"Cookie!"
As lovable a character as he might be, James E. Rohr knows he can't connect with the preschool set as effectively as Cookie Monster can. So Rohr, the chief executive of PNC Financial Services Group Inc., was more than happy to play straight man to the cookie-gobbling star of Sesame Street in a skit showing children the importance of spending, saving and sharing.
The skit was part of a two-hour event Wednesday at the Newark Public Library in New Jersey, where the PNC Foundation launched a $12 million financial education initiative in partnership with the Sesame Workshop. The program will include the dissemination of 1 million bilingual multimedia kits geared toward kids age 3 to 5, grants totaling $5 million across 14 states — including $300,000 for the Newark library — for institutions that work with children and early childhood educators, and a public awareness program that will target children and parents alike to drive home the idea of managing money wisely.
We won't know until next week what questions Rohr will have to field from Wall Street when PNC releases its first-quarter results. But if any of them seek his advice on how to save up when "me looking for me favorite thing in whole world: cookies," he'll have a well-rehearsed answer to deliver.
B of A at Bat
Bank of America Corp. customers who happened to stop by a branch on Park Avenue in Manhattan around lunchtime on Monday got quite a surprise.
New York Yankees right fielder Nick Swisher was on hand, giving away tickets to upcoming games, autographing baseballs and taking photos with flabbergasted fans. Swisher, a B of A customer, said he felt like Santa Claus handing out gifts to the unsuspecting patrons.
"You never know what you're going to get when you walk into a Bank of America branch," said a beaming Swisher, who showed no sign of fatigue despite getting to bed in the wee hours of the morning following a loss in Boston to the Red Sox the night before.
His appearance was part of a months-long series of events B of A has planned in conjunction with its sponsorship of Major League Baseball. Star players from the Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers also will be making surprise appearances at B of A branches in their respective cities in the coming weeks. Additionally, B of A will have "customer engagement teams" positioned through mid-June at select ballparks to distribute free, one-month MLB.com team alert subscriptions.
In addition to being a major sponsor of MLB, B of A is a sponsor of nine individual teams, including the Yankees and the Red Sox. (Talk about hedging your bets.)
Amid the bevy of press and B of A employees swarming around Swisher, it was difficult to tell who the actual customers were.
One pair of customers though was hard to miss. Decked from head to toe in New York Mets gear, they were somewhat taken aback when Swisher showered them with Yankees paraphernalia. One bystander asked whether they were going to convert to Yankees fans. Their response: "We live in Queens," the borough where the Mets play.
Rhodes, Bill Rhodes
He faced down the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, kept the peace when doing business in the Middle East and got a hard-fought deal done in China, against the odds. And that's just from the first chapter of "Banker to the World," Citibank veteran William Rhodes' new book about his five decades on the front lines of global finance.
Later chapters, each packaged as a lesson in leadership based on Rhodes' experiences, offer up the now-retired Rhodes' firsthand accounts of dealing with a debt restructuring in Brazil, a financial crisis in Asia and a long-winded speech by an African political leader who was uncooperative in yielding the floor during a forum Rhodes was moderating.
Among the leadership suggestions Rhodes makes: anticipate problems by visualizing their impact, take prompt, comprehensive action and defy intimidation. With a foreword by Paul Volcker and back-of-the-book blurbs from the likes of Nicholas Brady, Henry Kissinger and Nouriel Roubini, "Banker to the World" (McGraw-Hill, $25) shows that Rhodes remains productive as ever since retiring a year ago as a senior vice chairman of Citi. He had worked for the bank for 53 years.
N.Y. State of Mind
Not unlike other cities across America, Seattle and Salt Lake City happen to have streets named Wall.
But these two cities, along with Raleigh, N.C., can also lay claim to fostering an environment evocative of the most famous Wall Street of them all.
According to a report from eFinancialCareers, a networking site, Seattle, Salt Lake City and Raleigh are emerging as hotbeds for jobs in the financial services sector.
Citing February data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the report showed that Seattle is home to more than 87,000 financial services employees. About 900 of those work at the headquarters of investment manager Russell Investments, the report said.
In Salt Lake City, there are roughly 48,000 residents who work in financial services, an increase of 7% over the last decade. The Utah capital is home to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s second-largest office in North America, with more than 1,150 employees, the report said.
And the area comprising the cities of Raleigh and Cary, N.C., had 27,200 financial services employees, according to the BLS.
Econ Mission
George Mokrzan, director of economics for Huntington Bancshares Inc. in Columbus, Ohio, was named vice chairman of the American Bankers Association's economic advisory committee.
Mokrzan has since 2005 been a member of the 11-member committee, which meets twice a year with members of the Federal Reserve Board and the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
For more than a decade, he has provided economic analysis for Huntington's private financial and capital markets group.
