“Tom, can you hold on one quick second?” the CNBC correspondent asks the Wall Street analyst on the other end of the line. She moves to the chair against a plate-glass window, jacked up two feet off the ground, sticks in her earpiece, slides a microphone under her aquamarine jacket and clips it to her lapel. Picking up a phone extension on a small shelf next to the chair, she resumes the conversation with the analyst about the world’s largest computer-chip maker, Intel.
“Hold on, hold on,” Bartiromo says. She looks into the robot camera, smiles her sweetest smile and says: “Mark, things just got a little worse. Robertson Stephens is downgrading shares of Intel. ‘Squawk Box’ will return in two minutes with the story.”
“Sorry,” she says into the phone. “Thanks, Tom.”
The commercial is over and the correspondent, having doused her short brown hair with Vidal Sassoon spray, is back on camera. “We are looking at a broad-based sell-off on Wall Street, folks,” she says. “Compaq is down 22 percent as we speak.” If CNBC is in the business of pumping out real-time information, no one vacuums it up faster, or disgorges it in a more rapid-fire cadence, than Maria Bartiromo. Morning after morning she works the phones in her tiny space above the exchange at 20 Broad Street, cajoling her sources, coaxing freshly issued upgrades and downgrades from high-powered Wall Street firms even before the brokers have delivered the news to their paying clients.
At 32, this daughter of a Brooklyn restaurant owner is the most famous woman in financial news, the reporter whom everyone on Wall Street calls by her first name. The New York Post dubbed her the “Money Honey,” and the tabloid moniker stuck.
What gives the self-promoting seers immense power to boost or bash a stock is that their views are amplified by the media echo chamber. In a confusing world where everyone is jockeying for advance intelligence on what to buy or sell, information is power. Besides, there’s no real penalty for being wrong; the journalists, the commentators and the analysts blithely chalk up their mistakes to the market’s unpredictability and quickly turn to the next day’s haul of hot information. Within this hothouse environment, CNBC is as important a part of Wall Street’s circulatory system as CNN is in political and diplomatic circles, and wields far more power to change the events it is covering. A single negative story, even one based on a bogus rumor, can instantly slice billions off a company’s net worth. The reason for CNBC’s extraordinary influence is simple: lots of important and wealthy people watch it, along with a growing army of stay-at-home day traders. Derided by Ted Turner as a “piece of garbage” when it was launched by NBC in 1989, the channel has now surpassed Turner’s CNN in ratings.
The network received a letter last year on behalf of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Tatal al Saud. It seemed His Royal Highness was sailing his yacht, Kingdom 5, into the Caribbean and wanted permission to bounce the network’s signal off his private satellite transponder. “HRH relies heavily on CNBC to keep track of his portfolio,” the prince’s adviser wrote.
All this attention has turned the Fort Lee, N.J., network into a gold mine, a moneymaking machine that pours $200 million a year into the corporate coffers of its parent company. High-end financial advertisers are desperate to reach the network’s affluent audience, whose median household net worth is $981,000.
CNBC’s cultlike following ranges from the Armani crowd to those who merely dream of striking market gold. Suddenly it’s on in brokerage offices and corporate suites, in bars and restaurants and health clubs. CEOs watch it. Regis Philbin watches it. Andre Agassi, John Elway, Charles Barkley and Johnny Bench are among its most fervent fans. Indeed, the network is consciously modeled on ESPN’s “Sports Center,” as if the correspondents are a bunch of jocks sitting around talking about the Super Bowl. They appear in shirtsleeves, working the phones, kidding each other, discussing their love for Wendy’s burgers or Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
When Bartiromo hits the stock-exchange floor, she functions as a sidelines reporter, shouting to make herself heard above the roar of the well-heeled crowd. An avid kickboxer, Bartiromo tries to appear brash and tough in a testosterone-driven arena where some traders deliberately bump into her. A newspaper report once claimed that a trader had touched her rear while she was doing a stand-up. “If someone had tried to grab my ass,” she told a colleague, “I would have decked him whether I was on the air or not.”
She looks up at a faraway camera and reports that the Dow is down 72 points. Petallides hands her some new figures while she rattles off the latest prices. Television sets across the trading floor flicker with Bartiromo’s image, her screen presence more powerful than the slight figure on the floor would suggest.
But despite her warnings of a big sell-off, the Dow soon rebounds into positive territory, underscoring the weakness of CNBC’s breathless, minute-by-minute approach. Even from the epicenter of the New York Stock Exchange, the future is difficult to discern. By the closing bell, as Bartiromo is getting ready to anchor her afternoon show, “Market Wrap,” the Dow has jumped 165 points.
Bartiromo was initially disheartened by all the focus on her looks, but gradually decided that she was willing to play the role of Money Honey. When People ran a piece on her engagement to Jonathan Steinberg, the son of financier Saul Steinberg, that was all right, too. She even posed sitting on his lap. Her viewers might enjoy looking at her, but they loved her for her reporting.
Bartiromo spent years doing behind-the-scenes grunt work. After graduating from New York University in 1989, she became a production assistant for CNN, working her way up to associate producer, writer, producer and assignment editor. Eventually she found herself working for Lou Dobbs, the big-name anchor of “Moneyline.” Bartiromo dreamed of becoming a correspondent, but contented herself with the life of a field producer. She would go out, interview people, write the script, edit the piece–and watch a reporter read her words on camera.
