Business | Schumpeter

What is weighing on CEOs’ minds this earnings season?

Shareholder letters are proving to be bleakly prophetic

Illustration depicting a casket of the Prophet, partially open, with a modern CEO inside. The Prophet holds a manuscript and walking stick, while the CEO inside holds a pen and a piece of paper.
Illustration: Brett Ryder

Schumpeter likes to write—and receive—handwritten letters. When he got out his pen last year and wrote to Larry Fink, boss of BlackRock, he explained to the passive-investing billionaire that he was doing so because he believed they shared a mutual interest: letter-writing. Your columnist went so far as to use a John Donne quote, “letters mingle souls”, to elicit a response. Evidently soul-mingling, whatever its merits in Elizabethan England, is not the done thing in Hudson Yards. Mr Fink agreed to an interview but not, sadly, to an exchange of correspondence.

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This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “America, Ink”

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