During his many past engagements with students, Gabelli has told them that he likes to hire candidates with a Ph.D.—meaning “poor, hungry and driven,” which he proudly claims as being part of his own background growing up in the Bronx. But this time, he referred to Ph.D.s as being “passionate, hungry, and driven.” To illustrate this point, he cited the story of a Gabelli School student from China who took the initiative to travel to Connecticut where Gabelli was meeting with clients at a function.
“He came to Greenwich where we were having a meeting for our clients, and asked for a job—and I said, ‘You are exactly what we want: passionate, hungry and driven.’ And we hired him on the spot.”
He added that this particular student understood one of his oft-repeated mantras. “If you don’t ask, you don’t get,” he said, referring to what he calls his “11th Commandment.”
Gabelli learned early on that hard work and perseverance pay off. He went from working as a caddy at a local golf course to investing in stocks from the age of 13 to graduating from Fordham and earning an MBA from Columbia University Business School in 1967—as well as being enrolled in (but never attending) the Ph.D. program at NYU.
After a career of almost 10 years on Wall Street as a sell-side analyst, Gabelli launched his own firm in 1977, GAMCO Investors, which now manages more than $30 billion in assets.
Obstacles Can Yield Opportunities
During his presentation to the Class of 2026, Gabelli hit on several investment “I” buzzwords, including inflation, interest rates, infections, invasions, infrastructure, and incomplete energy policies. While he acknowledged some level of international turmoil, he assured students that current global economic challenges would give way to major opportunities over the next 10 years.
During the Q&A segment that followed, students persisted in voicing their concern about international affairs and market volatility. One asked about the looming European recession, to which Gabelli responded, “Stop worrying about recession. You have recessions every three or four years, so what?”
He did acknowledge that countries such as Germany are facing a rough winter due to Russia cutting energy supplies, but he also focused on potential positive responses and results.
“The good news about high energy prices in the United States and Germany is simple: They’ll come up with an accelerated way to make renewables,” he said. “They’ll come up with [innovations in]wind, solar, fiber, and battery storage support. They’ll accelerate that.”
Remaining Current and Focused
Gabelli noted that ultimately, the concerns of the past have been met with a “massive increase in innovation” and that students should seek out opportunities through research.
“The topics in 1965, 1985, 2005, aren’t going to be the same as in 2025, 2045,” he said. “You are going to have the best time over the next 20 years with the world of the digital revolution.”
He also stressed the importance of working hard.
“Work from five to nine when everyone works nine to five and just read everything that you can about anything that you do, whether it’s investment banking, sales, marketing, or product innovation,” he recommended.
Toward the end of the program, one student revisited the concept of the 11th commandment. “You said the 11th commandment is ‘if you don’t ask you don’t get,’” he stated.
“Yes. You don’t get it if you don’t ask,” responded Gabelli.
“So, someone has to ask,” the student replied, “do you think I can come work for you three years after I graduate?”
“Ah, see you asked the wrong way,” Gabelli answered. “How about, ‘I would like to learn the disciplines of your firm and serving customers. And I’d like to join you tomorrow,’ not in three years. You’re going to change your mind. You’re going to get rich in between. Why not tomorrow?”
“Do I have a chance to rephrase my question?” the student asked.
“Yes! That’s a smart guy, instant thinking,” Gabelli responded. “You know how to reach me.”
]]>Roddy Boyd and Bernice Yeung are using new models to keep hard-hitting investigative reporting alive in the “fake news” era—bringing to light shady business practices contributing to the opioid crisis, and amplifying the voices of those largely overlooked by the #MeToo movement
Seven years ago, Roddy Boyd was attending a journalism conference when he came to a startling realization. He’d already had a long career exposing financial companies’ chicanery for the likes of the New York Post and Fortune before he was laid off after the financial crash of 2008. And he was well into writing his first book, an exposé of corporate insurance giant AIG. As he looked around at the conference, however, he realized that many of his colleagues had been laid off or taken buyouts from newspapers that had cratered in the past decade.
“All my peers from 15 years of reporting had gone,” he says, “and no one was doing business stuff.” Instead, the room was filled with reporters from nonprofits, including venerable outfits such as the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and upstarts like ProPublica. Sensing the winds, Boyd decided to start his own nonprofit focusing on financial investigations: the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation, or SIRF, a reference to the surf culture in his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina.
