To boost more talented minority executives into the corporate stratosphere, Ariel Investments’ Mellody Hobson wants to install them at the top of existing businesses—and connect them with the customers and capital to succeed. Asa sixth grader in Chicago public schools in 1980, Mellody Hobson was mortified by the snaggletooth that protruded when she smiled. It simply didn’t fit the future she envisioned for herself. She asked her friends who wore braces for the name of their orthodontist, and...

Hedge funds posted their best monthly performance in a decade in May, taking advantage of rallying stock markets and distressed opportunities across the board, according to the latest numbers from the Absolute Return Composite of hedge fund indices. The industry has been increasingly under the microscope by Washington and investors alike since the second half of last year. On top of registering their worst performance ever in 2008, with the average fund down 19 percent for the year, the $50...

The euro zone is doomed to fail because the divide between the northern and southern countries is just too great, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan told CNBC in a recent interview. Alan Greenspan "At the outset of the creation of the euro in 1999, it was expected that the southern eurozone economies would behave like those in the north; the Italians would behave like Germans. They didn’t," Greenspan said. "Instead, northern Europe fell into subsidizing southern Europe’s excess consumption,...

The big banks don't have to be split if the "right regulation" is in place, Sandy Weill, former chairman and CEO at Citigroup, told CNBC on Tuesday, a year after he shocked the financial world by calling for the breakup of the investment banking and commercial banking operations. But Weill added in a "Squawk Box" interview that if regulations prevent investment banking from operating in a constructive way within big banks, then they should decide on their own to "split if they figure that's...

Activist investor Bill Ackman told CNBC on Wednesday his partnership with Valeant Pharmaceuticals to try to buy Allergan for $46 billion does not violate securities law. This arrangement, in which Ackman bought a 9.7 percent stake in the Botox maker at the behest of Valeant, was not front-running and not insider trading, Ackman said in a "Squawk Box" interview. He said his lawyer-Robert Khuzami, former director of enforcement at the SEC-vetted the Valeant partnership and deemed it legal. "The...