Befitting their five-decades-long friendship—the men carpooled together from the Bronx to Wall Street in the 1970s—the conversation had the feel of an informal chat, with plenty of joking and each man finishing the other’s sentences.

Do What You Love, Love What You Do

Cooperman, a former general partner of Goldman Sachs and manager of the hedge fund Omega Advisors, credited his success to hard work, luck, and intuition. The first, he said, is not to be underestimated; even though he’s 76, he still gets to his desk at 6:40 a.m. and goes to bed at 11 p.m. He does this even though he stopped investing client money last year and transformed Omega into a family investment office.

That kind of dedication is really only possible if you love your work, Cooperman told the crowd in the packed McNally Amphitheatre at the Lincoln Center campus.

“If you want to go with the flow today, you go into artificial intelligence, asset management, biotechnology. I’m the antithesis of that; I’m a broken-down stock picker. But I maintain that the only way to be successful is to do what you love, and love what you do. I love what I do,” he said.

Signs of Both Hope and Concern for the Economy

When it comes to the current state of the economy, Cooperman recalled investor Sir John Marks Templeton’s description of the market cycle.

“He said, bull markets are born on pessimism; we had that in ’08 and ’09. They grow on skepticism; we had that in ’10 and ’11. They mature on optimism, which you have now, and they die on euphoria. I don’t see many signs of euphoria right now,” he said.

That said, he said there are some things that worry him. Both he and Gabelli disapproved of the trade war currently being waged between China and the United States, for instance.

“Nobody wins with tariffs. The world loses, and hopefully there will be a resolution, which I think is what the market is expecting,” Cooperman said.

“The thing that should worry all of us around here is the economy is nearly fully employed, but the deficit is going up. In the fourth quarter last year, the economy abruptly slowed because of a very small increase in interest rates. That just tells you there’s too much debt in the system. I worry about the debt.”

The Merits of Recycling Wealth

The two touched on philanthropy as well. Gabelli, chairman and CEO of GAMCO Investors, Inc., and a major Fordham donor for whom the Gabelli School is named, asked Cooperman why he’d signed on to Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge to give away at least 50 percent of his wealth.

Cooperman replied that you can use money to buy things that bring you pleasure, such as art, homes and airplanes, or you can give it to your children or to the government. None of those appeal to him, he said, because material possessions only bring aggravation and giving excessive amounts of money to children robs of them of their sense of self-achievement.

“The fourth thing you can do with money is recycle it back to society, and that’s what I’ve chosen to do. I’m giving back to organizations that made a difference to me and my family in my lifetime,” he said.

“The idea is not original, but it is noble. In 1900, Andrew Carnegie said, ‘You die rich, you die disgraced.’”

Asked for their thoughts on the future of capitalism, Gabelli acknowledged that the system has some problems, but asserted that the meritocracy and rule of law that underpin it in the United States make up for its shortcomings. There are some things, however, that need to be addressed sooner rather than later.

“We have to deal with student loans. This is a real problem, and it’s got to be changed. We have $1.4 trillion in student loans, and we’ve got to solve that. Simple things, like letting you do pre-tax dollars to pay, and the schools have to be more practical about certain things,” he said.

The event was presented by Fordham’s Gabelli Center for Global Security Analysis.

Marks asserts that distinguishing yourself takes patience, discipline, and psychological know-how. On Oct. 3, he addressed a packed McNally Auditorium at a Gabelli School of Business event moderated by Erik Schatzker, the host of Bloomberg Television’s Inside Track.

The event was presented by the Gabelli Center for Global Security Analysis and the Museum of American Finance.

Read the full story on Gabelli Connect.

“The two civilizations,” as Blinder termed them during a one-hour talk and discussion at McNally Auditorium on Sept. 17, “don’t get along very well.”

Speaking to an audience of more than 150 Gabelli School of Business students and alumni, as well as members of the Alternative Investment Roundtable and the Fixed Income Analysts Society, Blinder outlined the reasons for the fissure and suggested a few corrective measures.

Although Blinder was clear at the talk’s outset to which camp he belonged, saying that “politicians use economics in the same way that a drunk uses a lamppost, as a source of support not as a source of illumination,” he said each side could learn something from the other.

