One on One with Carl Icahn, Chairman, Icahn Enterprises

Perhaps more than anyone else, the person associated with leading proxy fights these days is Carl Icahn. He calls himself a shareholder activist. He uses funds from his firm, Icahn Associates, to buy stock in a company that he considers undervalued and pressures management to take measures he thinks are necessary to turn it around. If they don't, Icahn often tries to get his own directors elected to the company's board.

I sat down recently with Carl Icahn and began by asking him how he rates his chances of success in proxy fights over the next couple of months, now that hedge funds and mutual funds are joining with him.

Interview Transcript

One Guy Who Has Seen It All Doesn't Like What He Sees Now

Peter Bernstein has witnessed just about every financial crisis of the past century.

As a boy, he watched his father, a money manager, navigate the Depression. As a financial manager, consultant and financial historian, he personally dealt with the recession of 1958, the bear markets of the 1970s, the 1987 crash, the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s and the 2000-2002 bear market that followed the tech-stock bubble.

Today's trouble, the 89-year-old Mr. Bernstein says, is worse than he has seen since the Depression and threatens to roil markets into 2009 and beyond -- longer than many people expect.

Mr. Bernstein, whose books include "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk," sees two culprits. One is the abuse of securitization -- the trend for banks to hold fewer loans on their books and instead turn them into securities that were sold to other investors. The other is simply years of overborrowing by financial institutions and consumers alike.

Mr. Bernstein is hopeful that Federal Reserve intervention will prevent deflation and depression, but he says there is no guarantee.

Excerpts of a recent interview

Warren Buffett Finances Mars-Wrigley Deal: The Complete CNBC Interview

Warren Buffett spoke live this morning (Monday) with CNBC's Squawk Box about his role in today's $23 billion Mars acquisition of Wrigley.

Here is the complete interview

Transcript: Wal-Mart’s Lee Scott

Lee Scott, chief executive officer of Wal-Mart since 2000, spoke to Jonathan Birchall, the FT’s US retail correspondent, about the state of the world’s largest retailer.

Here is an edited transcript of the interview.

Betting on a Market

Few start-ups will have emerged better from the dotcom meltdown than Betfair. Launched in 2000 by Britons Andrew "Bert" Black and Edward Wray, the London-based online betting exchange has since grown into the world's largest. Rather than play house, Betfair matches bettors with odds offered by other users, its whizzy technology handling some 300 wagers a second. The small cut the firm takes from the bettors' winnings these days adds up to big profits: Betfair pocketed $39 million in net earnings last year. And in refusing wagers from the U.S. [EM] where online gambling is outlawed [EM] Betfair has dodged a recent clampdown on rival Internet operators. Here is their story, as told to TIME's Adam Smith.

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