A documentary filmmaker once described the process of making a small budget movie as "crawling through a field of broken glass." Admittedly, he was making political documentaries and shooting in various war zones of the Middle East. Over there, it's hard to find the glass...
"Why do healthcare costs rise as much as they do? What, specifically, is driving it?" This was the question posed to Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean by Maria Bartiromo during his appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe program on July 27. Dean’s response: "The private sector doesn’t...
Back in the early spring of 1977, an executive in charge of booking for a major Midwestern theater chain was feeling perplexed. He was trying to pick what might be the big summer hit for his company and had narrowed the choices down to one...
"Is the financial system stable enough yet to fix itself?" In a Fortune article exploring this question, R&R's Sylvain Raynes sees the prospect of a CIT Group bankruptcy as a new beginning. "There is still value in CIT that can be picked out if the...
It is the middle of summer and already the air has taken an autumn chill courtesy of the mid-season box office report. Technically, the box office is up by 10 per cent. In reality, this is due to a couple of films that have done...
R&R principal Sylvain Raynes calls for the government to take the lead in weaning the financial markets off their reliance on rating agencies. Reuters reports, "The Obama administration has said it wants markets to reduce their reliance on ratings after Moody's Investors Service, Standard &...
Public interest journalism blog ProPublica interviewed R&R's Sylvain Raynes regarding reports that AIG has sold off dozens of subsidiaries in order to repay the $85 billion it owes American taxpayers. "There's nothing wrong with private transactions between consenting adults," Raynes said, "But when the government...
Reading Hollywood news reports is a lot like reading Pravda and Izvestia back in the days of the old Soviet Union. You have to read heavily between the lines and ignore most of what is said. This is especially true of the recent series of studio...
Bloomberg quotes R&R's Sylvain Raynes on Morgan Stanley's plans to repackage a downgraded collateralized debt obligation into new securities with AA ratings, the first transaction of its kind: "A lot of banks and insurers 'cannot buy anything but AAA,' said Sylvain Raynes, a principal at R&R...
Life is full of ironies. After all, it is pretty ironic that a book detailing how an underfunded professional baseball team was transformed into a budget-friendly powerhouse would actually be a primer on statistics and the need to radically revamp how the statistics are determined...