The Art of the Business Story

The Conference Board Review^® Article

By Charles M. Madigan

Charles M. Madigan is Presidential Writer in Residence at Roosevelt University and author of, most recently, 30: The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper. He reviewed David Cay Johnston's Free Lunch in the Jan/Feb issue.

Good Guys & Bad Guys

Behind the Scenes with the Saints and Scoundrels of American Business (and Everything in Between)

By Joe Nocera

Portfolio, $25.95

I am working in my kitchen on a healthy buffalo chili, and Joe Nocera, a New York Times business columnist, is talking to me. Actually, he is talking to NPR's Terry Gross, but this feels just about the same as talking to me, which is a tribute to the considerable skills of both Gross and Nocera.

What can I conclude from this experience?

In the world of retirement investment, it is much better to be 30. Those of us in our 50s with not a lot of jack in the market are probably doomed to perdition. For those who actually are 30, index funds are the way to go.
Most Americans are not equipped to be in the stock market because they don't have the cast-iron constitution to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em, they have the discipline of kittens, and they panic at exactly the wrong moment. This never happens to Warren Buffett, which is why he is not you.
A credit-card crisis is on the horizon as Americans reluctant to save are confronted by the fact that there's no equity left in their houses, and the fancy living we have been funding with high-interest credit cards is about to land on us just like the bank safe always lands on Wile E. Coyote in the old Warner Brothers cartoons.

Of course, there is much more. Nocera is on the radio pumping Good Guys & Bad Guys, a new collection of profiles, columns, and news stories from his years of business reporting.

I am full of envy.

I, too, lived the life of a newspaper columnist for a while and recall what I came to view as a reality lunch with my publisher. I thought we might want to put a collection of my best stuff into a book. He smiled kindly at me and said, "Who the hell would want to read that?"

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Return to the July/August 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.