Robert Teitelman is editor in chief of The Deal LLC. A member of the company’s Executive Committee, Mr. Teitelman is responsible for editorial operations of The Deal’s print and electronic products. Mr. Teitelman joined The Deal in December 1998 from Institutional Investor, where he had worked since 1989, ending his tenure there as the magazine’s editor. In 2003, Min Magazine chose him as one of the “21 Most Intriguing People” in media and in 2008 B2B Magazine selected him as for a “Media Business Innovator Award.” Mr. Teitelman also worked as a writer and editor for Forbes and Financial World. In addition, he is the author of two books, Profits of Science: The American Marriage of Business and Technology and Gene Dreams: Wall Street, Academia and the Rise of Biotechnology, both published by Basic Books. He is a graduate of the College of William & Mary, with masters degrees in international affairs and journalism from Columbia University.

Blog Entries by Robert Teitelman

Europe, the U.S. and breaking up the banks

Posted November 6, 2009 | 01:27 PM (EST)


Now it gets interesting. With the recovery at least beginning, European and now British regulators are clearly leaning toward a more competitive banking system with smaller players. The European Commission's Neelie Kroes' decision to break up ING Group NV (NYSE:ING) was the first major substantive move, but that was followed...

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Mark Thoma on Sane Markets

1 Comments | Posted October 19, 2009 | 03:51 PM (EST)


Mark Thoma over at The Economist's View last week wrote a short essay that was long on good sense. He commented on a Simon Johnson post that in turn thrashed a Chamber of Commerce attack on the proposed consumer protection agency as bad for small business. Knowing that tangled thread...

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Bruce Wasserstein 1947-2009

2 Comments | Posted October 15, 2009 | 03:59 PM (EST)


We do deals. Bruce Wasserstein did deals, a lot of them, in a career that's already being called "legendary." But for the most part, we didn't see this "artist" of M&A at work; instead, the Bruce we knew was an enthusiast of the media and for journalism. It's been said...

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Sorkin On What Happened After Lehman

1 Comments | Posted October 5, 2009 | 02:03 PM (EST)


The excerpt from Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail is now on the newsstands in the new issue of Vanity Fair. Because it's an excerpt, it's a little hard to tell how much it reflects the book. Like James Stewart's detailed chronology of the Lehman Brothers Holdings...

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The Search for Normalcy

5 Comments | Posted September 29, 2009 | 02:38 PM (EST)


The papers Tuesday seem to disagree about exactly where we are. The New York Times led off by Andrew Ross Sorkin's front page column declaring mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and optimism back, and buttressed by the business section's pumping for Dow 10,000, jostles uneasily with the Financial Times, where...

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Lehman Brothers' Nonlessons

1 Comments | Posted September 14, 2009 | 02:29 PM (EST)


Tired of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.? Weary of turgid, dutiful recapitulations of events from last year? Everyone is doing it (hell, I did one in a column in last week's The Deal magazine), and it might be palatable if anyone really had anything new to say about Lehman, Merrill...

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Simon Johnson on Bank State Capture

Posted September 8, 2009 | 02:29 PM (EST)


On Saturday, The Baseline Scenario's Simon Johnson returned to the question of modern finance and financial innovation. Johnson's original post last week presented the thesis that finance has grown too large and too innovative, thus creating diseconomies in the real economy. He admitted, however, that the evidence for...

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Simon Johnson on the Evidence for Overmighty Finance

3 Comments | Posted September 2, 2009 | 10:25 AM (EST)


Simon Johnson posted Tuesday on The Baseline Scenario a loose review of the economic data behind the argument that finance is simply too large. Over the past few weeks this theme has heated up; the Financial Times has columns Wednesday by Willem Buiter and John Plender wrestling...

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Sheila Bair Goes on the Attack, Again

4 Comments | Posted September 2, 2009 | 10:19 AM (EST)


Wouldn't you have wanted to be at Treasury on Tuesday when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner read the New York Times? There, at the top of the op-ed page, Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., continues to wage war against the Treasury's plan for a super-regulator (that's...

