Making the Routine Extraordinary: Wall Street Journal Karen Richardson
Writing a stock market column for the Monday edition of a business newspaper always requires a certain amount of creative imagination. A journalist can't really report on what happened during the previous (Friday) trading session -- that's old news -- and how much can one freshly forecast about the upcoming Monday morning trading session? By the time most readers crack open their Monday morning financial dailies, the markets will have rendered moot any forecasts anyway.So that is why I always teach my public relations clients that one way to help measure how savvy a financial columnist is, is by reading his or her Monday morning offering. Based on that formula alone, I think The Wall Street Journal's Karen Richardson is one sharp scribe.
Her most recent Ahead of the Tape column, on Monday, June 9, is a fine piece of financial journalism. Karen points out that so far every all-star private equity or sovereign-wealth fund that has ponied up billions of dollars to bolster distressed U.S. financial institutions has watched a serious portion of their balance sheet evaporate.
In Where Will U.S. Banks Beg Next?, Richardson notes that rescues from Corsair Capital, TPG, Temasek Holdings, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, China Investment Corp. and Warburg Pincus have left all would-be heroes with a lighter wallet.
"Given the performance of these investments so far, how much worse does it have to get before pension trustees and university endowments and the top-tier private-equity firms they back ask whether it makes sense to keep doing this?" Richardson asks. "How long before rich overseas funds stop giving cash to Wall Street firms that lose their money?"
Those are good, insightful questions and ones investors and securities firm executives need to weigh. If the A-team funds do get wary, Richardson suggests State investment funds in less politically 'pc' places such as Algeria, Angola, Libya and Zimbabwe may be the only true alternative.
"Selling stakes to funds of authoritarian or unstable regimes in frontier markets doesn't quite mesh with Wall Street's lofty image of itself," Richardson concludes. "But it created this mess, and beggars can't be choosers."
Now that is just plain, good writing!
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