A walking oxymoron

For a guy who said he would never guide analysts, Steve Schwarzman is certainly coming pretty close. Speaking at a Merrill Lynch conference, the chief executive of Blackstone said that annual profit forecasts of $1bn to $2bn for the private equity firm were way too low. That doesn’t amount to the detailed guidance some analysts want, but it’s a departure from the firm’s IPO prospectus earlier this year, in which it said it wanted to be «a different kind of public company» and did not intend to ...