“I thought, ‘I’ll put on my Brooks Brothers suit and go to the Ford Foundation, and they’d give me money,’” he says. It didn’t quite work out that way. Still, Boyd persisted as SIRF’s sole journalist, peeling the tops off hedge funds and pharmaceutical firms to reveal rotten layers underneath. In the past six years, he has exposed frauds, scams, and lies that regulators have been unable or unwilling to uncover, and SIRF’s coverage has played a role in putting upward of 20 people in jail. “I personally don’t want to live in a world where corporations have only modest fear of government intervention,” he says. “Someone’s got to stand in the gap.”
Even as journalism has struggled in the past 20 years, investigative reporting has managed to survive, even thrive, reborn in new models that have reinvigorated its function as a watchdog on democracy. Oftentimes that means ferreting out stories the daily newspapers and TV news programs miss. That’s what CIR reporter Bernice Yeung has done in tackling harrowing stories of sexual violence against immigrants, years before the #MeToo movement made sexual assault mainstream news. First appearing in a pair of documentaries for PBS Frontline, her reporting has grown into a book, In a Day’s Work, published last March.
Boyd and Yeung use different skills, with Boyd performing a deep dive into complicated financial documents and Yeung patiently interviewing subjects in difficult situations, but both have shone a light in dark corners.
“When you hit that sweet spot of strong edited reporting with a strong human story,” Yeung says, “you show people why they should care about an issue—and how we should rethink things that are doing people harm.”
Two Worlds on Wall Street
Boyd grew up in Westchester County, where his father was a hedge-fund manager. He always wanted to be a journalist. At Fordham, he wrote for the paper, an alternative weekly that saw itself as a campus watchdog. He recalls how he and his fellow reporters investigated crime on campus. They assumed most of the crime would be coming from off campus; when they looked at the data, however, they realized that 80 percent was student-on-student crime. “It was a really powerful moment to me; you could walk into something with a totally fixed preconception, but then the data shows you things that will change your view,” he says.
That combination of targeting hard issues and supporting them with data would come to define Boyd’s career as a reporter—but first, he says, “life threw me a curveball.”
After college, his girlfriend (now wife) Laura Ann Caprioglio, FCRH ’90, became pregnant. In order to support his new family, Boyd took a job on Wall Street, working at his father’s hedge fund for eight years. In retrospect, the experience was invaluable for a future financial reporter. “I met a lot of CEOs and CFOs, and with a couple of drinks in them, what they said was very different than what they said on the conference calls,” he says. He got the sense there were two worlds on Wall Street—one generating incredible wealth and prosperity through the free market, the other hurting real people through instances of fraud and greed.
Boyd became committed to exposing that world, writing first for the now-defunct New York Sun. He dug into the financial documents of companies to find out what they weren’t saying in public. “You really get a hell of a thrill when you’ve got a conference call transcript in your left hand assuring you all is well, and you’ve got an exhibit from a buried state lawsuit in your other hand where they are clearly doing the precise mathematical opposite,” he says.
While working at the Sun in 2004, Boyd began investigating insurance giant AIG. When the financial crisis occurred a few years later, he saw the company’s habit of insuring banks without hedging its investments as a perfect microcosm for everything wrong with Wall Street. “The world frigging changed on its axis, and AIG was ground zero for all of it,” he says. “To use a phrase, ‘All of the devils were there.’”
After Fortune laid him off in 2009, he turned his reporting into a book, Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG’s Corporate Suicide, published in 2011. By this point, Boyd and his family had moved to North Carolina, and he had started a blog that eventually grew into SIRF. One of his first targets was Anthony Davian, a hedge-fund manager who was siphoning off thousands of dollars into his own pockets. He ultimately pleaded guilty to 14 counts of fraud and money laundering, and was sentenced to 57 months in prison. In raving about Boyd’s work, the Columbia Journalism Review commented that “this kind of story is enough of a high-wire act when you’ve got a big media corporation and its well-paid legal team behind you. It’s something else when you don’t have that.” But Boyd, the magazine said, “had the reporting nailed down.”
Exposing Pharmaceutical Fraud
More recently, Boyd has turned his attention to the pharmaceutical industry. For one story, he spent countless hours investigating Insys, a drug company producing a late-stage cancer drug called Subsys that led to some complications, including several deaths. Boyd pored over legal and financial filings to reveal a clear pattern in which Subsys was being prescribed by doctors for all kinds of ailments it was never intended to treat, in exchange for cash bribes from the company. “These products were being sold fraudulently and abusively,” he says, “and they were making many more corpses than they were helping people.”