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The WSJ Tries to Fix Our Mistakes

6 Comments | Posted August 24, 2009 | 01:42 PM (EST)


Monday's Wall Street Journal includes the usual start-of-the-week supplement with an unusually provocative headline: The Mistakes We Make -- And Why We Make Them. In fact, the piece, by Meir Statman, a finance professor at Santa Clara University, is another of a seemingly endless number of attempts to apply...

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David Wessel on the Failure of Lehman Brothers

16 Comments | Posted August 6, 2009 | 01:23 PM (EST)


The Wall Street Journal's David Wessel's In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic is just out to the usual accompanying publicity. It's a very pleasant read, written in that WSJ style adapted to books that hit its apotheosis with Barbarians at the Gate and has...

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Economics and the Power of Prediction

6 Comments | Posted August 6, 2009 | 12:08 PM (EST)


Robert Skidelsky has a column in the Financial Times Thursday arguing that economics has gone off the track with its smothering embrace of mathematics and the presumption that it can predict the future. As always with Skidelsky, the eminent biographer of John Maynard Keynes (one of the great biographies...

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Goldman, J.P. Morgan and Wall St.'s Original Sin

Posted July 15, 2009 | 05:30 PM (EST)


Every high school biology student (if they're awake) knows the story of the famous experiment concocted by Columbia's Harold Urey many decades ago. Urey used a set of basic inputs -- heat, electricity, water, some basic elements -- to simulate the creation of the first organic compounds in a flask....

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More on The Accessibility Question

4 Comments | Posted July 8, 2009 | 01:31 PM (EST)


Felix Salmon has replied to my post Monday on the question of financial journalism's responsibility to make complex material accessible to a broad audience. Salmon, as usual, offers a reasoned response, though I think in some cases he's exaggerating what I actually wrote. My earlier post did not...

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The Challenges of Communicating the Crisis

6 Comments | Posted July 6, 2009 | 04:44 PM (EST)


Last week Felix Salmon at Reuters posted a comment by Choire arguing that Matt Taibbi in his take-down of Goldman, Sachs & Co. (NYSE:GS) "at least is explaining (or trying to explain) complicated financial operations in the real world -- while the finance writers and bloggers are often willfully...

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On the Matter of the M.B.A. Oath

6 Comments | Posted June 23, 2009 | 01:25 PM (EST)


Michael Skapinker has a column in the Financial Times Tuesday discussing an oath, hatched at Harvard Business School, that's been getting publicity of late. The oath, apparently signed by 1,100 business school graduates -- we're counting! -- promises the usual oath shtick: Be good, be true, mentor effectively. Skapinker...

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Beyond The Myth of the Rational Market

2 Comments | Posted June 23, 2009 | 01:20 PM (EST)


Justin Fox's book, The Myth of the Rational Market has been reviewed widely and received, in the main, good notices. Indeed, it's a pleasant read through some pretty forbidding material, though by necessity there's quite a bit of overlap with the late Peter Bernstein's Against the Gods and...

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The Babble Over Regulatory Reform, Cont'd

Posted June 16, 2009 | 03:39 PM (EST)


Nobody just announces anything anymore. Before anyone in Washington can get lunch, it has to be leaked, briefed, previewed in speeches, summarized in op-eds. And so it is with Treasury's much-mooted financial regulatory reform proposals.

After weeks of releasing bits and pieces of the plan -- derivatives, bank regulation, executive...

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Paying The Price Of Fragmented Regulation

2 Comments | Posted June 11, 2009 | 02:08 PM (EST)


Isn't Washington wonderful? In the run-up to testimony by Bank of America chief Ken Lewis on the Merrill Lynch & Co. affair, e-mails are suddenly leaking from the Beltway colander, though their ultimate source, strangely enough, is that opaque wonderland, the Federal Reserve.

The New York Times and the...

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How Should We Think About Bank Lobbying?

11 Comments | Posted June 8, 2009 | 11:14 AM (EST)


As the regulatory reform process chugs to life, how should we think about the lobbying process? The Wall Street Journal has a story Thursday reporting that various groups are working to delay or to soften new Financial Accounting Standards Board rules forcing banks to account for off-balance-sheet operations. Wednesday...

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