Bloomberg Quotes

I quit smoking in December. I’m really depressed about it. I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes. I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist’s life, and now people like Bloomberg have made animals out of smokers, and they think that if they stop smoking everyone will live forever.

If you have to compete based on capital, the giant always wins. If you can compete based on smarts, flexibility, and willingness to give more for less, then small companies like Bloomberg clearly have an advantage.

No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.

Bloomberg does not support the measure to silence the useless and maddening car alarm: he would rather impose himself on people than on mechanical devices.

I watch Bloomberg because I can trust that the people I see on Bloomberg will present me with actionable and insightful information that will help me be a better leader in business.

Those enterprises that see new needs and react more quickly, win!

If a business isn’t efficiently utilizing resources, then it’s a bad investment. A wasteful business is an unprofitable business. That may or may not show on their P&L for the current year, but you better believe it shows somewhere.

As Walsh saw it, Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House. It was a 1970s video game, the white ball pinging back and forth in the black triangle.

When we're talking about businesses adapting to change, it's not just about the processes and systems but also about people and their ability to practice new relationships, methods and behaviors.

have my own army in the NYPD—the seventh largest army in the world. —NEW YORK CITY MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG

As a new entrepreneur, you're probably gonna have to hustle hard to get things going at first. And you gotta be committed to that hustle until it's not necessary anymore.

Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system…Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said. “The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules can be found” in an article written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [in 1985], Tremonti said yesterday at Milan’s Cattolica University. —Bloomberg News, November 20, 2008

And, as I would learn later on in my life - at Salomon Brothers and in my own company - it's the "doers", the lean and hungry ones, those with ambition in their eyes and fire in their bellies and no notions of social caste, who go the furthest and achieve the most.

In nature, waste does not exist. There is only production and consumption; there is only creation and utilization. Everything that's produced is efficiently consumed. Everything that's created is efficiently utilized. And this cyclicality results in growth and in profit. The same should be true of each business, and the same should be true of an economy.

where a Michael Bloomberg could be the CEO of a large company one day and get elected as New York’s mayor the next.

Every Spring, nature teaches a class on business entrepreneurship. ....We see how capital is re-allocated, currencies are re-directed, growth is re-emphasized, and numerous life forms promote their value with re-vitalized marketing programs that implement flowers or seeds or aromas or habitability or pollination in an effort demonstrate a unique value proposition in a busy economy.

Elon Musk (of Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity), Jeff Bezos (of Amazon), and Reed Hastings (of Netflix) are other great shapers from the business world. In philanthropy, Muhammad Yunus (of Grameen), Geoffrey Canada (of Harlem Children’s Zone), and Wendy Kopp (of Teach for America) come to mind; and in government, Winston Churchill, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lee Kuan Yew, and Deng Xiaoping. Bill Gates has been a shaper in both business and philanthropy, as was Andrew Carnegie. Mike Bloomberg has been a shaper in business, philanthropy, and government. Einstein, Freud, Darwin, and Newton were giant shapers in the sciences. Christ, Muhammad, and the Buddha were religious shapers. They all had original visions and successfully built them out.

Somehow, we as a society must find a way to better engage our children in the joy of learning. Generation after generation of functional illiterates we don't need.

The changing climate should be seen as a series of discrete, manageable problems that can be attacked from all angles simultaneously. Each problem has a solution. And better still, each solution can make our society healthier and our economy stronger.

Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.

Greenwashing is a problem. That's why the practice of just sticking a label like ESG on a company or a project isn't good enough. We need to have a systemic approach. We have to approach it from the ground up with systems design, not from the top down with labels.

For the first time in the history of the world more people will die from overeating than undereating this year.

A better way to evaluate a company is to talk to the experts. No, I don’t mean journalists or analysts. I mean those who really know what’s going on and what the potential

Bloomberg predicts that wind energy will be the lowest-cost energy globally by 2030.

New York city wasn't yet the post-Giuliani, Bloomberg forever, Disneyland tourist attraction of today, trade-marked and policed to protect the visitors and tourism industry. It was still a place of diversity, where people lived their lives in vibrant communities and intact cultures. Young people could still move to New York City after or instead of high school or college and invent an identity, an art, a life. Times Square was still a bustling center of excitement, with sex work, "adult" movies, a variety of sins on sale, ways to make money for those down on their luck".

It is not just bookstores and libraries that are disappearing but museums, theaters, performing arts centers, art and music schools— all those places where I felt at home have joined the list of endangered species. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and my own hometown paper, The Washington Post, have all closed their weekend book review sections, leaving books orphaned and stranded, poor cousins to television and the movies. In a sign of the times, the Bloomberg News website recently transferred its book coverage to the Luxury section, alongside yachts, sports clubs and wine, as if to signal that books are an idle indulgence of the super-rich. But if there is one thing that should not be denied to anyone rich or poor it is the opportunity to dream.

Dr. Noah Smith, economics columnist for Bloomberg View, tells us, “The real danger of the ‘rise of the robots’ is not that they’ll take all our jobs, but that they’ll cause continually increasing inequality.

Business judgment is best developed through professional experience. The next best alternative is to be reading business articles. We recommend Bloomberg Businessweek and Economic Times/Business Standard, if time permits.

The last person into their respective office the next day, as measured by their Bloomberg login status, has to pay for the liquid lunch that follows, where we spend three hours nursing our hangovers and reliving the events of the previous evening.

When it comes to television advertising, Michael Bloomberg out-spends the NRA and all other self-defense groups by 6.3 to one. The money produces political attack ads that accuse supporters of right-to-carry on college campuses of “allowing criminals to carry hidden, loaded guns in our schools.

