The Disruptor
Contrarian and drawn to the edge; challenges the settled answer.
Gretchen Morgenson reads as The Disruptor because she treats finance not as a beat to cover but as a power system to hold to account. Across her Pulitzer-winning work and her NBC reporting on private equity's reach into emergency medicine, housing, and wealth distribution, she moves quickly into uncomfortable territory and absorbs institutional friction that would deter most peers.
“Well, there are a couple of things that happen early on that sort of you see the beginnings of that these takeovers are not only designed to find companies that are maybe undervalued or underperforming, we can whip them into shape and then sell them later, that while they're doing that, while they're monitoring them, while they are lookin…”
“Okay, well, first of all, assistant editor is a little strong. I was a secretary, and I got the job because I could type more than 35 words a minute. Okay. So I was just out of college, brand new to New York. I had graduated from a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, and my eyes were as big as saucers as I came into New York.”
“Very important, very, I mean, you really saw the inner workings, how the sausage is made, as they say. And so I would see how the over-the-counter desk, over-the-counter stock desk would push stocks and, you know, encourage brokers to sell them, put a lot of commission in them, to move them because some big seller was coming into the mark…”
“It stopped outperforming in like the mid-2000s or so or, you know, towards 2008. And so you really have to wonder what the purpose of the continued infatuation with private equity among pensions is if they can get the same return in a S&P 500 with five basis points as a cost and total transparency, by the way, and a mark-to-market that yo…”
Masters in Business: “Gretchen Morgenson: From Wall Street to Journalism”
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