Behind every billionaire there is a story!

View from the Top: Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of Blackstone

In a video interview with FT.com, Mr Schwarzman spoke about his IPO, the dangers of rebuffing sovereign wealth funds and why he enjoys giving away money as much as he likes making it. Edited highlights appear below.

You have said in the past that you thought we were in the fifth inning of the financial crisis. Is that where we are now? It depends. There are two pieces of the financial crisis. One is capital markets and the second is the real economy.

In terms of capital markets we’ve got out of the risk of systemic collapse. I think that the Fed has done a really very powerful and impressive job in that regard.

Now, in terms of the real economy and how that’s hitting the financial institutions, that hasn’t fully happened yet.

So I think that is definitely in a fourth or fifth inning. There’s more to come. Do you think Lehman is totally secure? I have a lot of confidence in Dick Fuld [chief executive of] Lehman. I started my career there. Lehman’s faced some challenges from time to time and always found a way to deal with them. They’re very alert and on top of funding issues and they tend to be very clever

read the rest published by FT here:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2a5a42b2-338d-11dd-ba8a-0000779fd2ac.html