Washington's all abstraction. It's about access to power and nothing else. I mean, I'm sure it's fun if you're living next door to Seinfeld, or To Wolfe, or Mike Bloomberg, but living next door to them isn't what New York is about, In Washington people literally talk about how many feet away from John Kerry's house their own house is. The neighborhoods are all so blah, the only thing that turns people on is proximity to power. It's a total fetish culture. People get this kind of orgasmic shiver when they tell you they sat next to Paul Wolfowitz at a conference or got invited to Grover Norquist's breakfast.

Every morning when we get up, we relish the day’s upcoming battles. They keep us alive, and they keep Bloomberg’s corporate family thriving. We can’t wait for tomorrow. Who says we can’t do that? What do you mean they’ll beat us? Have them put on their boxing gloves, and send them into the ring. We’re ready!

If you’re going to succeed, you need a vision, one that’s affordable, practical, and fills a customer need. Then, go for it. Don’t worry too much about the details. Don’t second-guess your creativity. Avoid overanalyzing the new project’s potential. Most importantly, don’t strategize about the long term too much.

Did I want to risk an embarrassing and costly failure? Absolutely. Happiness for me has always been the thrill of the unknown, trying something that everyone says can't be done, feeling that gnawing pit in my stomach that says "Danger ahead". Would it be nice not to have uncertainty, to sit back and "veg out"? When the phone rings constantly, when people keep demanding attention, when I desperately need time to myself, it seems an attractive notion just to "chuck it all". But then nobody calls, nobody stops by, and soon I'm nibbling my nails and getting irritable, and I realize that's not what I want. It sounds good. In reality though, I want action, I want challenge.

Stop and frisk does not get my vote.

So there are laws that are defensible but unenforceable, and there are laws impossible to infringe. But in the New York of Mayor Bloomberg, there are laws that are not possible to obey, and that nobody can respect, and that are enforced by arbitrary power. The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law. Tyranny can be petty. And “petty” is not just Bloomberg’s middle name. It is his name.

One consequence, presumably unintended, of America’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol has been the emergence of a not-quite-grassroots movement. In February 2005, Greg Nickels, the mayor of Seattle, began to circulate a set of principles that he called the “U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.” Within four months, more than a hundred and seventy mayors, representing some thirty-six million people, had signed on, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York; Mayor John Hickenlooper of Denver; and Mayor Manuel Diaz of Miami. Signatories agreed to “strive to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own communities.” At around the same time, officials from New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine announced that they had reached a tentative agreement to freeze power plant emissions from their states at current levels and then begin to cut them. Even Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Hummer collector, joined in; an executive order he signed in June 2005 called on California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2010 and to 1990 levels by 2020. “I say the debate is over,” Schwarzenegger declared right before signing the order.

Matt Levine, a Bloomberg columnist who writes a detailed and witty daily email dissected by Wall Street bankers, had been on vacation when the prospectus went live. The following Monday morning, he wrote in his email that the “We” trademark news was “the news item that caused me to absolutely lose my mind—the item that, if I were a slightly more dedicated financial columnist, would have had me on the next helicopter back to the office.

Steve Sanetti of the NSSF told me on my radio program in July 2014 that Project Child Safe had reached out to Bloomberg for assistance as Bloomberg claimed to promote gun safety, but Bloomberg never responded. Instead, his money has gone to support a warped idea of “safety,” which is to incite furor and violence. To recap: It was gun control advocates who turned their backs on a national gun safety program that provided gun locks. Not the gun industry.

New York city wasn't yet the post-Giuliani, Bloomberg forever, Disneyland tourist attraction of today, trade-marked and policed to protect the visitors and tourism industry. It was still a place of diversity, where people lived their lives in vibrant communities and intact cultures. Young people could still move to New York City after or instead of high school or college and invent an identity, an art, a life. Times Square was still a bustling center of excitement, with sex work, "adult" movies, a variety of sins on sale, ways to make money for those down on their luck".

Speculators, meanwhile, have seized control of the global economy and the levers of political power. They have weakened and emasculated governments to serve their lust for profit. They have turned the press into courtiers, corrupted the courts, and hollowed out public institutions, including universities. They peddle spurious ideologies—neoliberal economics and globalization—to justify their rapacious looting and greed. They create grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge citizens into crippling forms of debt peonage. And they have been stealing staggering sums of public funds, such as the $65 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that have been unloaded each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash.21 They feed like parasites off of the state and the resources of the planet. Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money. They are no different from the detested speculators who were hanged in the seventeenth century, when speculation was a capital offense. The obscenity of their wealth is matched by their utter lack of concern for the growing numbers of the destitute. In early 2014, the world’s 200 richest people made $13.9 billion, in one day, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.22 This hoarding of money by the elites, according to the ruling economic model, is supposed to make us all better off, but in fact the opposite happens when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, as economist Thomas Piketty documents in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.23 The rest of us have little or no influence over how we are governed, and our wages stagnate or decline. Underemployment and unemployment become chronic. Social services, from welfare to Social Security, are slashed in the name of austerity. Government, in the hands of speculators, is a protection racket for corporations and a small group of oligarchs. And the longer we play by their rules the more impoverished and oppressed we become. Yet, like

Even as the centrist vote coalesced around Biden, and the progressive and liberal vote was divided, our campaign still won California, Colorado, Utah, and Vermont on Super Tuesday. But Biden beat us in Texas by around sixty thousand votes. That narrow win, along with solid victories in Virginia, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, gave the former vice president a huge boost. Our campaign, which days earlier had been expected to win the most delegates on Super Tuesday, was suddenly trailing. Biden had the lead, and the momentum. Warren left the race a few days later, and with the exit of Bloomberg, what had been a twenty-three-candidate contest was down to a two-man race between Biden and me.

