Early life and education
Alice Lynnette Davey is a native of Dallas, Texas. She received a Bachelor of Business Administration, BBA in finance and an Master of Business Administration, MBA from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin in 1978 and 1980.Career
Work for the Financial Accounting Foundation
From 1980 to 1991, Schroeder worked as a Certified Public Accountant, CPA at Ernst and Young, starting in Houston. In 1991 Schroeder became a project manager for the Financial Accounting Standards Board of the Financial Accounting Foundation in Norwalk, Connecticut. Her projects focused on ending abusive insurance industry accounting practices primarily due to the use of finite risk transfer contracts, an issue which later became central to the criminal allegation faced by employees of AIG and Berkshire Hathaway-owned Gen Re, General Re,. Schroeder's work included overseeing List of FASB pronouncements#Statements of Financial Accounting Standards, the release of: *SFAS No. 113: ''Accounting and Reporting for Reinsurance of Short-Duration and Long-Duration Contracts'', *EITF Issue 93-6Insurance analyst
In 1993, Schroeder left the FASB to work as a Sell side, sell-side insurance investment analyst for Dowling Partners in Hartford, a boutique firm run by V.J. Dowling. In 1994, Schroeder moved to CIBC Oppenheimer. In 1998, she joined PaineWebber. In 1998 Schroeder wrote Warren Buffett a letter requesting a meeting for her clients about Berkshire's recent acquisition of the reinsurer General Re, which she covered. Afterward, Buffett approached her to become the first and only Wall Street sell-side analyst to whom he would speak. Schroeder then initiated coverage of the hard-to-analyze Berkshire Hathaway in a widely-admired report. This was the first significant Wall Street coverage the company received. In 2000, Schroeder was hired by Morgan Stanley, where she was voted the #1 property-casualty insurance analyst two years in a row after having been ranked a member of the Institutional Investor (magazine), ''Institutional Investor'' All-America Research Team for seven years.''Institutional Investor (magazine), Institutional Investor''. October 2001. October 2002. In 2002. Schroeder was voted one of ''Business Insurance (magazine), Business Insurance'' magazine's "Rising Stars". That year, she was also named analyst/researcher of the year by ''The Review'', a reinsurance industry publication.Books and reporting
''The Snowball''
In 2003, Schroeder has reported that an investment writer approached her to jointly write a book about Warren Buffett and corporate governance. Schroeder felt this was not the right book and discussed another idea with Buffett, who offered to cooperate with her if she wrote a more comprehensive book. In June 2003, Schroeder, then a managing director at Morgan Stanley, began traveling to Omaha to research and write Buffett's official biography, ''The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, The Snowball''. Schroeder spent approximately 2,000 hours with Buffett and interviewed 250 other people. Schroeder reportedly received a $7 million book contract for publishing ''The Snowball''. ''The Snowball'' was published September 29, 2008, and debuted at #1 on ''The New York Times'', ''The Wall Street Journal'' and ''Publishers Weekly'' lists of hardcover nonfiction best-sellers and remained on the bestseller list for more than three months. After the book's publication, Buffett reportedly stopped speaking to Schroeder. He canceled the yearly dinner Schroeder hosted in Omaha at which she interviewed him before nearly two hundred people. ''The New York Times'' reviewer Janet Maslin called it one of her ten favorite books of 2008. ''Time (magazine), Time'' and ''People (magazine), People'' also named ''The Snowball'' one of the ten best books of the year.''People (magazine), People''. December 29, 2008.MBIA and Bill Ackman report
In 2002, activist hedge fund manager Bill Ackman challenged bond insurer MBIA's AAA bond credit rating, rating calling for a division between MBIA's bond insurers' structured finance business and its municipal bond insurance side. Ackman published a report raising extensive concerns about MBIA's continued solvency. He gave Schroeder's team an early draft and suggested they downgrade MBIA, but they initially resisted. Schroeder and her colleague Vinay Saqi eventually responded to Ackman's report, partially acknowledging Ackman's thesis.Goldman Sachs pistol retraction
On November 30, 2009, Schroeder published an editorial, opinion piece on Bloomberg News stating that several Goldman Sachs bankers, in a show of prescience about potential social unrest, had obtained pistol permits. In a December 9, 2009, ''The Wall Street Journal'' blog post, journalist Susanne Craig reported that New York City Police Department spokesman Paul J. Browne retracted certain earlier information it had earlier given Alice Schroeder on the number of banker permit applications, which was part of the basis for the column. Bloomberg has since re-published the column on its website in corrected form.First Call estimate
In 2002, ''The Wall Street Journal'' broke the news that Thomson Reuters' First Call, a research database which compiles the earnings estimates of Wall Street analysts to publish consensus earnings estimates for public companies, removed Schroeder's estimate on Chubb Corp., Chubb Insurance from the database after Schroeder refused to raise her estimate on Chubb to match that of other analysts, whom she disagreed with. Once other investment banks complained about similar experiences, First Call agreed to include a broader range of analyst forecasts in its estimates and better disclose the factors that account for their differences in judgment.References
External links
{{DEFAULTSORT:Schroeder, Alice Living people McCombs School of Business alumni American women journalists 1956 births American business and financial journalists American business writers Women business writers American women essayists Women business and financial journalists 21st-century American women