its IPO, Groupon reported earnings that were good but not as good as many expected, and the shares tumbled. You might expect the management team to be rattled and strike a defensive tone on its conference call with investors. Instead, the call was all business: detailed, candid and orderly. Groupon CEO Andrew […]
Insurance company earnings calls are normally staid affairs. But Hartford Financial Group had a sudden burst of excitement yesterday as its largest shareholder, hedge fund titan John Paulson, joined the call. He hammered CEO Liam McGee for not being more specific about his plans for increasing shareholder value at the company, which saw its shares […]
In an interview after the Super Bowl, New York Giants Head Coach Tom Coughlin reflected on his team’s remarkable success. Coughlin’s secret for brining out the best in his players was simple: he told them he loved them. According to the New York Post, Coughlin recalled his speech to his players the night before the […]
Lucas van Praag, the longtime communications chief at Goldman Sachs, is stepping down. To those of us in the PR trade, this news yesterday was much more significant than Facebook’s IPO filing and the legion of twentysomething millionaires it will spawn. Van Praag has done a brilliant job of defending Goldman and handling the outsized […]
Attorneys for News Corporation investigating the phone-hacking scandal at the now-defunct UK tabloid News of the World revealed today that emails warning of widespread hacking were deleted from James Murdoch’s computer. The New York Times reports: “Rupert Murdoch’s son James that referred to “a nightmare scenario” of legal repercussions from widespread phone hacking at the […]
David Rubenstein wants to have it both ways. He’d like us to believe that he’s a reasonable fellow, ready to pay more tax if Congress would only change the law, according to a New York Times report:. “If you change the law, we’ll pay the taxes,” Mr. Rubenstein said to scattered applause during a debate […]
Here’s some free advice for Mitt Romney: Release your income tax returns now. Right now. Don’t wait “until April” as you’ve said in the past, or give a vague estimate of your effective tax rate, as you did earlier today. Do it now so you can address facts, instead of conjecture and speculation. According to […]
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook column profiles Paul Levy, a PE manager who makes a good defense of private equity: “We want to build businesses,” Mr. Levy said earnestly. “Nobody wants to fire people. We want to retain all of the value-added, high-quality people that work at these companies. But it’s like any other endeavor. If […]
There’s long been a debate about whether a company’s culture makes any difference in how it performs. Culture often is derided as the “soft stuff” that is nice to have but not really essential to a company’s success. Indeed, Sandy Weill once famously quipped that culture was “something they put in yogurt.” (Of course, we […]