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey.

too little—and complex, because the manufacturing and marketing of food products has changed dramatically. Dr. David Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has extensively documented how food manufacturers and restaurant and fast food chains carefully combine fats, sugar, and salt in precise ratios that reach the “bliss point”—which means they trigger brain systems that increase the desire to eat more, even after our stomachs are full. On a global basis, the World Health Organization has found a pattern of increased consumption of “energy-dense foods that are high in fat, salt and sugars but low in vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients.” Hyper-urbanization has separated more people from reliable sources of fresh fruit and vegetables. Quality calories in fruits and vegetables now cost ten times as much as calories per gram in sweets and foods abundant in starch. In a report for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Arielle Traub documented the increase from 1985 to 2000 in the price of fresh fruits and vegetables by 40 percent, while prices of fats declined by 15 percent and sugared soft drinks by 25 percent.

Yes, that’s the one. Aaron, I want you to acquire the company tomorrow. Start low, but I want you to end up offering at least fifteen million for it. Actually, how many partners are there?” “I see two registered partners. Michael Teo and Adrian Balakrishnan.” “Okay, bid thirty million.” “Charlie, you can’t be serious? The book value on that company is only—” “No, I’m dead serious,” Charlie cut in. “Start a fake bidding war between some of our subsidiaries if you have to. Now listen carefully. After the deal is done, I want you to vest Michael Teo, the founding partner, with class-A stock options, then I want you to bundle it with that Cupertino start-up we acquired last month and the software developer in Zhongguancun. Then, I want us to do an IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange next month.” “Next month?” “Yes, it has to happen very quickly. Put the word out on the street, let your contacts at Bloomberg TV know about it, hell, drop a hint to Henry Blodget if you think it will help drive up the share price. But at the end of the day I want those class-A stock options to be worth at least $250 million. Keep it off the books, and set up a shell corporation in Liechtenstein if you have to. Just make sure there are no links back to me. Never, ever.

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey. The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

And don’t tell me again that you were ten years old. Your age has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. There are no big changes between ten and twenty—or ten and eighty, for that matter. You still can’t love a Jesus as much as you’d like to who did and said a couple of things he was at least reported to have said or done—and you know it. You’re constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who throws tables around. And you’re constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who says a human being, any human being—even a Professor Tupper—is more valuable to God than any soft, helpless Easter chick.” Franny was now facing directly into the sound of Zooey’s voice, sitting bolt upright, a wad of Kleenex clenched in one hand. Bloomberg was no longer in her lap. “I suppose you can,” she said, shrilling. “It’s beside the point whether I can or not. But, yes, as a matter of fact, I can. I don’t feel like going into it, but at least I’ve never tried, consciously or otherwise, to turn Jesus into St. Francis of Assisi to make him more ‘lovable’—which is exactly what ninety-eight per cent of the Christian world has always insisted on doing. Not that it’s to my credit. I don’t happen to be attracted to the St. Francis of Assisi type. But you are. And, in my opinion, that’s one of the reasons why you’re having this little nervous breakdown.

Many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency: the endless ‘news’ feeds, the constantly changing screens of traders, the office lights blazing late into the night, the young analysts who find themselves required to work thirty hours at a stretch. But very little that happens in the finance sector has genuine need for this constant appearance of excitement and activity. Only its most boring part—the payments system—is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends. No terrible consequence would follow if the stock market closed for a week (as it did in the wake of 9/11)—or longer, or if a merger were delayed or large investment project postponed for a few weeks, or if an initial public offering happened next month rather than this. The millisecond improvement in data transmission between New York and Chicago has no significance whatever outside the absurd world of computers trading with each other. The tight coupling is simply unnecessary: the perpetual flow of ‘information’ part of a game that traders play which has no wider relevance, the excessive hours worked by many employees a tournament in which individuals compete to display their alpha qualities in return for large prizes. The traditional bank manager’s culture of long lunches and afternoons on the golf course may have yielded more useful information about business than the Bloomberg terminal. Lehman

Rather, the issue is whether it is right to have a mosque and Islamic center in virtually the exact spot where so many Americans were killed in the name of Islamic holy war. I don’t think it is right, any more than I would support the idea of a neo-Nazi recruiting center at Auschwitz. My sympathies in this case are not with religiously deprived Muslims, but rather with Debra Burlingame, a spokesperson for a 9/11 victims group. “Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America’s heart was broken nine years ago,” she said.5 Some supporters of the mosque, such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, clearly missed the distinction being made here between the right to worship and how and where that right is exercised. Fareed Zakaria, writer and CNN host, recognizes the distinction; even so, he argues in favor of the mosque on the grounds that the folks building it are traditional Muslims who have condemned terrorism.6 Still, it’s not clear why these moderate Muslims disregarded the sentiments of the 9/11 victims’ families and decided on a site so close to Ground Zero. Undoubtedly radical Muslims around the world will view the mosque as a kind of triumphal monument. There is historical precedent for this. Muslims have a long tradition of building monuments to commemorate triumphs over adversaries, as when they built the Dome of the Rock on the site of Solomon’s Temple, or when Mehmet the Conqueror rode his horse into the Byzantine church Hagia Sophia and declared that it would be turned into a mosque. Many Americans may not know this history, but the radical Muslims do, and Obama does as well. The radical Muslims would like the Ground Zero mosque built so it can stand as an enduring symbol of resistance to American power, and President Obama evidently agrees with them.

