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The mood among bankers gathered in New York on Thursday evening to honor American Banker's 25 Most Powerful Women in Banking was decidedly much more subdued, even humbler, than it has been in years past.
October 7 - WIB PH
Arianna Huffington will be the keynote speaker at the 25 Most Powerful Women in Banking awards dinner hosted by American Banker on Oct. 6, 2011, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.
May 27 -
Political-pundit-turned-digital-entrepreneur Arianna Huffington has lit up the blogosphere with a campaign targeting customers of the largest financial institutions.
January 4
Arianna Huffington had some unusually kind words for banks and bankers at an industry event on Thursday night.
But the Huffington Post founder hasn't changed her mind about the industry's underlying problems.
"There's an enormous amount that needs to be fixed," Huffington told American Banker in an interview on Friday.
"If you look at a lot of the problems that got us through the financial crisis, if you look at mortgages — for me, that is really a key issue, the need to rework mortgages ... there's no question that this is in the public interest," she said.
Huffington, a vocal critic of how some big banks treat their customers, was a rather provocative keynote speaker for a gala celebrating the banking industry. In 2009 she launched a "
But Huffington had a
The event was sponsored by American Banker Magazine and honored the publication's
Huffington, who sold her company to AOL and now runs the combined entity's editorial operations, exhorted her media colleagues to pay more "attention to what is working, not just what is not working."
That line was met with loud applause by the bankers on Thursday night. But on Friday, Huffington said she was referring not to negative stories about the banking industry but to media coverage of sensationalist stories like "
The gala occurred during ongoing "
Huffington praised Miller's speech on Friday, saying "her message really resonated in the room. It was really interesting how in a room of bankers, you heard a lot of the same concerns that you heard around the country."
