Noteworthy Quotes From Recent Business Stories

This week we’ll focus on several business news stories that earned extensive coverage in the media.  We’ll look at some soundbites and quotes and judge them for effectiveness.

Tarp or Trap?
The biggest story is Treasury’s decision to allow some banks to repay $68 billion in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) money.
Reuters coverage included getting reaction for a large number of investment counselors, brokers and market strategists.  Here is some of what the news service reported: “If you’re a bank you absolutely want to communicate to the marketplace you’re going to be repaying TARP funds because that’s something you’re going to brag about.”  Craig Peckham, equity trading strategist at Jefferies & Co.   This is a good soundbite because it creates a word picture — a bank bragging.  Personally, when I read it, I imagined the top-hatted gent in the cutaway and stripped pants from the Parker Brothers game, Monopoly, his chest puffed out and a dialog balloon over his head reading, “I’ve already paid back my TARP money! Have you?”

Less upbeat was this comment Reuters got from David Kotok, chief investment officer at Cumberland Advisors in New Jersey:  “We have constructed a new form of moral hazard and a new form of implied guarantee. Note that the last huge implied guarantee was extended to FannieMae and Freddie Mac and we know what eventually happened there. TARP is really a trap.” While rearranging the letter of TARP to form the word TRAP was clever and compelling, it would have been even stronger if Kotok had called attention to it:  “Instead of T-A-R-P, it should be spelled T-R-A-P.”  Why?  Because using it the way he did you had to be reading the quote to get the irony.  In a broadcast interview the vast majority of listeners would have missed it.

Bingo!

Microsoft relaunched its largely-ignored search engine with elegant new features and a new name.  Interestingly, more was made of the name in the media than was made of the features.  That name: Bing.  Microsoft clearly hoped that Bing could become a verb or noun — the way common usage has transformed Google. (To Google something is to search for links on Google, so to Bing something would be to search for links on Bing.) Interestingly, Bing already was both a noun and verb.  As a noun in British dialect it means either a heap or pile — an unfortunate definition given Microsoft’s past history competing with Google.  As a verb, albeit obsolete, it means to go.  A second definition of the noun form is “a variety of cherry.” From my perspective as a media trainer, is a Bing a good name?  Well, I came up with a plus and The Washington Post came up with a minus.  First the plus:  Once you find something using Bing, you utter the triumphant phrase that has resonated in church basements since the 1930s: “Bingo!”  The minus?  A columnist in the Post pointed out, the letters could stand for, “But It’s Not Google.”

Business Ethics Oath
Doctors and lawyers take professional oaths and now a group of Harvard MBAs hope to business people will, too.  Before their commencement, about half the graduates of Harvard Business School took a new “MBA oath” they had created, pledging to act ethically.  The oath includes the line: “As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone.”  Reporting on the story, The New York Times quoted Max Anderson, one of the organizers of the oath campaign as saying, “My hope is that at our 25th reunion our class will not be known for how much money we made or how much money we gave back to the school, but for how the world was a better place as a result of our leadership.”   The Times also quoted Suffolk University professor Mariam Weismann, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches business and law at Suffolk University as lauding the effort , but warning, “Who’s going to enforce it?”

Poetic Justice
And the week’s most irresistible hypothetical scenario came in a Boston Herald story about remarks at a Boston College conference by Harry Markopolos, the man who tried repeatedly to blow the whistle on Bernard Madoff, only to be repeatedly rebuffed by the SEC.
“Whatever Madoff hid offshore, I think he’s going to get cheated out of. If I’m his private banker in Panama, I’m thinking: ‘I know Mr. Madoff isn’t getting out of prison to collect the money, and I know his family denies having anything to do with this scheme, so they’re not going to show up, either. So guess what: It’s my money now.’”  Summing up, Markopolos said, “I call that ‘cheating the cheater’ – and that’s sort of poetic justice, I think.”