In April, Dr. Vladimir (Zev) Zelenko, M.D., an upstate New York physician and early HCQ adopter, reproduced Dr. Didier Raoult’s “startling successes” by dramatically reducing expected mortalities among 800 patients Zelenko treated with the HCQ cocktail.29 By late April of 2020, US doctors were widely prescribing HCQ to patients and family members, reporting outstanding results, and taking it themselves prophylactically. In May 2020, Dr. Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D. published the most comprehensive study, to date, on HCQ’s efficacy against COVID. Risch is Yale University’s super-eminent Professor of Epidemiology, an illustrious world authority on the analysis of aggregate clinical data. Dr. Risch concluded that evidence is unequivocal for early and safe use of the HCQ cocktail. Dr. Risch published his work—a meta-analysis reviewing five outpatient studies—in affiliation with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the American Journal of Epidemiology, under the urgent title, “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk COVID-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to Pandemic Crisis.”30 He further demonstrated, with specificity, how HCQ’s critics—largely funded by Bill Gates and Dr. Tony Fauci31—had misinterpreted, misstated, and misreported negative results by employing faulty protocols, most of which showed HCQ efficacy administered without zinc and Zithromax which were known to be helpful. But their main trick for ensuring the protocols failed was to wait until late in the disease process before administering HCQ—when it is known to be ineffective. Dr. Risch noted that evidence against HCQ used late in the course of the disease is irrelevant. While acknowledging that Dr. Didier Raoult’s powerful French studies favoring HCQ efficacy were not randomized, Risch argued that the results were, nevertheless, so stunning as to far outweigh that deficit: “The first study of HCQ + AZ [ . . . ] showed a 50-fold benefit of HCQ + AZ vs. standard of care . . . This is such an enormous difference that it cannot be ignored despite lack of randomization.”32 Risch has pointed out that the supposed need for randomized placebo-controlled trials is a shibboleth. In 2014 the Cochrane Collaboration proved in a landmark meta-analysis of 10,000 studies, that observational studies of the kind produced by Didier Raoult are equal

This fall, Alibaba Group Holdings will go public on the New York Stock Exchange, and it could raise $20 billion, according to Bloomberg News, making it the largest stock offering in U.S.

The question is whether the ECB will be able to fight low inflation by itself. Mr Draghi signalled that the central bank could only do so much when he called last week for governments in the eurozone to do more to boost growth by loosening fiscal policy and introducing structural reforms. Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, told Bloomberg News this week that monetary policy had “come to the end” of its instruments, stating: “I don’t think that the ECB’s monetary policy has the instruments to fight deflation.

Some backers of the new platform say it will allow them to better customize and police traders' messages. Bloomberg executives

By the end of 1993, there were 623 websites in existence. Two years later, there were 23,500 live sites, covering a variety of human interests: from business-based journalism on Bloomberg.com to one of the first online communities called – and we’re not making this up – Bianca’s Smut Shack.

both Tesla and GM think battery prices will come down fast enough for electric cars to be more affordable than equivalent gasoline cars by the early 2020s. The Chevy Bolt sells for less than $35,000, after subsidies. Tesla plans to be producing Model 3s at a rate of hundreds of thousands a year by 2019. Other electric car companies, new and old, are developing competitive strategies. It is still difficult to predict how quickly the sales of electric cars will overtake those of gasoline vehicles. Even assuming all goes well for Tesla and their electric competitors, it could take years, or decades. Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s study estimated that electric cars will account for 35 percent of new car sales by 2040. That’s based on battery prices decreasing at a slower rate than Tesla and GM anticipate. But, as noted earlier, gasoline cars will face the difficult task of competing with electric cars that are both cheaper and better.

The two of us have no interest in the tired old debate that is still playing out on Capitol Hill. Our interest is not in winning an argument or an election. It’s in saving lives, promoting prosperity, and stopping global warming.

Instead of arguing about making sacrifices, let’s talk about how we can make money. Instead of pitting the environment versus the economy, let’s consider market principles and economic growth. Instead of focusing on polar bears, let’s focus on asthmatic children. And instead of putting all hope in the federal government, let’s empower cities, regions, businesses, and citizens to accelerate the progress they are already making on their own.

the United States, the debate has too often centered on how likely various doom-and-gloom scenarios are, and when they’ll occur. But scaring people doesn’t work.

The reality is that the uncertainty involved means we do not know with precision whether we can achieve either of those goals; nor do we know for certain what the consequences will be if we do not. Regardless, most people put little faith in projections that far out, which is understandable. Scientists have been wrong plenty of times before. What people want to know is not exactly what will happen to the Earth eighty years from now but what will happen to their house, their job, and their community this year. Telling people that they might possibly save the Earth from distant and uncertain harm is not a great way to convince them to support a particular policy.

Defense, it is clear, is not enough. To find an answer, we decided to mount the most intensive consultation process in the club’s modern history, inviting over five thousand grassroots leaders to participate in a series of meetings, surveys, and discussions. It culminated in our first national convention, which we held in San Francisco in September 2005.

Even before the convention, the results from the state and local consultations suggested a surprising shift in the membership’s concerns—after more than a hundred years in which the protection of wild places was our highest priority, club leaders were now saying that climate change needed to be at the top of our agenda.

