Through an energy crisis, a stock market crash and even the improbable rise of CNBC’s Maria (Money Honey) Bartiromo, Louis Rukeyser’s Wall Street Week has held on as the country’s most watched financial TV show.
By Hall Lux, with Jenny Anderson, Rich Blake, Lucy Conger, Justin Dini, Kevin Hamlin, Jeffrey Kutler and Justin Schack
December 2000
Institutional Investor Magazine
Last month Rukeyser celebrated his reign in style with a special 30th-anniversary broadcast of the PBS show from New York’s Carnegie Hall. Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill, Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt Jr., New York Stock Exchange chairman Dick Grasso and Goldman Sachs star pundit Abby Joseph Cohen were among the Wall Street celebrities who showed up to pay tribute to Rukeyser. As usual, the pun-dropping host grilled his guests about the next move in stocks and the economy. The experts, prediction: Evolving technologies and the Internet will continue to globalize the economy, and the waves of consolidation will keep rolling in. But Rukeyser hasn,t lasted 30 years by needlessly sticking his own neck out. Asked by this magazine to predict the winner of the deadlocked presidential election, a critical factor for the stock market in November, Rukeyser took a pass. Says the wary TV host, “As Eric Severeid said, ,Never make a prediction that can be proved wrong within 72 hours.,”
