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Dave Bing, political neophyte, will be Detroit’s oldest mayor
When pro basketball hall-of-famer Dave Bing was elected May 5 as Detroit’s third mayor in less than a year, a voter turnout of just 14 percent showed they’d prefer a duke to an emperor, and age to outrage.
Duke, as Bing was known in his youth, narrowly beat interim Mayor Kenneth V. Cockrel Jr. in a special election to choose who would serve the remaining term of the city’s disgraced chief executive, Kwame M. Kilpatrick.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)Elected Detroit’s youngest mayor at 31, Kilpatrick’s first and abortive second terms were marked by his penchant for high living, big cars, entourages, luxury junkets and marital infidelity. When a police whistleblower lawsuit threatened to disclose thousands of sexually explicit text messages between Kilpatrick and his chief of staff, former high school classmate Christine Beatty, the two lied about their relationship in court and settled the lawsuit for $8.4 million in taxpayer money.
Dave BingBoth resigned their positions, admitted their perjury in separate plea deals and spent several months in jail. In addition, Kilpatrick confessed to obstructing justice and assaulting two county investigators who went to his home to serve a subpoena on businessman Bobby Ferguson, another childhood friend and convicted felon who was awarded some $170 million in city contracts during Kilpatrick’s tenure.
Bing, at 65, will be sworn in as Detroit’s oldest mayor, and the first political neophyte to hold the job in nearly 120 years. While he will hold the office through the end of the year, he faces an August primary and November general election to claim his own full 4-year term.
A native of Washington, D.C., and high school dropout who dreamed of professional sports greatness while playing basketball with childhood friend – and later Motown musical legend – Marvin Gaye, Bing moved to Detroit as the 1966 NBA draft’s No. 2 pick, and was a Piston for nine seasons.
After moonlighting as a bank manager trainee and in a steel company PR job, he started his own business in 1980, first as Bing Steel and later expanded as the Bing Group, an auto parts manufacturer with reported annual revenues of as much as $300 million. He also has interests in money management and construction.
Although long active in Detroit civic affairs, Bing resisted calls for a mayoral candidacy until his successful run this year. Attacked as an outsider – he moved into the city from his suburban home to run for office – and forced to admit that he falsely claimed to hold a master’s in business administration from Syracuse University, Bing edged out Cockrel, who as city council president had assumed the mayor’s office after Kilpatrick’s resignation.
He’s pledged to take a businessman’s approach to governing one of the country’s most impoverished, crime-ridden, and corrupt cities, and has just three months to prove his effectiveness before having once again to face the voters, however few, in August.
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Can Warren Hellman save the San Francisco Chronicle?May 12, 2009 at 11:04am
Billionaire financier F. Warren Hellman is already beloved in his native San Francisco for underwriting an eccentric annual music festival called Hardlly Strictly Bluegrass.
But if the California mogul can figure out how to save another bit of endangered Americana, the community newspaper, he will surely be regarded as a national, as well as a local […]Muckety Mover Dick Cheney Trash Talker
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Dave Bing Political Neophyte Will Be Detroits Oldest Mayor
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SEC sues money-fund manager Bruce Bent
A man who fundamentally changed the nature of investing in this country has been accused of misleading investors last year.
Bruce R. Bent Sr., 71, the co-founder of the first money market mutual fund, is the object of a civil lawsuit by the Securities and Exchange Commission that was filed Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)His son, Bruce Bent II, 43, the co-CEO of the fund known as the Reserve Primary Fund, is also cited in the complaint.
Another Bent company, Reserve Management Company Inc., the fund’s manager, and Reserve Partners Inc., a broker-dealer run by Reserve Management, are also named as defendants.
The suit charges the Bents with the “knowing dissemination of false information” about the impact of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. last September upon the Reserve Fund.
According to the complaint, the Reserve Fund held $785 million in Lehman debt securities, securities that had become worthless.
The SEC alleges that the Bents falsely assured shareholders and the fund’s trustees that, despite the Lehman loses, Reserve Management had enough capital or available credit to keep the fund’s net asset value above $1 a share.
This proved not to be the case, and eventually the Bents acknowledged that the fund had “broken the buck” and the net asset value was below $1 a share.
This prompted a run on the fund and a call for tougher regulation of money market funds in general.
The Reserve Fund, which had been valued at $62.5 billion, is now in liquidation, with about 90 percent of its assets returned to investors.
Reserve Management has held back about $3.5 billion pending the outcome of about 29 civil lawsuits. The SEC is asking that this money be released and distributed to investors in the fund.
In a statement, the elder Bent said, “We remain confident that we acted in the best interest of our shareholders. We are hopeful that this matter can be resolved quickly.”
Bent was a money manager at the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association in the late 1960s.
One day, he and his boss, Henry B. R. Brown, began chatting about strategies that would allow small investors to get higher rates on return than those offered by savings accounts.
“I looked up at Brown and said, ‘Why not a mutual fund?’” Bent later told Fortune magazine. “He said he didn’t know anything about mutual funds. I said, ‘I don’t know anything about mutual funds either, but I think it would work.’”
The pair went out on their own, starting the Reserve Fund in 1972. By the beginning of January 1973, they were managing $1 million.
A story then ran that month in The New York Times, prompting interest in the fund. By the end of the year Brown and Bent were managing $100 million and mutual funds were proliferating.
Brown, who died last August, left company management in 1985, but retained a financial interest in the business until Bent bought him out in 1999.
In 2001, Bent ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for Nassau (NY) County executive, promising that he would serve at $1 a year and that he would improve efficiency in the government.
