You nailed the guy. You nailed him good. Is he gonna resign?” exclaims a large luncher at the table by the door as Maria Bartiromo steps into San Pietro.
The luncher is Ken Langone, billionaire co-founder of Home Depot. The guy she “nailed” is Ben Bernanke, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve. And Bartiromo is the talk of the town, even more than usual.
A few days before she had rocked the markets when she reported on her CNBC television show some comments Bernanke had made to her at a dinner in Washington. According to Bartiromo, Bernanke said the market reaction to his recent congressional testimony on the US central bank’s interest rate policy had been wrong.
Before she had even finished her report, the markets went into a spin, the Dow Jones index dropping 70 points within minutes. The more lasting damage may be to Bernanke’s reputation as he tries to establish himself as a worthy successor to Alan Greenspan. But the scoop has only enhanced the reputation of Bartiromo, possibly the best-known business journalist in the world.
After a laugh with Langone, Bartiromo is shown to one of the best tables in the house, which has miraculously become available despite a mix-up over the booking.
I am the envy of Wall Street. Sitting at a corner table in San Pietro with Maria Bartiromo, the Sophia Loren of financial journalism. The restaurant is a big Wall Street hang-out, and I detect a few quizzical glances. “Who’s that with Maria? Don’t recognise him. Maybe he’s that new hedge fund guy,” I fondly imagine them saying.
After the waiter has given us an interminable list of specials, I press Bartiromo on the Bernanke affair.
She points out that Bernanke’s comments were heard not just by her but also by Bob Hormats, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs, and another journalist. This, she implies, deals with the suggestion that they might have been off-the-record or inadvertent. She adds that Bernanke had carefully avoided answering a number of “tough questions” from Hormats.
“When he said the markets got it wrong, I was taken aback, a little,” she says, but admits she was very surprised by the market reaction to her report. She declines to speculate on Bernanke’s motives but says he was clearly worried that the markets thought he was soft on interest rates. “I think that the market today has a clearer idea.”
After ordering - sole for her, veal ravioli for me - we talk about how she made her name as the first reporter to broadcast live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for her daily slots on CNBC. For 10 years, she shouted out the market news, the winners and losers, the analysts’ buys and sells (mainly buys of course) from the colourful bedlam of the world’s largest stock exchange, frequently jostled (sometimes deliberately) by traders on the floor.
“When I first got there it was tough. Nobody had done it before. And there were a lot of people who didn’t want me there. They said to themselves: ‘Who is this person? She has a camera, she is a woman, she’s in my way.’”
But Bartiromo stood her ground, sometimes jostling the traders back. The viewers, and many of the traders, loved it. “I think people rooted for me.”
It’s a particularly exposed form of television, and she believes this is partly why many viewers feel a personal connection with her. “The camera’s very transparent. Whether you liked me or not, you knew what you were getting and it was me.”
At one stage she was doing a show in the morning, a show in the afternoon and a show at nine o’clock at night. “They are waking up with me and they are going to bed with me and I love that.”
Bartiromo is known for her hard work, on-screen and off. She also writes columns for BusinessWeek and Reader’s Digest and has just started doing personal-finance slots on radio. “But I’m lucky because I love it. I love business news. And I love talking to smart and successful business people.”
She admits she would struggle with the workload and says she is lucky to have a very supportive husband in Jonathan Steinberg, son of financier Saul Steinberg, a former magazine publisher who is now launching a family of exchange traded funds.
The daughter of a Brooklyn restaurateur, Bartiromo, now 38, studied journalism and economics at New York University before joining CNN Business News. She then moved to CNBC in 1993, and by the late 1990s, the Money Honey, as the tabloids dubbed her, had become one of the faces of the stockmarket boom. Along with other CNBC reporters, she was subsequently criticised for contributing to the irrational exuberance of the bubble. “Journalists everywhere could have done a better job being sceptical. At the same time, I don’t know whether anyone would have listened. I don’t know.”
She denies that CNBC’s coverage these days is “encouraging people to get in and out of individual stocks” and states firmly: “I am not a fan of day trading.”
I ask about Mad Money, CNBC’s manic stock-advice programme presented by the former hedge-fund manager Jim Cramer. “The ratings are good, and that indicates that there is a day-trading community out there,” she says, and leaves it at that.