While economists rely on historical data, dispassionate analysis, and a long view to maximize society’s well-being, politicians have no such compulsions, much less obligations. Yet politicians are the ones who by and large create economic policy, most of it through tax and trade legislation and treaties, to cite two policy cornerstones which Blinder emphasized during his talk. And politicians are further enabled by a voting public that has little knowledge or patience for economic theory or policy, Blinder said.

“The main selection principle for a policy, if the selection is being done by an economist, is what is good. … In politics, it’s more typically what sounds good,” he said. “If you’re a politician, your success criteria is obvious: It’s how you do on election day.”

Blinder, the author of the recently published book Advice and Dissent: Why America Suffers When Economics and Politics Collide, tailored his remarks to his audience, suggesting a number of ways economists must engage both the public and politicians to counter what he called the “false beliefs” preached by politicians, particularly with regard to trade and tax legislation.

To achieve that, Blinder said economists must master what he called a “four-ring circus” comprising substance, politics, message, and process if they are to succeed in pushing through sound economic policy.

The first ring, substance—whether regarding tax policy, regulatory policy, monetary policy, or trade policy—is the economist’s forte and needs no strengthening.

But grasping the nuances of the other three “rings” is essential, if nonetheless challenging given that most economists lack the necessary interest and assertiveness. Economists, he intimated, must conquer their dislike of politics as well as their disinterest of the field to make any inroads on the legislative front.

Economists must also overcome their reluctance—in some cases, their inability—to convey their message in terms accessible to the public. “Message is really important if you want to move the electorate,” he said. “And if you want to move the politicians, you have to move the electorate.”

Process, which links the other three categories, is also looked on with disdain by economists, much to the detriment of their policy arguments, Blinder said.

“So the upshot is that if you’re deficient in politics, message, and process, you’re going to have a hard time influencing policy even if you’re super, super, wiz-bang right about the substance of the policy,” he said.

The overriding challenge for economists is to convince the public and politicians of the solidity of their positions, Blinder said­—an imperative complicated by economic theory’s indisposition to the lifeblood of politics: compromise.

As such, Blinder, who writes a monthly column in The Wall Street Journal, sounded a note of caution.

“The notion that a bunch of economists like me can make an appreciable dent on the economic literacy or illiteracy of the population at large is fanciful,” he said at his talk’s conclusion. Still, he said, “I try.”

The event was presented by the Gabelli Center for Global Security Analysis, the Fixed Income Analyst Society, and the New York Alternative Investment Roundtable.

–Richard Khavkine

Not so for Warren Buffett. To the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, says the author Lawrence Cunningham, the more indispensable companies have names like Chuck Akre, Tom Gayner, Ingrid Hendershot, and Tom Russo.

Those four are among thousands of Berkshire investors who have helped sustain the culture of integrity and trust Buffett has cultivated at the hugely successful Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate he has led since 1970—and with which he will forever be linked.

During a University Club talk on April 23 sponsored by the Gabelli Center for Global Security Analysis and the Museum of American Finance, Cunningham suggested that the foundation of Berkshire’s success can be traced to characteristics associated with the root definition of company, derived from the Old French compaignon, meaning that person with whom one breaks bread.

“It’s a family, it’s a community, it’s a culture, it’s a group,” Cunningham, a professor at the George Washington University Law School and author of The Essays of Warren Buffett, said of Berkshire’s investor collective. “That’s the culture that Warren built.”

Cunningham’s new book, The Warren Buffett Shareholder, co-edited with his wife, Stephanie Cuba, is a compendium of essays in which 43 Berkshire shareholders,  including Cunningham, discuss how and to what effect Berkshire reflects Buffett’s unique corporate philosophy, and how that thinking helped build a singularly prosperous firm.

Much of that thinking is distilled at Berkshire’s renowned annual spring meeting of shareholders, which Cunningham in the book likens to “a pilgrimage of kindred spirits,” that draws upward of 40,000 people to Omaha.

Subtitled “Stories from inside the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting,” the book’s contributors suggest that Berkshire’s ethos can be traced to Buffett’s insights into leadership culture, namely that a decentralized, non-hierarchical corporate mindset, otherwise uncommon in American companies, engenders prosperity. That philosophy is built not on abstruse microeconomic theory, but on people.

“Mostly he’s found managers of high character and strong talent,” Cunningham explained. The result is trust, which allows decision-making within dozens of Berkshire’s subsidiaries, from See’s Candy to Geico to Fruit of the Loom, to be left to those most intimate with the asset.