Boyd says he drove himself into debt traveling around the country to talk with patients and their families, but the stories he heard kept him going. “Thousands of people were overdosing on this stuff, and it wasn’t being reported. They were selling something a hundred times more powerful than battlefield morphine and talking about it like it was a hamburger from Hardee’s. I had total moral outrage and conviction that this company was worse than the Mafia.”
When Boyd’s series came out in 2015, the company was rocked by the allegations. Multiple doctors went to jail for their participation in the kickback scheme, and the top executives were arrested.
Over the past five years, Boyd gradually built up his nonprofit through grants of $100,000 to $150,000 a year. This past year, he saw a huge jump to more than $600,000, driven by several large contributions from financial executives, with more than half of that funding coming from Wall Street short-seller Marc Cohodes. His first goal after receiving that money will be to turn his eye back on the financial markets. “I don’t want there to be any suggestion I am getting paid off,” he says, and besides, “there are some damn interesting stories that are largely untold.”
Rape in the Fields
At the time that Bernice Yeung began reporting about rape and sexual harassment in the fields of California, that story was largely untold as well. The story began as a tip from a University of California, Berkeley, student who was doing a summer internship at CIR and had heard about a farmworker who had been forced by her supervisor to have sex with him for years as a condition of keeping her job. That led Yeung and her colleagues to ask a classic journalist’s question: “Was this an isolated incident, or is this part of a larger phenomenon?”
It was a difficult question to answer. After all, Yeung and her fellow reporters couldn’t just go into the fields and start interviewing people. Even if they could find women and men who had experienced sexual abuse, they were likely to be hesitant to talk with strangers. “People don’t want to talk to journalists about this for the same reason they don’t want to report it,” Yeung says. “Shame, self-blame, fear of not being believed. Then you add to that the challenges of immigrant status and poverty.”
Yeung and her colleagues started with a few cases that, against the odds, had been reported to the courts, where documents could help fill in the gaps and offer some corroboration for details. In talking with the women (and a few men), they still had to overcome the barriers to discussing such a taboo subject; oftentimes, they let women choose where they wanted to do the interviews, or talk off the record until they were comfortable. Some interviews led to others, revealing hundreds of cases in which women were raped and abused with impunity by supervisors in the fields. Even when women came forward to report years of abuse, their attackers were rarely prosecuted, and labor contractors who employed them rarely punished.
In talking with subjects, Yeung drew upon the training she’d received at Fordham. She had grown up in San Jose, California, the daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong who came to work in Silicon Valley. She originally thought she might be a music journalist, but that all changed when as an undergrad at Northwestern she discovered the Innocence Project, which works to free wrongly convicted inmates. “That was a complete game changer for me,” she says. She began doing investigative reporting, moving back to the Bay Area to work at SF Weekly. Even as she wrote about tobacco companies and school funding, she felt she needed a stronger grounding in the topics she was covering.
While reporting on criminal justice issues, she spoke with Fordham sociology professor Jeanne Flavin, Ph.D., and began considering grad school. “It just seemed to fit,” she says. At Fordham, Flavin became her adviser for her thesis, which examined procedural justice, a movement to treat citizens with dignity and respect in the Bronx criminal court. Her sociology training helped her become a better interviewer, she says, by showing her how to think critically about the power dynamics between investigative reporters and vulnerable subjects. “It gave me the vocabulary to think through the thorny ethical issues about how we get informed consent.”
When the documentary Rape in the Fields finally aired in June 2013, it didn’t have an immediate effect. “It was a little of that deafening silence,” Yeung says. At screenings of the film held in farmworker communities, however, she was amazed to see how personally affected many in the audience became. “Women would get up and talk about how they had experienced something similar, and were sharing it publicly for the first time,” she says. As attention built, calls grew to pass legislation to deal with the issue. Finally, in September 2014, California passed a law to require sexual harassment training of all labor contractors, with provisions to revoke the license of contractors who hired supervisors who sexually harassed their workers. “That’s the gold standard,” Yeung says, “when you can affect policy.”