I didn’t know it yet, but this new priority would mean enormous changes in the way I saw the world and environmentalism. Previously environmentalists worked to stop bad things—pollution, clear-cutting, overfishing—but we more or less accepted the big-picture American economy, with the established industries that made it up. Not anymore. Now we were about to find ourselves in a different business: helping to foster a different kind of economic development, one based on knowledge and technology rather than fossil fuels. After thirty-five years of working to clean up after twentieth-century industrialism, environmentalists were about to plunge into creating its twenty-first-century replacement. But before we could go full tilt toward the new, we had to stop the last spasms of the old—an energy future crafted during George W. Bush’s first term by Vice President Cheney.

Probably the most expensive piece of equipment is the Bloomberg terminal, a desktop computer that brings financial types a wealth of up-to-date facts and figures. People swear by it and thanks to their cost (thousands of dollars a month!) they make great status symbols.

In a 2016 book widely publicized in the US, Stern claimed that 58 per cent of all jobs would be automated eventually, driven by the ethos of shareholder value. He told the American media group Bloomberg, ‘It’s not like the fall of the auto and steel industries. That hit just a sector of the country. This will be widespread. People will realize that we don’t have a storm anymore; we have a tsunami.’16 Nevertheless, there are reasons to be sceptical about the prospect of a jobless or even workless future. It is the latest version of the ‘lump of labour fallacy’, the idea that there is only a certain amount of labour and work to be done, so that if more of it can be automated or done by intelligent robots, human workers will be rendered redundant. In any case, very few jobs can be automated in their entirety. The suggestion in a much-cited study17 that nearly half of all US jobs are vulnerable to automation has been challenged by, among others, the OECD, which puts the figure of jobs ‘at risk’ at 9 per cent for industrialized countries.18

Columbia’s Dart Center treated Bloomberg and his various anti-gun groups as objective sources of information. “Nearly 12,000 murdered with guns each year,” parroted Columbia in an online post announcing the workshop. In fact, the FBI reports that there were 8,124 murder victims in 2014. Since 2010, the number of victims has stayed below 9,000.28 Columbia also repeated the absurd claim that the U.S. has a firearm murder rate “20 times higher than other developed countries.” Chile has a murder rate very similar to that of the U.S. Brazil and Russia are both developed countries that have much higher firearm murder rates than the U.S.

Here is how they came up with it: Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown organization set up a website pretending to sell guns, but no guns were sold. Criminal background checks were done on the people’s names for those who visited the site and people who might have criminal backgrounds were identified: however, there were all kinds of false positives. Someone might not have a criminal record, but someone else with a similar name might. And so the crusaders for gun control march on, with botched research, muddy numbers, and assumptions presented as facts.

federal government to protect it from foreign terrorist attacks. That lesson caused him to create a global intelligence division and a counterterrorism force. The audacity of the idea was breathtaking—a local police force with a worldwide perspective that could unearth terrorist plots wherever conceived and prevent them from reaching New York City. When Kelly proposed hiring a deputy commissioner for counterterrorism and another for a reconceived intelligence unit, Bloomberg approved it. “The world no longer stops at the oceans,” the mayor said at the time. “We have to make sure we get the best information as quickly as we possibly can,” he asserted. It was the same concept—accurate information delivered in real time to people making important, complex decisions—that had been the basis for Bloomberg’s global business. Kelly had little trouble convincing his boss of the need, or the viability of the bold idea, even though at the time he had not yet developed a detailed plan.15 Kelly rapidly changed the status of the NYPD on the Joint Task Force on Terrorism that the FBI had been running in New York City since 1980. He named retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Frank Libutti the first NYPD deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, and he increased the number of NYPD detectives assigned to the group from twenty to more

In 2014, the ad that the NFL turned down featured a former Marine talking about his responsibility for his family’s safety. Unlike Bloomberg’s ads, this ad never even mentions the word gun, just the concept of personal protection. The company even told the NFL that it would happily remove its logo, which features a gun, and replace it with a picture of an American flag. But apparently the stumbling block was the vague reference to someone being responsible for his family’s safety. The NFL and NBA are private organizations that are free to support Bloomberg if they so choose. But right now, these organizations seem to be guided by political correctness rather than consistent rules or guiding principles

vociferous

The great irony of 2008 was that our belief in a system of accounting, a belief woven so deeply inside our collective psyche that we’re not even aware of it, made us vulnerable to fraud. Even when done honestly, accounting is sometimes little more than an educated guess. Modern accounting, especially at the big, international banks, has become so convoluted that it is virtually useless. In a comprehensive dissection in 2014, the Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine explained how a bank’s balance sheet is almost impossibly opaque. The “value” of a large portion of the assets on that balance sheet, he noted, is simply based on guesses made by the bank about the collectability of the loans they make, or of the bonds they hold, and the prices that they might fetch on the market, all measured against the offsetting and equally fuzzy valuation of their liabilities and obligations. If a guess is off by even 1 percent, it can turn a quarterly profit into a loss. Guessing whether a bank is actually profitable is like a pop quiz. “I submit to you that there is no answer to the quiz,” he wrote. “It is not possible for a human to know whether Bank of America made money or lost money last quarter.” A bank’s balance sheet, he said, is essentially a series of “reasonable guesses about valuation.” Make the wrong guesses, as Lehman and other troubled banks did, and you end up out of business.

