http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2008/01/08/michael-bloomberg-billionaire-tool-banking-system.html
Michael Bloomberg, Billionaire Tool of the Banking System
January 8, 2008 (LPAC)--New York City's billionaire mayor Michael
Bloomberg is a creature of Wall Street who spent 15 years at Salomon
Brothers before leaving to found his own company, Bloomberg L.P., a
financial data and news provider, and later also a well known financial
news website. According to /Fortune,/ Bloomberg was "ignominiously
fired" in 1982 from Salomon Brothers, where he had "thrived as a
trader... then made an enemy who got him banished to run the firm's
rudimentary computer systems." After his firing, Bloomberg used his
computer knowledge to form, with a few friends, a company to provide
data and analytical tools to Wall Street firms and other bond traders,
founding what was then known as Innovative Market Systems. In 1982 the
firm landed its first big client, Merrill Lynch, and was on its way. By
the time of the April, 2007 /Fortune/ article, Bloomberg had an
installed base of some 250,000 Bloomberg terminals, specialized
financial data, tools and news computers for which customers paid $1,500
a month each; the company also does radio, with some 125 radio stations
subscribing to Bloomberg Business News, and produces news for
television. /Fortune/ estimated that Bloomberg L.P., a private
partnership, had $4.7 billion in revenues and profits before taxes of
$1.5 billion in 2006. Bloomberg is said to own 68 percent of the
company, Merrill Lynch 20 percent, and Mike's fellow co-founders the
rest. Merrill Lynch has also helped finance the company. /Fortune/
estimated that the company was worth at least $20 billion, making Mayor
Mike worth at least $13 billion.
There is another side to this, beyond the standard "boy makes good"
business story, as there usually is for billionaires. The rise of
Bloomberg's information empire coincided with the shift on Wall Street
away from old-style white-shoe investment banking toward the world of
securitization and trading, and Bloomberg was both a beneficiary of this
process and part of the infrastructure which made it possible. Now this
creature of the system is being groomed for yet another role in the
service of his masters.
