Sometimes we wonder what we might accomplish here at DealBreaker if we had the editorial resources of, say, the New York Times. We’re not even talking about the top editors and star financial reporters and columnists. (We’ve certainly never wondered what it would be like to work with Gret-Gret or Tommy Friedman, much less Krugie. Even our darkest moments have their limits.) We mean copy editors, fact-checkers and the like.
At the very least we’d have less comments pointing out that we’ve once again resisted the idiotic rule that forbids inserting a apostrophe between it and s when they are conjoined to indicate possession. And we wouldn’t forget important dates, such as Maria Bartiromo’s September 11th birthday.
But we do resist grammar and spelling on a regular basis. And we may even have screwed up a fact here or there. We are not only imperfect and forgetful, we forget our imperfections. We’ve been spending way too long today thinking deeply about Bill Carter’s piece in the Times today about Maria Bartiromo and Citi. Bess just subjected it to her, uhm, unqiue brand of analysis. And given our imperfections we hesitate to ask a couple of questions that might be embarrassing to their editors. Nonetheless, here’s what we didn’t understand in today’s article.
• The quote: “The Citigroup spokeswoman, Leah Johnson, said the company had no issues with Ms. Bartiromo’s coverage. She conducted a prominent interview recently with the Citigroup senior vice chairman, William Rose.”
• The question: Who the heck is this prominent guy called William Rose at Citigroup? Felix Salmon at Portfolio thinks he doesn’t exist. He thinks that Carter meant to refer to Senior Vice Chairman Bill Rhodes, who is in fact prominent.
• The quote: “I love this thing now called sovereign funds,” she said, meaning the large pools of capital amassed by governments in Asia and the Middle East, and managed by groups like Cutter Associates, an international investment firm. “I had the head of Cutter on and he said: ‘Look, we have $60 billion we want to put to work.’ I find that kind of stuff so exciting. I find it so sexy.”
• The question: This Cutter Associates has $60 billion they want to put to work? Aren’t they a company that helps financial companies out with technology ‘solutions’ or whatever? With offices in Boston, Toronto and London, the firm might have some money to invest but $60 billion seems unlikely. And although she's peppy, Maria's not on speed so we doubt she jumped from talking about sovereign funds to chattering on about a technology consultancy that found $60 billion at the end of a rainbow. But you know who does have $60 billion to invest? The Qatar Investment Authority, which also happens to be a sovereign fund so it fits contextually.
Now we don’t really blame Carter for these errors. Rose sounds like Rhodes, and maybe the Citigroup flack made the mistake. And Qatar—well, that’s just a guy and his newspaper falling victim by the conspiracy to confuse all of us by changing the way place names are spelled and pronounced. There is no chance that “Q-A-T-A-R” is pronounced as “Kudd-Er” in English except in an Alice in Wonderland world where words are pronounced however the rulers tell us they are, regardless of spelling and tradition.
As Citigroup Chief Totters, CNBC Reporter Is Having a Great Year [New York Times]
Posted by chris, Nov 05, 2007 4:40PM
while I hate to defend the slutty milf, i've done a fair amount of work in the Qatar region and a number of people do pronounce it "gutter" and "cutter" even though I don't think they're in the majority.