In her early days reporting from the NYSE floor, Bartiromo got great support from women viewers and the few women at the exchange.
But, let’s face it, her most devoted fans tend to be men. Few have been more devoted or shown their devotion more publicly than Joey Ramone, lead singer of the New York punk band, the Ramones.
Bartiromo started receiving e-mails from someone calling himself Joey Ramone in 1998. Unsurprisingly, she was at first sceptical that it was the Joey Ramone. The e-mails would say things like: “Maria, I saw you on CNBC today, and you were talking about Intel. I own Intel but I feel they’re losing market share to AMD. Call me. Joey Ramone.” Could this really be the man responsible for such classics as “Sheena is a Punk Rocker”, “Teenage Lobotomy” and “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”?
“I finally e-mailed him back, and it was him, and we started having this great friendship about the markets. He was so informed and so intelligent about the markets. A really good investor.”
But, for Ramone, there was clearly more than the markets to the friendship because when his solo album appeared shortly after his death from cancer in 2001, it included a love song entitled “Maria Bartiromo”. The uncharacteristically lyrical number’s chorus goes: “I watch you on the TV every single day./Those eyes make everything okay./I watch her every day./I watch her every night./She’s really outta sight.”
“After he passed away, so many of the band members and friends called me and said: ‘Joey loved you.’”
Bartiromo admits that her own musical tastes are more Frank Sinatra than Joey Ramone, and her husband accuses her of being uncool. “I say, no I’m not. Joey Ramone wrote a song about me. It doesn’t matter how many times I listen to Shirley Bassey - I’m cool.”
Bartiromo’s eyes are mentioned as often as her scoops, and she doesn’t deny that her looks helped get her where she is. “But when it comes to a person’s looks in this business, it’s certainly not going to keep you there. At the end of the day you’ve got to have the goods. You can’t fool my viewers. They are the smartest and most informed people on the planet.”
On the other hand, she also loves the glamour. “I’m a girls’ girl. I like fashion. I like getting my hair done,” she says, looking very glamorous but businesslike in a Gucci suit and Manolo Blahnik shoes with a Bulgari bag.
She is taken very seriously by many top figures on Wall Street. John Thain, former president of Goldman Sachs and now chief executive of the NYSE, says her column is the first thing he turns to in BusinessWeek.
And she has interviewed almost all the leading names in US business, some several times. They say yes, in part, she says, because she is not out to trap her subject: “I’m looking for articulate answers to the issues of the day.”
Of her many interview coups, she points to those with Hank Greenberg, the former head of American International Group, the world’s biggest insurance company. These included one shortly after the board ousted him, under pressure from Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general.
Bartiromo is close to a number of people targeted by Spitzer - including Dick Grasso, former chief executive of the NYSE, and our fellow diner Ken Langone, and others who have accused the attorney general of abusing his power. “In the case of Hank Greenberg a lot of people said [Spitzer] was the judge, the jury and the executioner,” she says. “Power can be abused. Having said that I think he’s done a tremendous job. He’s really cleaned things up.”
Spitzer is one of the people Bartiromo would love to interview again, along with Rupert Murdoch. Unfortunately Murdoch is loyal to News Corporation’s Fox News and its chief, Roger Ailes. “I asked him to do my show again but he said: ‘I can’t. Roger Ailes would be mad.’”
Fox is due to launch a rival business channel to CNBC later this year, and there has been some speculation that Bartiromo might jump ship. But asked whether she has talked to Fox, she says only that her CNBC contract runs to 2008. She also questions whether there is room for another business channel.
Under her current contract, CNBC is committed to help her set up her own production company which she hopes will produce some documentaries. Looking further out, she would love to do a show examining the big issues of the day, whatever they are, without losing her special interest in business.
By this time we have waited for at least 15 minutes for coffee, and a very apologetic Bartiromo says she really has to go. “I’m on screen at three.”
On her way out, she has another exchange with Langone, who pleads with her not to do a Bernanke on him. I am left to pay the check and to savour a last few minutes as the man lunching with Maria Bartiromo.
David Wighton is the FT’s New York bureau chief.
Ristorante San Pietro, 18 East 54th Street, New York
1 x Dover sole
1 x veal ravioli
1 x mineral water
3 x coffee
Total: $119.21