Seizing the MeToo# Moment
Even after that success, Yeung doggedly continued her reporting on sexual violence. When Rape in the Fields aired, she was contacted by an editor from the New Press about the possibility of turning the subject into a book; by that time, Yeung was already on to a new topic, examining sexual abuse among janitorial workers in offices on the night shift. She helped to produce the documentary Rape on the Night Shift while gathering material for the book, In a Day’s Work.
“I think the book was already out of my hands before Weinstein,” she says, referring to the sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein that ignited the #MeToo movement, exposing sexual transgressions by powerful men in media, politics, and the arts. “#MeToo has created this opening, and is not going away,” she says. “I hope that we get to the point where we are not focused purely on reporting after the fact but thinking more about the mechanisms we can put in place to prevent this.”
In a Day’s Work is refreshing in not only focusing on the problem but also weaving in stories of activists and policymakers working to address it. “Investigative journalism can be heavy and, frankly, depressing,” she says. “I wanted to not leave people feeling like they are powerless in the end.”
Yeung is heartened by the resurgence of interest in investigative reporting. She sees a hybrid model of newspapers partnering with nonprofits to pull off complicated, important stories. “I think it is especially important at this moment in time when things seem very polarized and there are all these claims of ‘fake news,’” she says. “The power of investigative reporting is in really digging into a topic, but also providing the necessary context historically, socially, and culturally so we can come away with a better understanding in the end.”
—Michael Blanding is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.
]]>In fact, in her role as chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab, clarifying seemingly impenetrable financial topics for the average person is a big part of her day.
“Too often with people who are pundits, it seems that their number one goal is to sound like the smartest girl or guy in the room, and more often than not they’re going to turn people off,” she says.
At Schwab, Sonders keeps a lot of plates spinning, providing market and economic analysis as well as spearheading investor education initiatives. She often shares her views as an expert guest on a range of television programs on CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg TV and Radio, and CNN, to name a few.
“We’re all time constrained, and there is an appreciation for [experts] to get to the point and to take complex [financial] topics and explain them in a way that’s easier to understand,” she says.
She maintains that investing is about more than just facts and figures, a widely held false impression that turns many people off before they even get started.
“I don’t use math to any significant degree in anything that I do on a day-to-day basis,” she says, emphasizing that strategy and analysis often are more at play. “There is this misperception [that this business] is all about stats and accounting.”
A Process, Not a Gamble
When it comes to investing, the 1990 Gabelli School of Business MBA graduate wants people to know that following the hot tip of the moment (or the trending topic on Twitter) is hardly wise.
In fact, there’s one question she’s asked often that she hates: Should investors “get in” or “get out” of the market right now?
“I have a love-hate relationship with that question,” she says. “I hate it because it’s a ridiculous question, but I love it because it gives me an opportunity to pontificate on why it’s a ridiculous question.
“Neither get in nor get out is an investing strategy,” she says. “That’s simply gambling on a moment in time. Investing should never be about a moment in time, it should always be about a process over time.”
And one-size-fits-all advice just doesn’t cut it in her view.
“I hate the cookie-cutter approach,” says Sonders, who adds that a 24-year-old with an appetite for risk warrants a far different investing strategy than a 70-year-old retiree.
Moving Beyond Gordon Gekko
In addition to slicing through what she calls a cacophony of financial advice due to social media and a 24-hour news cycle, Sonders is also adamant about clearing up some misperceptions about Wall Street—and the role that women can play there.
“One of the biggest shames of the aftermath of the financial crisis is how big of a black eye the industry has gotten,” Sonders says.
Wall Street and the broader financial services space are not brimming with Gordon Gekko-type clones, she says, referring to the fictional corporate raider who argued that “greed … is good.” She says that such a view discounts what a positive impact the industry has on so many individuals’ lives, and it overlooks opportunities that exist there for those who don’t fit that stereotype. “[Some people] may not understand what the broader industry does for investors, and for companies and our economy,” she says.
And that brings her to another myth about financial services: that it’s solely a boys’ club.
Women in Finance—a Bull Market
Sonders posits that the boys’-club culture likely dates back to a time when the typical path to Wall Street was through training programs set up by wire houses, which eventually funneled young professionals onto trading floors.
“There’s no question that’s kind of the classic boys’ network,” she says. “That sense of [women] feeling out of place [in the industry] might have been greater in that era. That’s not the path I took. I had a very different set of experiences.”
