Loomis: Always ahead of the curve

Christine Haughney of the New York Times profiles Carol Loomis of Fortune magazine, who has retired after more than 60 years at the business publication.

Haughney writes, “In the 1960s, she wrote one of the first articles about hedge funds. She reported two cover articles on the risk of derivatives in the mid-1990s, long before those instruments contributed to the near-collapse of the global economy. A 1999 piece, ‘Lies, Damn Lies and Managed Earnings,’ presaged the wave of accounting scandals a few years later. On Monday, Fortune will publish her final article before she retires, a piece about one of the world’s most powerful financiers, Laurence D. Fink of BlackRock.

“Ms. Loomis is perhaps best known as Mr. Buffett’s Boswell. She has been Fortune’s resident expert on Mr. Buffett since meeting him in 1966, and each year edits the annual shareholder letter of Mr. Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway. The two speak nearly every business day and are frequent bridge partners, playing mostly over the Internet.

“She will have more time now for bridge. At her age, she said, it was becoming too difficult to jump on a plane and take extended trips to write the deeply reported, lengthy magazine features that she worked on throughout her career.

“‘I began to realize that some of the things that a Fortune writer needs to do, just take for granted, become a little bit harder at this age,’ said Ms. Loomis, seated in a Fortune conference room on Wednesday. ‘I didn’t want to be a Fortune writer who was constrained in any way.'”

Read more here.