Davos Newbies

The New York Review of Books remains essential reading. Michael Tomasky reviews the two recent biographies of Hillary Clinton and makes the point everyone else has missed:

Carl Bernstein, in A Woman in Charge, and Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., in Her Way, want to relive the controversies of the Clinton White House. After an unprovoked war built on lies, the deaths of tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, illegal domestic spying, government-sanctioned torture, the indefinite incarceration of suspects, a scandal surrounding efforts by the nation’s highest-ranking law enforcement officer to install prosecutors willing to undertake blatantly political prosecutions, and astonishing tales of congressional corruption, is it not at least demeaning and superfluous to be presented with one-thousand-plus pages revisiting such questions as how many hours of billable work Hillary Clinton actually performed for Madison Guaranty? It might not be, if we learned useful new information, about both the Clinton presidency and Hillary’s more recent record in the Senate. But A Woman in Charge and Her Way—the former sometimes by intent, the latter almost always inadvertently—tell us less about Mrs. Clinton than they do about the political and journalistic cultures that allowed hysteria about the Clintons to thrive.

The Financial Times’ Chrystia Freeland interviewed Knut Kjaer, who runs Norway’s massive public investment corporation, NBIM. NBIM manages $350 billion — the bounty of Norway’s North Sea oil — and has an explicitly ethical investment stance. Two parts of the interview were particularly striking. NBIM excluded Wal-Mart from its holdings because of ethics. That sparked this exchange:

When you first excluded Wal-Mart, it didn’t initially respond. Are you starting to get quicker reactions from companies now?
What we did before the decision - and this is standard procedure - we [gave] the company the draft report from the Ethical Council. We sent it to Wal-Mart and I got one of my lawyers to call them for many days, saying that this is very important that you respond.

You phoned them in Bentonville?
Yes, yes. We called for many days, saying this is important for you, this is your chance to give your version.

And your lawyer spoke to people there?
Yes, but they didn’t listen.

Were you surprised by that?
Yes, I was.

That’s entirely consistent with the Wal-Mart portrayed in Charles Fishman’s The Wal-Mart Effect. The hermetic world of Bentonville obviously extends to shareholders.

Less significant, although quite delicious, was this exchange between Freeland and Kjaer:

Do you personally ever feel underpaid?
I don’t and, you know, if you feel underpaid you should quit.

And how much was your salary last year?
Less than $500,000. What’s your salary?

Can I say no comment? I am not running a public fund.
OK, but the press asks me to be more open than the press are.

It’s a fair question. But certainly by fund management standards that’s incredibly modest.
That’s your comment.

It seems clear to me that Kjaer should start a blog.