This emphasis on fiscal restraint reflected Bent’s original investment principles at the Reserve Fund, which was seen as low-risk.
But according to The Wall Street Journal, the fund’s strategies changed in 2006 and it began to invest in higher-risk financial products, including the commercial paper from Lehman Brothers that led to the fund’s demise.
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Dave Bing, political neophyte, will be Detroit’s oldest mayorMay 10, 2009 at 12:42pm
When pro basketball hall-of-famer Dave Bing was elected May 5 as Detroit’s third mayor in less than a year, a voter turnout of just 14 percent showed they’d prefer a duke to an emperor, and age to outrage.
Judge rejects hardship plea from ex-Detroit mayor
Convicted felon and former Detroit mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick today lost a hardship bid to reduce $6,000 in monthly restitution payments to the city for his crimes.
As part of a plea deal last year to end criminal prosecution in a sex and obstruction-of-justice scandal, the ex-mayor agreed to repay Detroit taxpayers $1 million, resign his office, serve four months in jail, forfeit his law license and refrain from running for elected office for five years.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)After his release from jail, Kilpatrick moved his family to a Dallas suburb where he lives in a 2,800-square-foot home, drives a Cadillac Escalade, and earns a base salary of more than $100,000 with income potential of as much as $360,000 a year as a software salesman for Covisint, a subsidiary of Detroit-based Compuware Corp.
Chairman and CEO Peter Karmanos, who moved Compuware headquarters to downtown Detroit in a political deal with Kilpatrick, said when he hired the confessed perjurer that he is “on a short leash,” and will be fired if an ongoing federal investigation of corruption in Detroit leads to new charges against him.
Kilpatrick claimed hardship in the terms of his restitution, saying that after all monthly living expenses, only $6 remained to repay the city.
Wayne County Circuit Judge David Groner, who had ordered those terms as part of Kilpatrick’s plea deal, said Kilpatrick will have to reconsider the “lifestyle in which he has grown accustomed.”
“In other words,” Groner ruled, the ex-mayor “may not be able to sustain an upper-middle-class existence while he still owes a debt to society and a substantial financial debt to the citizens of Detroit.”
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Dave Bing, political neophyte, will be Detroit’s oldest mayorMay 10, 2009 at 12:42pm
When pro basketball hall-of-famer Dave Bing was elected May 5 as Detroit’s third mayor in less than a year, a voter turnout of just 14 percent showed they’d prefer a duke to an emperor, and age to outrage.
NY Fed’s Stephen Friedman resigns over ties to Goldman
His nickname at Goldman Sachs was “Mr. Inside,” and for decades, Stephen Friedman’s extensive contacts and expertise made him a go-to player on Wall Street.
But it was precisely that web of connections that raised conflict-of-interest issues in his latest job as non-executive chairman of the powerful Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
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MAP HINTS: Boxes with + signs can be expanded by doubleclicking. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For more options, right-click on a box or click on the map tools to the left. (Requires Flash)Friedman, 71, resigned from the post Thursday amid questions about his continuing ties to Goldman Sachs, which were first raised in a Wall Street Journal story Monday.
“Although I have been in compliance with the rules, my public service motivated continuation on the Reserve Bank Board is being mischaracterized as improper,” he wrote in a letter to New York Fed President William Dudley. “The Federal Reserve System has important work to do and does not need this distraction.”
In its story, the Journal had disclosed that Friedman was allowed to lead the New York Fed and remain a Goldman director and shareholder, in violation of Fed policy because of Goldman’s new status as a bank holding company. The New York Fed sought a one-year waiver of that rule, which was granted by the Federal Reserve board in Washington in January.
While the waiver was under consideration, in December, Friedman bought 37,300 more Goldman shares, the paper reported. He also bought more shares the day after the waiver came through. The purchases, which gave him a $3 million paper gain, were disclosed in Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
Friedman originally told the Journal that his role at the New York Fed wasn’t a policy-making one and that he saw “no conflict whatsoever in owning shares” of Goldman.
He noted that when he became an economic adviser to former President George W. Bush, he had had to sell nearly all his investments, in a process he described as “very costly and a difficult thing to manage.”
A longtime star of the financial world, Friedman had worked as an investment banker, a private-equity executive and an economic adviser to the president.
The bulk of his career, however, was spent at Goldman Sachs, where he held numerous executive roles. He was the company’s co-chief operating officer from 1987 to 1990, co-chairman, along with his longtime friend Robert E. Rubin, from 1990 to 1992, and the sole chairman from 1992 to 1994; he still serves as a director.
Admired for his intelligence and low-key style, Friedman has a welter of relationships in the philanthropic world as well. He is chairman emeritus of the board of Columbia University, where he attended law school, chairman emeritus of the executive committee of the Brookings Institution, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Out of work, he is said to be an avid chess player and wrestler. A wrestling center at his alma mater, Cornell University, bears his name. His son David Benioff, wrote the screenplay for The Kite Runner and X-Men Origins: Wolverine and is married to actress Amanda Peet. His brother, Richard, is a constitutional law scholar at the University of Michigan.
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Dave Bing, political neophyte, will be Detroit’s oldest mayorMay 10, 2009 at 12:42pm
When pro basketball hall-of-famer Dave Bing was elected May 5 as Detroit’s third mayor in less than a year, a voter turnout of just 14 percent showed they’d prefer a duke to an emperor, and age to outrage.
Sec Sues Money Fund Manager Bruce Bent
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Ny Fed Chairman Stephen Friedman Resigns Over Ties to Goldman
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Judge Rejects Hardship Plea From Ex Detroit Mayor
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