Search Results for: Bloomberg

The story of “the world’s most notorious weapons trafficker”:

The longer we sat in the small, musty room, the more the tempered side of Bout’s personality receded. I asked whether he felt any remorse. “I did nothing in my mind that qualifies as a crime,” he replied. “Sure, I was doing transportation of arms,” he said. “But it was occasionally. Three hundred and sixty days were normal shipments. For five days, I shipped arms and made a couple of hundred thousand dollars.” (Mirchev, by contrast, recalls a period of “almost daily flights” for UNITA.)

“Disarming Viktor Bout.” — Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker

See also: “Glock: America’s Gun.” — Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek, Jan. 14, 2011

Featured Longreader: Luke Hackney, writer/designer. See his story picks from Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Yorker, The Nation, plus more on his #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Author Danyel Smith. See her story picks from Bloomberg News, The Atlantic, Esquire, plus more on her longreads page.

Inside CEO Dick Costolo’s efforts to perfect the company’s revenue model and compete with Google and Facebook for ad dollars:

Twitter still makes money with licensing deals—Microsoft pays to get a real-time feed of tweets for its search engine, Bing. But Costolo firmly established the company’s primary identity as a communications tool that lets advertisers contribute content along with other users free of charge—and then pay extra to make their messages more prominent. The centerpiece of Twitter’s plans, what Costolo calls “the atomic unit of our ad strategy,” is the “promoted tweet,” a message from an advertiser that appears near the top of a user’s feed. Advertisers pay only when a user “engages” with the tweet—retweets it, say, or clicks on a link. The more people click on an ad, the more the ad appears. Twitter executives trumpet an engagement rate of 3 percent to 5 percent, compared with less than 0.5 percent for normal banner ads.

“Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn’t Die.” — Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek

See more #longreads about Twitter

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Sports Illustrated, Bloomberg Businessweek, Reuters, Popular Science, City Pages Minneapolis, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Jason Boog.

The Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane on banking, risk and how to bring social and financial equity back into the system:

Consider the effects of the too-big-to-fail problem on risk-taking incentives. If banks know they will be bailed out, those holding their debt will be less likely to price the risk of failure for themselves. Debtor discipline will therefore be weakest among those institutions where society would wish it to be strongest. This encourages them to grow larger still: the leverage cycle isn’t merely repeated, but amplified. The doom loop grows larger. The biggest banks effectively benefit from a disguised, and growing, state subsidy. By my estimate, for UK banks this subsidy amounts to tens of billions of pounds per year and has often stretched to hundreds of billions. Few UK government spending departments have budgets this big. For the global banks, the subsidy can reach a trillion dollars – about eight times the annual global development budget.

“The Doom Loop.” — Andrew Haldane, London Review of Books

See also: “Secret Fed Loans Helped Banks Net $13 Billion.” — Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun, Phil Kuntz, Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 27, 2011

Ex-president and CEO Michael Woodford says he tried to blow the whistle on fraudulent accounting related to $1.6 billion in transactions. He was then fired:

Woodford, 51, recounted how he had just returned from Hong Kong, having fled Tokyo after a board meeting in which Olympus Chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa had fired him. The cause for dismissal, according to Woodford: his insistence that Olympus officials come clean about a series of questionable purchases dating to 2006, totaling $1.6 billion, none of which had been adequately reported in the company’s consolidated financial statements. The deals had been approved by Kikukawa and the Olympus board, yet in several cases the parties receiving the sums were not even clearly identified in Olympus’s books. (At least one Japanese magazine had strongly hinted that the Yakuza were beneficiaries of some of these shady deals.) Woodford, frustrated by the board’s stonewalling, had hired the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct an independent audit of the suspicious transactions. For several weeks leading up to his dismissal, he had been calling the board to account for these transactions, and eventually demanded the board’s resignation. Instead, Woodford was purged. And now he was running for his life.

“The Story Behind the Olympus Scandal.” — Karl Taro Greenfeld, Bloomberg Businessweek

More from Taro Greenfeld

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Salon, The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, Nature, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Emily Keeler.

How one night at Rupert Murdoch’s London townhouse changed the course of the phone-hacking scandal:

Red wine in hand, Rupert Murdoch chatted with guests at his London townhouse on what would be one of the most important nights to the future of his company. Gathered for cocktails were Rupert’s son James, heir apparent to the family media empire; Rebekah Brooks, the chief­executive of News Corp.’s U.K. unit; and Chase Carey, the New York-based president and chief operating officer. Joining the executives were a pair of legal heavyweights: Joel Klein, former New York City schools chancellor, and Brendan Sullivan Jr., the well-connected Washington lawyer brought into the Murdoch fold at Klein’s request.

It was May 19, 2011. The senior Murdoch had flown in two days earlier for a whirlwind of meetings with his top London executives. He had called the dinner party to hash out once and for all how to handle the phone-hacking scandal that had been hanging over the company for months and was suddenly spinning out of control.

“Dinner at Rupert’s.” — Greg Farrell, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Hack Work.” — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, Aug. 1, 2011

An inside look at the operational challenges facing United and Continental as they merge—from the union negotiations to the choice of in-flight coffee:

On July 1 the new United introduced its new coffee. Fliers on the ‘legacy United’ fleet, accustomed to Starbucks, let out a collective yowl of protest. Pineau-Boddison had expected some resistance—Starbucks, after all, is a popular brand—but this was something else. Flight attendants reported a barrage of complaints. Pineau-Boddison received angry e-mails from customers, as did Smisek. The coffee, fliers complained, was watery.

The beverage committee launched an inquiry. The coffee itself, they discovered, was only part of the problem. Airplane coffee is made from small, premeasured ‘pillow packs’ that sit in a brew basket drawer at the top of the galley coffee machine. When the drawer is closed, boiling water flows through the pillow into the pot below. The old United brew baskets, the committee discovered, sit a quarter of an inch lower than Continental’s, leaving a space for water to leak around the pillow pack.

“Making the World’s Largest Airline Fly.” — Drake Bennett, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Ask the Pilot.” Patrick Smith, Salon, May 15, 2009