See You In the Funny Papers
Here’s a first. I appear in a comic strip history of the CME-ICE rivalry in Bloomberg Markets Magazine. Quite the likeness!
Other than the fact that I appeared at all, the most amusing part of the, er, article, is the panel depicting CME’s Terry Duffy getting the news that ICE was making a rival bid for CBOT via a note slipped under his hotel room door at the FIA at Boca at 0600. I had eaten dinner with Duffy and CME CEO Craig Donohue the night before. They were in a little better mood then than they were the next day.
Bloomberg’s Matt Leising called me at about 0630 to ask me about the development. That led to an appearance on Bloomberg TV, where I was interviewed right before Jeff Sprecher. He watched me give the interview, and was not pleased with my prediction that CME would eventually prevail, but have to pay a lot more: I saw him say to the woman next to him (who I later found out was his wife, Kelly Loeffler) “who is this guy?” That was exactly how it worked out though, and apparently there were no hard feelings because Sprecher spoke at a conference I organized at UH a couple of years later. Either that, or he didn’t connect me with “this guy.”
Evenhanded guy that I am, I invited Craig Donohue to speak at a conference a year or two after that. His speech was interrupted by some Occupy types (remember them?), whom my tiger of an assistant Avani and I bodily shoved out of the room while the rest of the audience sat in stunned silence (not knowing what was going on).
So yeah. My involvement with CME and ICE sometimes does sound like something out of the funny pages. Now it’s official.
I remember the event and the Occupy-wannabes and their frat-like chant about 1%. At first, I thought it was a frat pledge stunt. Then I remembered the group of students and the table where they were sitting. I encountered them during the lunch break before Craig Donohue’s speech. I was going from table to table collecting business cards for an iPod (or iSomething) give-a-away drawing we were sponsoring. I assumed they were grad students in attendance for the event. They didn’t have business cards to put into the iPad drawing fishbowl I was carrying around, yet they were just fine putting in a substitute card by writing their names on the reverse side of my business card so they could enter the drawing. Greed is irresistable! Or, maybe it was more telling of their beliefs that everyone is entitled to get something of value without having earned it. In any case, Craig P and Avani promptly expelled them. There would be no Zuccati Park at the UofH Hilton ballroom. Great event BTW. When is the next one?
Comment by Woody — July 6, 2015 @ 8:23 am