In 1993 Dobbs promoted her to line producer, but Bartiromo pulled her boss aside one night. “I really don’t want to do this,” she told Dobbs. “I appreciate the promotion, but you’re taking me out of the field, and that’s what I do best. I have a nose, I have sources on Wall Street.” Dobbs was patient but firm. “Maria,” he said, “you cannot always be in someone else’s shadow.” Dobbs knew that she wanted to be on the air but felt she wasn’t ready. Bartiromo decided to put together an audition tape. She took voice lessons to ease her Brooklynese. Some of her early efforts were awful, but she salvaged enough good takes to send a tape to CNBC, which soon hired her. When she broke the news, Dobbs was dismissive. “You’re not going to learn anything at CNBC,” he said. “That’s terrible news. I don’t understand how you could even consider going there.” When Bartiromo began reporting from the floor of the stock exchange, friends at CNN told her that Dobbs thought it was a terrible shot and hard to look at. A year later CNN began doing the same thing.
For financial journalists, almost everything turns on cultivating sources. Bartiromo enjoyed strong relationships with such star analysts as Prudential’s Ralph Acampora, who would chide her good-naturedly to “get the camera out of my office” when she got wind of his latest forecast. But less prominent brokers grew upset with her. “Maria, you’re killing me,” one told her. His clients would call and say they no longer needed him, that they could get the information faster from Maria. Bartiromo’s response was firm: “I’m sorry. You either have a relationship with me or you don’t. Most of the time I’m going to get it anyway.”
Some brokerages resented her role. When Bartiromo reported in 1999 that Kevin McCarthy, an analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, was downgrading Intel, it had caused a major fight within the firm. The tip had come from an outside investor, which raised a red flag: why was he telling her this? “Are you short it?” she asked. “Yes,” the Intel investor admitted. Everyone, Bartiromo knew, had an agenda in talking to her. She quickly called her best source at DLJ. “Maria, I’ve gotta call you back,” he blurted. “I hear you’re downgrading Intel,” she said. “Maria, yes, but…” He quickly hung up. The firm had gotten after her guy. The executives knew that they were friends; they had been seen having dinner. Even though he wasn’t the original source, Bartiromo felt that she had gotten him into trouble.
CNBC sometimes hyped news that was little more than Street chatter, and Bartiromo occasionally joined in the speculative sweepstakes. Novell, a computer-software firm, jumped 15 percent after Bartiromo described a forthcoming article in Barron’s in which an analyst said the stock could quadruple in five years. But even CNBC’s clout had its limits. When Bartiromo quoted mere speculation that the firm LSI Logic was expected to make “a real bullish presentation” at a tech conference, the stock nonetheless dropped by 11/16.
Still, Wall Street traders such as Jim Cramer, cofounder of TheStreet.com, began betting on the Maria factor. She could really make stocks dance, Cramer believed. Early one morning in the summer of 1999, Cramer’s Merrill Lynch broker called him with news that the firm was upgrading the semiconductor maker Micron Technology. “That’s gonna be huge,” Cramer said, even though the analyst was some no-name he’d never heard of. “Why? We’re not really important on Micron,” the broker said. “Yeah, but someone at your company speaks to Maria Bartiromo.”
Just as Cramer had anticipated, Bartiromo quickly trumpeted the Merrill upgrade. Micron jumped three points and Cramer dumped 15,000 shares, knowing that lots of buyers would be riding the Bartiromo wave. This was absurd, he thought, and investors will sort out the truth. The stock quickly crested and began falling back to earth. Cramer bought back the shares after Micron had dropped three points, back near its original price. He’d turned a quick $45,000 profit by calibrating the short-term power of CNBC.
Even as he exploited her reports, Cramer began skewering Bartiromo as an outrageous tout who simply recycled whatever the analysts at the big blue-chip firms said. Bartiromo was unfazed. If Merrill Lynch had 13,000 brokers pushing a stock to its big-money clients, that stock was probably going to move. If she had the news before it was widely disseminated, she wanted to get it out there. Bartiromo wished she wielded the kind of influence she was assumed to have, but that wasn’t the way her world worked. These weren’t her opinions. She was just a reporter, passing on the judgment of others.
It was guru gridlock out there as the stock market surged into the new century. The fortune tellers were fiercely bullish, with Prudential’s Acampora predicting that the Dow could reach 13,500 to 14,000 by the end of 2000. Unfortunately, the market immediately headed south. In late January, the day after the Dow plummeted 243 points, Bartiromo said: “I just hung up with the chief strategist at Goldman Sachs, Abby Joseph Cohen, clearly one of the best bulls around. She made a case why stock prices should continue going higher in the year 2000.” Ten weeks later came the April crash, with the Dow plunging a record 618 points in a single day.
Whether the market was soaring or sinking, the national obsession with stocks had created a new kind of celebrity, as a front- page New York Post headline last spring made clear. money honey: I WANT TO BE KATHIE LEE, it said. Bartiromo had announced that she’d love to be the new sidekick on Regis Philbin’s morning show, where she would soon be having a tryout.
At the moment, Bartiromo was on the “Today” show set with Katie Couric to chat up the premiere of her new Friday-night show, “Market Week,” which she had been promised after being dropped from “Business Center.” Bartiromo tried to dampen the speculation that she might team up with the star of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” She had her sound bite down: Regis tries to help people become millionaires, but I help people become billionaires.
Never mind that with the market’s recent volatility it was considerably harder to become a mere millionaire, or even to avoid losing a bundle, by following the advice of the wizards who kept talking up stocks on CNBC. Watching from across the river in New Jersey, Joe Kernen, an acerbic panelist on the morning show “Squawk Box,” saw his colleague leading them out of the cable-news ghetto to the brighter lights of media stardom. “We’re all going to be rich!” he shouted. “Maria’s breaking out!”
