The Library within the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue in Manhattan is a quiet, little-known place where you might meet someone for lunch in secret. Maria Bartiromo, who lives nearby, sometimes goes there, and she arrived looking lovely and earnest, and not as tall as she seems to be on TV. She’s five feet five, she told me. “But on television, everyone is the same height.” (They adjust the chairs.)
Financial meltdowns and corporate scandals make this a golden age for business journalists, and the driven, smart Ms. Bartiromo is at the forefront of the action. “The Money Honey,” as the U.S. tabloids nicknamed her—or, as she’s been described in England, “the Sophia Loren of financial journalism”—is, of course, the formidable anchor of CNBC’s Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo, the host and managing editor of the nationally syndicated Wall Street Journal Report with Maria Bartiromo, and much else besides, including her stints midst the post-dawn, giggly yammering of Morning Joe.
She is the only financial expert in the land to have had a love song written about her by a punk-rocker. The late Joey Ramone’s lyric “I watch her every day / I watch her every night / She’s really out of sight” might lose a certain something without the music, but, in fact, he was an avid investor.
“He was very serious and informed about stocks,” she explained enthusiastically. “We were corresponding about the markets long before I realized he was Joey Ramone the performer. And then he told me, ‘Maria, I wrote a song about you.’ ”
She ordered a light lunch: chicken Cobb salad with dressing on the side. “Tap water will be fine, thanks.” (No bread.) She’s an unpretentious woman, raised in working-class Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. At 42, and married to an investment-firm C.E.O., she remains proudly close to her Italian-American roots. Her mother’s grandparents were born in Agrigento, Sicily. Her paternal grandfather was a bricklayer from just outside of Naples who built a restaurant in Brooklyn and named it Rex Manor, after the ship that brought him to America in 1919, The Rex. Maria’s father became its proprietor and chef. She had her first job there: the coat-check girl.
“I have two lasting images of my parents,” she recalled affectionately. “My dad cooking over a hot stove at the Rex with a bandanna around his head. And my mom working behind the glass counter as a teller at an O.T.B. in the city. They’re retired now, but they worked hard all their lives to raise a family.”
“You also work hard,” I suggested.
“And whenever I complain about it, my mother says, ‘Oh, Maria. You’re not chopping wood.’ ”
She laughed lightly. She studied economics and journalism at New York University and worked at the Off-Track Betting place. “It’s probably subconscious, but the O.T.B.’s urgent pace and dealing with money all day could have planted the seed for wanting to report from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.”
She became the first woman in history to do so. “I had two things going against me. I was a reporter with a camera and I was a woman,” she said of her early days reporting live from the bedlam of the testosterone-fueled boys’ club on the exchange floor. “One day, I was standing by the General Electric post and there were maybe 25 guys within earshot when one of them who was about three times my age said, ‘Run along, little girl, and don’t come here again.’ I had knots in my stomach.”
“What did you do?”
“I looked at him and said, ‘Don’t talk to me that way’—and I ran along! But I came back! And I kept coming back. And 20 years later, I’m still there.”
‘You love what you do?”
“If I am not loving what I do, then what’s the point?”
“Which of these three C.E.O.’s do you think will be the first to resign,” I asked provocatively, “Hayward of BP, Toyoda of Toyota, or Blankfein of Goldman Sachs?”
“If I had to guess,” she replied after careful thought, “it would be Hayward of BP.”
“Do you think all three should resign?”
“Not necessarily. But I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to act as judge and jury.”
“Have you heard the rumor that within a year Henry Paulson will return to Goldman Sachs?”
“No,” she said evenly. “I’d find that extraordinary.”
Why, I asked her next, is it O.K. for the government to regulate salary caps on Wall Street when nobody objects to Oprah Winfrey earning $315 million last year, Tyler Perry $125 million, and Roger Federer a mere $43 million?
“Exactly,” she replied. “It’s the American Dream to achieve great success, and I don’t think the government should be regulating anyone’s salaries—including those on Wall Street. But I believe pay should be tied to performance. It’s mind-boggling to see some fat cat walking away with hundreds of millions in bonuses after they’ve taken their company into the ground. That’s wrong. They should be held accountable.”
A staggering 400 government agencies oversaw A.I.G., yet they all missed what was going on. (And A.I.G. was bailed out for $182 billion.) If government can’t regulate Wall Street, I asked, who can?
“I’m a free-market capitalist who would like to think that the market can correct itself. Unfortunately, the structures we have in place dropped the ball. The boards of directors were asleep at the wheel. So were the regulators. I believe that so-called independent boards of directors should be held accountable for their firms, too. Wall Street today faces the wrath of their shareholders and the scorn of the public. There’s got to be substantial change from within to regain public trust.”
But we are no longer surprised by scandals and corruption on Wall Street, while the BP catastrophe could be taken as a dark metaphor of polluted corporate life and greed. “Will the public ever trust Wall Street again?”
“I believe that trust is everything for the markets and for the economy—everything,” she replied firmly. “Andrew Cuomo said something to me once, and I think it rings true. ‘People will go back in the water when they know the shark is dead.’ ”
She offered to pay for our lunch, and then to split the bill, and I said that wouldn’t be right. And so Maria Bartiromo hurried off to her studio at CNBC, saying almost too calmly, “I am going to have to excuse myself, John. Because I’m live in 45 minutes.”
Award-winning journalist John Heilpern is the author of Conference of the Birds: The Story of Peter Brook in Africa.
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