My stomach sank when I returned to my office and looked at the Bloomberg terminal behind my desk.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of physically comparing different Wall Street trading floors, you needn’t bother. They are all basically alike. The floor itself is a checkerboard of stained carpet squares covering a maze of twisted wires and electronic equipment. These removable squares serve as the lid of a massive trash can, and hidden below are dozens of half-empty Chinese food containers and mice. (Mice love trading floors, and banking employees are constantly discussing creative ways to trap and kill them.) If you stop by virtually any trading floor on Wall Street, this is what you will inevitably encounter: Hundreds of telephones are ringing. Television monitors are blasting news and flashing scattered bond quotes. One of the checkerboard squares is upended, and several maintenance men are taking a break to yell at each other in front of a pile of circuits and cables. Dozens of traders and salespeople are standing at three-foot intervals face-to-face at several long rectangular desks, which are stacked with a rainbow of colorful computers, flashing monitors, blue Reuters and green Telerate screens, beige Bloomberg data systems, and customized black broker quote boxes.

THE POWER OF MSCI, FTSE RUSSELL, and S&P Dow Jones Indices is largely over only stock markets. Of even greater and direct importance to countries are their presence and weighting in various influential bond market indices. These may not have the cachet of the brand-name stock market benchmarks bandied about on TV bulletins, but indices like the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate or JPMorgan’s EMBI and GBI-EM are also powerful in their own way.

Mike Bloomberg once said, “I have always had a policy: If it’s a friend and they get a promotion, I don’t bother to call them; I’ll see them sometime and make a joke about it. If they get fired, I want to go out to dinner with them that night. And I want to do it in a public place where everybody can see me. Because I remember when I got fired from Salomon Brothers—I can tell you every single person that called me. That meant something. When I was made a partner? I have no recollection of that whatsoever.” My friend Todd Benson puts it this way: “Show up when it matters, when it means something. Never miss a funeral. Attend every wedding.

capital expenditures required in Clean Technology are so incredibly high,” says Pritzker, “that I didn’t feel that I could do anything to make an impact, so I became interested in digital media, and established General Assembly in January 2010, along with Jake Schwartz, Brad Hargreaves and Matthew Brimer.” In less than two years GA had to double its space. In June 2012, they opened a second office in a nearby building. Since then, GA’s courses been attended by 15,000 students, the school has 70 full-time employees in New York, and it has begun to export its formula abroad—first to London and Berlin—with the ambitious goal of creating a global network of campuses “for technology, business and design.” In each location, Pritzker and his associates seek cooperation from the municipal administration, “because the projects need to be understood and supported also by the local authorities in a public-private partnership.” In fact, the New York launch was awarded a $200,000 grant from Mayor Bloomberg. “The humanistic education that we get in our universities teaches people to think critically and creatively, but it does not provide the skills to thrive in the work force in the 21st century,” continues Pritzker. “It’s also true that the college experience is valuable. The majority of your learning does not happen in the classroom. It happens in your dorm room or at dinner with friends. Even geniuses such as Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, who both left Harvard to start their companies, came up with their ideas and met their co-founders in college.” Just as a college campus, GA has classrooms, whiteboard walls, a library, open spaces for casual meetings and discussions, bicycle parking, and lockers for personal belongings. But the emphasis is on “learning by doing” and gaining knowledge from those who are already working. Lectures can run the gamut from a single evening to a 16-week course, on subjects covering every conceivable matter relevant to technology startups— from how to create a web site to how to draw a logo, from seeking funding to hiring employees. But adjacent to the lecture halls, there is an area that hosts about 30 active startups in their infancy. “This is the core of our community,” says Pritzker, showing the open space that houses the startups. “Statistically, not all of these companies are going to do well. I do believe, though, that all these people will. The cost of building technology is dropping so low that people can actually afford to take the risk to learn by doing something that, in our minds, is a much more effective way to learn than anything else. It’s entrepreneurs who are in the field, learning by doing, putting journey before destination.” “Studying and working side by side is important, because from the interaction among people and the exchange of ideas, even informal, you learn, and other ideas are born,” Pritzker emphasizes: “The Internet has not rendered in-person meetings obsolete and useless. We chose these offices just to be easily accessible by all—close to Union Square where almost every subway line stops—in particular those coming from Brooklyn, where many of our students live.

But Bloomberg still talks about it as the lucky break of his career. “After all, losing a job can be a golden opportunity to start your own business. (Thank you very much, Salomon Brothers),” said the Mayor in his speech to the Economic Club of New York on March 23, 2009, at the height of the great recession (lasting from December 2007 to June 2009, according to official statistics of the National Bureau of Economic Research). He explained how his administration intended to overcome the crisis by encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit of the City, with many new initiatives to attract “the best and brightest” brains and help them build their startups.[13]

There’s another thing about New York: the bar scene and the restaurant scene for the ‘kids,’” adds Brian Cohen. “There’s no better place to hang out than in New York. The city’s environment is so much more conducive to that. You can’t do that in Silicon Valley. You can’t walk from San Mateo to Mountain View, you know? If you’re in the city, you may go to 12 different bars, hang out with 40 different friends … it’s another matter. I think the real catalyst is that New York is totally walkable, you can walk anywhere, and every place is safe. Where would you go to live this life? Nowhere.” But even Cohen is worried about the after-Bloomberg: “There’s no businessman who could fit in his shoes. I think New York is going to go through a difficult time then. He’s had an impact in ways people have no understanding of. That will be gone.

My mother and my father both, you know, the term would be, ‘suck it up and just get on with it’; ‘don’t let bad things that happen to you stop you’; ‘you’re in control of your life,’” recalls Bloomberg. That advice is one of his sharpest childhood memories.

This focus on humans rather than money is best illustrated by the Apple store concept, which was the first to include the Genius Bar, a children’s play area and other features that critics thought were a waste of time. When the first Apple store designs were announced, Bloomberg reported: “(Steve) Jobs thinks he can do a better job than experienced retailers. Problem is, the numbers don’t add up. I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake.”15 However, after opening, it was obvious that the stores were engaging customers in an even more immersive, brand building experience. Eight years later, Apple’s New York store became the highest grossing retailer on Fifth Avenue.

