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Will Higgins, an excellent wordsmith for The Indianapolis Star, was kind enough to include me in interviews he did in preparation for a story about the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s Centennial and the track’s enormous impact on Indianapolis. He included a couple of my quotes in his story. It was another one of those “you-know-you’re-getting-old-when” moments […]
“How is your unwritten book coming along?” Myra Mariachi asks. “How do you know I have an unwritten book?” I respond. “Because you’re the type of person who might write a book but not the type who is writing a book,” Myra says. “A genuine author is secluded for hours at a time, doesn’t answer […]
It’s a rainy Monday morning and Doug Clark is making a house call-an early but otherwise average start to his week. He parks in the circle driveway of a lookalike home in a suburban subdivision, grabs his black bag and, after a few brief raps on the door, is greeted by a middle-age housewife. She […]
The 32-year-old developer Lauth Group Inc. likely will survive in some form if the company can find financing to get it through a Chapter 11 reorganization and if the real estate market doesn’t take too long to turn around, experts said. The developer of more than $3 billion in projects has scrambled this year to […]
This week, two community theater productions reinforce my decision not to give “star” ratings. You may have noticed that in this column I never give shortcut ratings. No “three and a half stars.” No “thumbs up.” While I appreciate ratings when it comes to buying vacuum cleaners, I don’t find them useful in talking about […]
An activist shareholder vying to become a director of Conseco Inc. says the insurance company’s board “completely misjudged” the risks it faced when it emerged from bankruptcy in 2003 and hasn’t recovered since. Now an independent shareholder advisory firm is siding with him. “The board is blindly pushing forward into risky waters with limited view […]
The planet is all agog over swine flu. We’re not supposed to call it swine flu. We’re supposed to call it H1N1. That way, the hogs and pigs won’t get upset and U.S. pork sales won’t decline any further. And besides, the disease isn’t transmitted through swine, um, “donations” to the human cause. We spread […]
Amid the aroma of its lobby coffee shop and soothing tones of its player piano, the Indiana Heart Hospital sits at the center of significant changes in how Indianapolis’ hospitals and doctors do business. The 56-bed facility in Castleton was launched in 2003 as a forprofit venture between Community Health Network and its cardiovascular physicians. […]
Call it a trickle-down effect, but not the kind President Reagan would have liked. The recession has cost most institutional investors, such as university endowments, about a quarter of their value. As a result, venture capitalists’ primary source of funding has dried up. The implications for Hoosier entrepreneurship are stark. “Right now, it is very […]
This week, two community theater productions reinforce my decision not to give “star” ratings. You may have noticed that in this column I never give shortcut ratings. No “three and a half stars.” No “thumbs up.” While I appreciate ratings when it comes to buying vacuum cleaners, I don’t find them useful in talking about […]
Financial reports trickling in from Indianapolis’ major hospitals show why the city’s health care building boom ground to a near halt this year. It ran into a wall of investment losses. A case in point: Indianapolisbased Clarian Health suffered a whopping $633 million in losses on its investments and interest-rate swaps last year. That wiped […]
Customer groups say an 18-percent rate hike sought by the Indianapolis Department of Waterworks is excessive even for a utility drowning in variable-rate bond debt that’s swelled since financial markets collapsed. The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission is weighing the department’s request filed in February to tap customers for an additional $22 million in the wake […]
Risk has a bad name these days, for understandable reasons. In recent years, many corporate executives managed as if the boom times never would end, along the way ratcheting up debt to unfathomable levels. Many bankers, meanwhile, doled out loans to the lowliest of borrowers, and traded complex securities few truly understood. Yet a strong […]
