Carol Loomis

From the minute I got to 'Fortune,' I loved my job. I knew myself to be a virtual dunce about business, and I was wide-eyed about how much I was learning.

The options and futures traded on exchanges are derivatives contracts.

The goal of the program, called Giving With Purpose, is to teach college students - and anyone else who cares to register - how to beneficially contribute to charity. That's not necessarily easy. There are IRS rules for giving that must be learned, and there is wayward, wasteful philanthropy to be avoided.

Throughout his remarkable business and government career, Robert Rubin, now 65, has both worked exhaustively at reaching well-founded conclusions and rejected the idea that anything - and he means anything - can be a 'provable certainty.'

There is a certain oddity to Larry Fink having problems in Washington. He is a strong Democrat who has close ties to President Obama and has often been rumored as set to take a big administration job, such as Secretary of the Treasury.

Limited partnerships are required to amend their filings whenever important changes, such as the admission of new partners, take place.

In 1980, aided by $1.5 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. government and his own pitchman routines on television, Lee Iacocca brought Chrysler back from the abyss.

The 1969 experience has been a rude awakening for many hedge-fund investors and has left some of them with strong reservations about the whole concept. For the first time in their relatively short history, the funds are not growing: in fact, some have suffered large withdrawals of capital, and a few have actually folded.

In general, the hedge funds were clobbered by the 1969 bear market, ending up in many cases with records that were worse than those put together by aggressive mutual funds denied the luxury of short sales.

Some managements do not even think of buybacks as an option. The idea of shrinking their equity base repels them. Their inclination instead is to get bigger, and this often leads them to pay rich prices for acquisitions that never earn their keep.

Larry Fink, 61, tall and outgoing and passionate about his business, is the chairman, CEO, and co-founder of the largest asset-management company in the world, BlackRock.

On the rare occasions when my family talked about business, the subject was Kansas City's Boss Pendergast and his potential for muscling my dad's small gravel-and-sand operation.