Anti–Second Amendment advocates profess to love science while demonizing people of faith, but you’d never know this by their arguments. Bloomberg PR exec/mom Shannon Watts-Troughton once told me via Twitter that “an assault weapon enables humans to shoot 10 rounds in one minute. @blueelephant69: @shannonrwatts @DLoesch.” What in flat-earthing hell is this? I can throw ten bowling balls a minute, I have assault arms, ban them. By her estimation, “assault weapons” are any firearms that can shoot ten rounds per minute, which is every firearm. Even a bolt action rifle can shoot ten rounds per minute. That

With the time and money Bloomberg groups spend demonizing peaceful, law-abiding mom-and-dad gun owners, they could have promoted real gun safety. Bloomberg’s $50 million to shout down dissent on Second Amendment issues could have gone toward putting a safe in every American home or teaching children about proper behavior with and around firearms. He could have donated to Project Child Safe, a wonderful program created by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which gives away free gun locks in gun safety kits through partners in every state. Over thirty-six million safety kits have been distributed through partnerships with law enforcement agencies in all fifty states. Unfortunately,

Bill Kelley, a Bloomberg employee, waited minutes before replying on his BlackBerry to a relative asking: “Bill, are you OK?” At 9:23 a.m. Kelley sent the last message of his life from the Windows on the World restaurant on top of the World Trade Center. “So far … we’re trapped on the 106th floor, but apparently [the] fire department is almost here.”5 These messages are a sample of a vast collection of e-mails sent on September 11, 2001, and later shared with news media or stored in a 9/11 digital archive owned by the Library of Congress. Many of the e-mails were dispatched by BlackBerrys. For trapped or fleeing workers, BlackBerrys were the only reliable communication link in lower Manhattan. After the first plane knocked out cell towers on top of the World Trade Center, cell and landline circuits were overwhelmed. Paging companies lost many of their frequencies, and phone lines went dead for hundreds of thousands of Verizon customers6 when a call-switching center, several cell towers, and fiber-optic links were smashed by debris from a collapsed building.7

Innovative Market Systems was no overnight success. Bloomberg began by investing about $300,000 and went to work with three recruits he had met at Salomon—Thomas Secunda, who specialized in analytics; Chuck Zegar, who created the software; and Duncan MacMillan, the expert in customer needs. All three are still at Bloomberg L.P., wealthy but unsung heroes of the Bloomberg saga.

In time Bloomberg could afford to buy back a third of Merrill’s stake and when Merrill fell on hard times in the crash of 2008, he bought back the remaining 20 percent. That gave him 92 percent of the company’s stock and set its value—at that moment—at about $20 billion.

She will always be a white girl who acted black. And try as she might—and she is trying, mightily—to have us forget the athletic exploits and superstardom of Bruce, Caitlyn isn’t ever going to be just Caitlyn. She’ll always be Formerly Bruce. That’s the price she pays for Bruce’s fame. There isn’t, in the end, much you can really do about your true self. That fleeting glimpse we get in the mirror or in a candid shot on Facebook, the one that looks too fat or old or white or male, the one that makes us say, “That isn’t me! That can’t be me!”—well, it is. It’s you. It’s me. It’s us. And though we wish it were not so, there is no app for that. Adventures in National Socialism Notes from a weekend with Bernie ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES BY KEVIN D.

Tests by Bloomberg showed that Kraft Parmesan contained almost 4 percent cellulose, a plant-derived polymer mainly used to make paper and paperboard. Other brands had cellulose content as high as 7.8 percent.

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were staunch advocates of arming the government of Ukraine in their fight with Russian separatists and Putin. During the Republican National Convention, the party platform committee proposed language to the effect that Ukraine needed U.S. weapons and NATO support to defend itself, in support of a long-held Republican position. Carter Page, now on the Trump campaign team, used to work in the Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office, has personal investments in Gazprom, a Russian state oil conglomerate. He told Bloomberg that his investments have been hurt by the sanctions policy against Russia over Ukraine.39 He has characterized the U.S. policy toward Russia as chattel slavery.

brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against Cioffi and Tannin sought to prove that the two men had knowingly deceived their investors, overlooking the possibility that they simply had no idea what they were doing, and failed to grasp the real risk of a triple-A-rated subprime-backed CDO. The case was weak, and turned on a couple of e-mails obviously ripped from context. A member of the jury that voted to acquit the Bear Stearns subprime bond traders told Bloomberg News afterward not only that she thought they were innocent as charged but that she would happily

When President Obama addressed the country on January 5, 2016, about his latest push for gun control, Bloomberg-funded research provided the “facts” that Obama cited: •​“Congress actually voted to make it harder for public health experts to conduct research into gun violence; made it harder to collect data and facts and develop strategies to reduce gun violence.” •​“After Connecticut passed a law requiring background checks and gun safety courses, gun deaths decreased by 40%. Forty percent.” •​“Since Missouri repealed a law requiring comprehensive background checks and purchase permits, gun deaths have increased to almost 50% higher than the national average.” •​“A violent felon can buy the exact same weapon over the internet with no background check, no questions asked. A recent study found that about 1-in-30 people looking to buy guns on one website had criminal records—one out of 30 had a criminal record. We’re talking about individuals convicted of serious crimes—aggravated assault, domestic violence, robbery, illegal gun possession. People with lengthy criminal histories buying deadly weapons all too easily.