“Autonomy actually promotes accountability,” Cunningham said.

That autonomy and permanence—Berkshire hasn’t sold a subsidiary in 40 years, Cunningham said—has over the years convinced shareholders that leanness and simplicity are the means to endure and to flourish.

“We think Berkshire shareholders love the economic returns—we certainly do—but they equally love these cultural aspects. And the two are closely related: Berkshire’s economic success owes a great deal to its very special culture and that very special culture owes a great deal to its shareholders, and so it’s a virtuous circle,” Cunningham said.

That culture replicates, he said. “Berkshire blood,” he noted, flows through investors’ collective veins.

But with Buffett approaching 90, and Berkshire’s vice chairman, Charles Munger, in his mid-90s, questions of succession are becoming more pronounced, Cunningham said.

Earlier this year, the Berkshire board elevated two Berkshire colleagues, Ajit Jain and Greg Abel, long thought as possible successors to Buffett, to vice chairmen. Despite being “excellent choices,” Cunningham said, both will have to cultivate important collaborators if Berkshire’s singular culture is to persist.

“They will need the kinds of shareholders that Buffett has attracted for decades,” Cunningham said of Jain and Abel. “Our thesis is that the Warren Buffett shareholder is as important to the future of Berkshire Hathaway as is whoever is named as Warren Buffett’s successor.”

A willingness and a desire to break and share bread, in other words, will be as vital as a stellar resume.

–Richard Khavkine

During periods like this, Brian C. Rogers, non-executive chairman of T. Rowe Price, said having a risk-sensitive yet optimistic outlook is important. 

“It’s a good time to be well-diversified and very cautious,” Rogers said at a talk organized by the Gabelli Center for Global Security Analysis on April 12.

During the recession of the 1970s, he said investing was less of a business and more of a craft.

“The firms were small,” said Rogers, who retired as chief investment officer of T. Rowe Price Group in 2017. “There was no CNBC. You learned everything you could from the Wall Street Journal or talking to companies and reading annual reports.”

A Barron’s Roundtable veteran, Rogers joined T. Rowe Price as a portfolio manager in 1982. For 30 years, he served as the firm’s portfolio manager of the U.S. Large-Cap Equity Income Strategy and the Equity Income Fund.

At the talk, he reflected on the evolution of the Baltimore-based investment management firm. He said back in the ’80s, T. Rowe Price employed about 250 people and invested about $10 billion dollars. Today, the firm has 7,000 employees in more than a dozen countries. It also invests about $1 trillion across a wide range of asset classes, including equity and fixed income, he said.

“We’re a very different company today and it’s a very different investment environment,” said Rogers.

While technology has led to improvements in the investment process, Rogers argued that it can also “impart a feeling of overconfidence and false precision” in finance.

“Correctly assessing book value per share has always been a big challenge,” he said.

Getting a Jump Start

One of Rogers’ first assignments at T. Rowe Price involved managing balanced funds for hospitals, small universities, and high-net-worth individuals. Though most young investment professionals gravitated toward emerging growth funds at the time, Rogers said working in balanced funds challenged him.

“Sometimes doing dirty work gives you a jump start even though it doesn’t feel like a great thing to do at the time,” he said.

Rogers believes getting on a path to investment success is a matter of looking at your leadership style, what you want to do, and how you want to work.

“There are some people who have an entrepreneurial edge and they really want to work for themselves, and there are other people who like to work in a big organization …that’s neither good or bad, it’s just whatever works [for you],” he said.

Rogers encouraged students who are interested in a career in investment to learn the basics of accounting, finance, and financial analysis. Rather than pursue short-term financial success or opportunities at a variety of firms throughout their careers, he advised aspiring investment professionals to seek a position at a reputable firm that provides opportunities for professional growth.

“In a theoretical world, if you work for a company and you like who you work with and they pay you really well, and you have a great opportunity to grow, you should never leave,” he said.

“Resist the temptation to just change [jobs]because those aren’t usually great decisions. But if you feel blocked and you get a great opportunity, then that’s a different thing.”

Established in 2013, the Gabelli Center for Global Security Analysis aims to support and promote investment analysis through a variety of programs designed to foster dialogue among scholars, practitioners, and students.