In addition to working with many women at the start of her career—she began at the Zweig/Avatar Group before moving in 1999 to U.S. Trust, which was acquired by Schwab a year later—she says the firms she worked for believed in promoting from within and rewarding workers based on their merit, not their gender.
“My only two jobs have been at firms that have been blind to gender,” she says.
Today, she emphasizes that there are so many “different and unique opportunities [for women] to start out in the business,” with the wealth management and private client spaces being particularly ripe for opportunity.
“We crossed the chasm where more than half the wealth in the U.S. is controlled by women,” she says. “It’s an awesome time for women,” she adds.
Looking back at her career, Sonders has no regrets.
“I have kind of a creed or motto that I think about in my life,” she says. “When I’m asked, what would you change? In general, my response is I wouldn’t change a thing. … The slightest little change would have put [me] on a completely different path.”
—Kelsey Butler, FCLC ’10
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“It is kind of cool,” he said, noting that the physical move of gold bars represents a tiny fraction of the trillions in currency that move through the Federal Reserve every single day.
Analyzing how those trillions move falls to economists like Bennett, who, after spending more than 20 years at the reserve, rose through the ranks to become senior vice president. He eventually left the reserve to become chief economist at the New York Stock Exchange from 2001 to 2008.
With a stock market career bookended by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 financial crisis, it’s not surprising that Bennett takes a cool analytic approach to contemporary issues facing the economy and the markets, one which manifests itself in a course he teaches titled “Contemporary Issues in Finance, Managerial Economics, and Macroeconomics.”
Bennett does not diminish the human cost of terrorism or the economic downturn. But he points out that the markets continued to function and recover after 9/11 and again in 2008. He said that people often forget that the post-9/11 recession began with a tech bubble that burst well before the attacks.
“Clearly the markets preformed badly in the wake of the attacks but they came back pretty quick,” he said. “The New York Stock Exchange continued to function in the 1930s even after prices were very depressed and the U.S. economy was in the doghouse.”
He said that terrorism, such as the ongoing attacks by ISIS, probably would not affect the markets or the U.S. economy very much. He reiterated President Obama’s point of view, from his final State of the Union address, that the U.S. economy is the “strongest, most durable economy in the world.”
Wall Street Isn’t Main Street
Bennett was quick to note the distinction between the markets and the economy.
“The U.S. stock market is not as integrated with the U.S. economy as some imagine. There’s a trading dynamic on Wall Street that’s separate from what happens on Main Street. The market can go up and down, but it doesn’t mean the economy is going to go up and down,” he said.
Bennett’s views on the economy developed in two environments that he said were culturally distinct: the University of Chicago, where he got his undergraduate degree, and Princeton University, where he earned his doctoral degree.
“I did have a sense that Chicago was idiosyncratic in terms of its view especially when it comes to macroeconomics; it had a monetarist ideology influenced by Milton Friedman. Princeton was in a Keynesian tradition. The way macroeconomics was taught was completely different in the two places.”
He said that Chicago “did real world” analysis whereas Princeton was heavy on economic models, equations and the language of math. A Princeton-educated economist usually went into academia—but not Bennett.
“I wanted to go do something that applied to the real world, in New York,” he said.
During his 20-year career at the Federal Reserve, he played many roles at the bank, with research being one component. He also supervised transactions between the big banks. And he advised the president of the New York Federal Reserve who in his role as vice chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) influences monitory policy, such as interest rates.
“It was gratifying to brief the (NY Fed) president before every FOMC meeting and say this is important and here’s some research you have to keep in mind,” he said.
Macroeconomics and a Stabilized Economy
Macroeconomics, he said, is essentially “thinking about the stability of the economy.”
“It is not something that’s intellectually fun. It’s a practical issue in modern societies: trying to understand what to do if there is a recession or what kinds of things can be done to avoid periods of inflation.”
Though, he admitted, economists aren’t always successful.
“The reason all these fancy models don’t work so well is because there’s a randomness to human endeavors you really can’t forecast,” he said. “Still, I don’t think it’s just an accident that the U.S. economy has been stable.”
He pointed to the fact that, since the Great Depression, the field of economics has grown tremendously in this country. Of the 75 individuals who have received the Nobel Prize in economics, 53 were from the United States.
“These are things that we (Americans) have actually gotten kind of good at,” he said.
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