But Amazon is not alone in its avoidance of taxes. Bloomberg Businessweek reports, “The tactics of Google and Facebook depend on ‘transfer pricing,’ paper transactions among corporate subsidiaries that allow for allocating income to tax havens while attributing expenses to higher-tax countries. Such income shifting costs the U.S. government as much as $60 billion in annual revenue, according to Kimberly A. Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.” At a time when both local and federal governments are putting off needed infrastructure improvements because of tax revenue shortfalls, the tax avoidance schemes of our richest technology companies are partially to blame.

A good salesman knows you better than you know yourself. If you are Chinese, they will sell you yield. If you’re European, they will stroke your sense of superiority. If you’re an ambitious manager of an American pension fund, sitting on piles of money but bound by rules and regulations, they will find a kosher way for you to become the big swinging dick you always knew you were. And if you are an American hedge fund — a serious fund, not two guys and a Bloomberg — a smart salesman cuts the bullshit and both of you reach an understanding.

In October 2010 a Bloomberg reporter explained how Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the previous three years through transfer pricing games known by names such as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich,” ending up with an overseas tax rate of 2.4 percent. The problem is getting worse. Microsoft’s tax bill has been falling sharply, for similar reasons. Cisco is at it. They are all at it. Transfer pricing alone costs the United States an estimated $60 billion a year—and that is just one form of the offshore tax game.

and Estate Management. We believe all of

By now, you should have enough material to design, develop, or just renew your own core values, mission, and vision statements. Start with your one thing and work from there. A good building is never built until the architect blends the dream with the details.

Most importantly, to successfully develop a serious business, you need a process, a practice, by which to obtain that information and, once obtained, a method with which to put that information to use in your business productively. —Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth

Of the 53 central banks tracked by Bloomberg, 19 have dropped their benchmark interest rates in the past three months. Low rates encourage consumers to borrow and spend, increasing domestic consumption. They also devalue currencies, making exports cheaper. That's good for the countries selling but hard on countries flooded with cheap products.

Hydraulic fracturing has been used safely in over a million wells, resulting in America’s rise as a global energy superpower, growth in energy investments, wages, and new jobs," added Mr. Milito in the statement. Environmental groups have countered that the isolated incidents of contamination confirm their fears about the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing. John Noël, of the group Clean Water Action, said in a statement that the report "smashes the myth that there can be oil and gas development without impacts to drinking water." Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the EPA study, "while limited, shows fracking can and has impacted drinking water sources in many different ways," according to the Beacon Journal. The EPA report acknowledges that the findings may be due to a lack of data collected, inaccessible information, a scarcity of long-term systematic and base-line studies, and other factors. Bloomberg reported that EPA couldn't come to terms with energy companies including Range Resources Corp. and Chesapeake Energy to conduct water tests near their wells before and after they were fracked, meaning if the agency did find instances of contamination, it was harder to prove that fracking was the cause. "These elements significantly limit EPA’s ability to determine the actual frequency of impacts," the agency said in a fact sheet released with the report.

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase. The rapid increase in college

Clip This Article on Location 1397 | Added on Monday, September 1, 2014 4:10:39 PM REVIEW & OUTLOOK An $8.3 Billion Rebuke to the FDA Roche buys a drug approved in Europe but not in America. 359 words Amid this summer's M&A fever, Roche's agreement Monday to buy the San Francisco biotech InterMune deserves special notice. The tie-up is an $8.3 billion guided missile into the fortified bunker that is the Food and Drug Administration. InterMune has never turned a profit in 16 years of existence and other than its clinical expertise the company holds a single asset: an idea for treating a lethal lung disorder called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis with no known cause, cure or approved therapy—at least in the U.S. An InterMune drug called pirfenidone that slows the progression of irreversible lung scarring is on the market in Europe, Japan, Canada and even China. Bloomberg News But the FDA refused to approve pirfenidone in 2010, despite the 40,000 Americans who are killed annually by lung fibrosis and a positive recommendation from its outside scientific advisory committee. The agency brass claimed the evidence was statistically unsatisfactory, when one clinical trial was inconclusive but another showed strong benefits such as improved lung function. The results of the third trial the FDA ordered were reported earlier this year and confirmed that pirfenidone is even more of a treatment advance than it seemed in 2010, and may prolong life. The agency is expected, finally, to approve the medicine in November. Roche is paying a 38% premium over Friday's closing share price, and 63% over trading before the news of InterMune's corporate suitors broke a few weeks ago. The deal is a big vote of confidence in pirfenidone, not least because a rival lung fibrosis drug is awaiting U.S. approval. Then again, maybe that drug's maker, the German pharmaceutical consortium Boehringer Ingelheim, will have the same FDA experience as InterMune. The Roche deal is a tacit reprimand to the FDA's unscientific and uncompassionate—and wrong—2010 defenestration. Amid medical ambiguity about effectiveness, the humane option is to allow a drug to come to patients and follow on with more research, in particular for a drug with few side effects. Pulmonary fibrosis is a protracted death sentence of three to five years. The FDA denied tens of thousands of dying people better and possibly longer lives in the time they had left. ==========

NEW YORK Climate change is likely to exact enormous costs on U.S. regional economies in the form of lost property, reduced industrial output and more deaths, according to a report backed by three men with vast business experience. The report, released Tuesday, is designed to persuade businesses to factor in the cost of climate change in their long-term decisions and to push for reductions in emissions blamed for heating the planet. It was commissioned by the Risky Business Project, which describes itself as nonpartisan and is chaired by former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Thomas F. Steyer, a former Bay Area hedge fund manager.