Boston Business Journal

Wild market brings slew of questions for advisers

by Mary K. Pratt,
October 17, 2008

Michael J. Ruberto, shareholder and name partner at Ruberto, Israel & Weiner, launched his law career in 1972 at Kaye & Fialkow as a tax lawyer. The small firm repeatedly had Ruberto working on banking cases, and he soon accepted his calling as a banking attorney. In 1986, Ruberto took a position as managing partner at Hoberman & Pollock and then in 1994, he arrived at RIW as the head of the banking department of the firm. He is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and earned his law degree from Boston University. He sat down with Banker & Tradesman to talk about the chaos of the banking world today, and how best to escape from it.

Company: Ruberto, Israel & Weiner
Title: Shareholder and Name Partner
Age: 63 Experience: 36 Years

Q: What are your thoughts on the banking situation right now and how many of these cycles have you seen?
A: It really does come and go. This happened in the late 80s, early 90s. “This” being the economic downturn, and it’s happening again. What happens is when the economy first goes down, we get so busy we can’t handle all the work because we’re doing work outs of loans that have gone bad, business goes down. Then after you finish all that, you slow down for a period, because banks have tightened up their credit standards and then all of a sudden – if a bank doesn’t lease out its inventory, it goes out of business – so they start lending again and you start the whole process over again. I’ve been through two of those. Right now we’re in the process of working out the bad loans. I assume we’ll get quiet after a while and then things will pick up again.

Q: Is this worse than what you’ve seen before?
A: It always seems more intense when you’re going through it.

Q: But through it all, what remains the same?
A:What remains the same is the same in government, no matter who’s president, you have those mid-level bureaucrats which are the loan officers, and they remain the same – that’s how you stay in business. People do business with people they know and like, and you get to know people and you do business with them. They trust you. The reason people come to me is because they’ve dealt with me, they know me, they like me and they like the quality of my work. It’s true in everything; it’s the relationships that always carry on.

Q: How do you kick back and relax when you’re not at work?
A: One thing I do is ballroom dancing. My wife and I dance on a competitive level… a low-level competitive level. I belong to a book group in New York that’s run by a fellow named Bill Johnson who used to be a professor of philosophy over at Brandeis for 25 years. We’ve spent semesters talking about Shakespeare, semesters talking about philosophy, semesters talking about the Revolutionary War and the Constitution. When I am not reading any of these books for the book club, I am reading cheap mystery novels.

Q: So your favorite dance, I hear it’s the Foxtrot?
A: It is! It is, because it’s the easiest – the one I learned in high school. My mother sent me to the girls club to learn how to dance when I was about 10 years old. But I do remember the Foxtrot.

Q: What’s the hardest?
A: For me the hardest dances are the Latin dances. I find the smooth dances fairly easy. I mean, I like the waltz, the foxtrot, the tango, the rumba…but when you start getting into the salsa and things like that, it gets harder.

Q: What else do you enjoy?
A: I’m also interested in the ballet. My wife was on the board of directors of the Boston Ballet for 25 years. So, I was dragged into that kicking and screaming. I got used to the music and eventually I began to enjoy the art form, it’s really a lot of fun.

Mike Ruberto’s Five Favorite Books, Authors
1. “Jude the Obscure” by Thomas Hardy. This novel was the last Hardy wrote, and began as a magazine serial. It was first published in book form in 1895. The book was burnt publicly by the Bishop of Exeter in that same year.
2. “Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton. “Age of Innocence” won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize. The story is set in upper-class New York City in the 1870s.
3. The Civil War Trilogy: Gods and Generals / The Killer Angels / The Last Full Measure by Michael and Jeff Shaara. Jeff completes the Civil War Trilogy started by his late father Michael; whose book “The Killer Angels” described the Battle of Gettysburg.
4. Anything by James Lee Burke, a mystery writer best-known for his Dave Robicheaux series.
5. Anything by Agatha Christie. Christie, an English crime writer of novels, short stories and plays, who also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, is best remembered for her 80 detective novels and her successful West End theatre plays.