Bloomberg Building, Oh My!

For fun, I attended the Financial Industry In Transition: Positioning for 2009 seminar at the Bloomberg Headquarters.

I had never been in the building before and it does indeed deserve to be in a BusinessWeek article of architectural wonders. I walk in the stern white marble lobby and down a hall lined with these massive wood pouches. They were about my height and I wanted to jump in them. Then I checked in and the receptionist area was smooth and sleek with cameras built into the wall behind them - which actually took a really good picture of me. They gave me a pass on a silver beaded chain and I went past the guards to elevators that lit up when they opened. It was hard for me to keep scanning the elevators to see which one was available so a "ding" or some kind of noise would have been appreciated - what about the visually impaired? The news was playing in the elevator (instead of the Captivate news screens) so that's where the visually impaired get an advantage over the hearing impaired. We get up to the 6th floor and it is GORGEOUS. Bright, airy with real trees growing! Everything was brand new and fun - either interesting lights, monitors or something. There were even TV monitors built into the mirror in the ladies' room! I was sad when I had to give my badge back at the end of the day - I really liked my picture.

As for the seminar - it was interesting. They gave us a flashdrive that had all the presentations and materials on them for our future reference which was GENIUS since I hate carrying all that crap around. The keynote speaker was Professor Bruce Greenwald from Columbia Business School and he was a commanding, engaging and amazing speaker. There has been a decline in consumption but business/ investments have been high and steady. Monetary policy is not correlated to increases in net GDP so all the stuff that the Fed is doing is pretty ineffectual. Professor Greenwald saw 3 ways to fix the economy: (1) protectionism to drive the current account imbalance to 0, (2) internationalize surpluses which is basically making other countries purchasers of surplus and that would take a long time (3) stagnant global growth which would increase unemployment but we would see increases in productivity. Not good news.

Another really terrific speaker was Sheila Smith, Principal, Deloitte Advisory Service LLP who was on the "New Era of Debtor-Creditor Relations" panel. I was impressed with her experience and she had a great way of telling stories while looking totally fabulous.