A native of Roxboro and a 1991 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, Robert Gray now works on the breaking news desk for the Fox Business Network. Gray has had an eclectic career in journalism, from launching a radio station in Prague to reporting from the New York Stock Exchange for Bloomberg Television.
Gray, 40, joined Fox Business a week before the station launched in October 2007. Since then, he watched the Wall Street crash and rebound that last week brought the Dow Jones industrial average back above 10,000 again. Gray spoke with staff writer David Bracken by phone from New York. Some highlights:
Q: What was it like covering the crisis on Wall Street last year? Living in New York, you're so close to the story. I can remember the weekend Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy I had brunch with someone who worked there, and they weren't quite sure what was going on.
On a personal and professional level, you're so close to the story. You know people at all of these firms who are affected by these bankruptcies.
I can remember Sunday nights standing out in front of various firms wondering who was next because the market was moving against a lot of the big firms as it had against Bear Stearns and then Lehman Brothers. You name any of the firms, and they were all at risk. ... It was very exciting because you never knew what was coming next and you were trying to stay ahead of the story.
Q: How would you rate the business press's coverage of last year's financial meltdown? It is interesting because so much can move on rumor and speculation. Right around the Bear Stearns time when you've got CEOs going on TV and saying "Oh, we're fine" and then they are totally teetering that weekend.
It just shows you how fast things move now. The market itself, the press, the Internet, Twitter, all of these methods of communication can really turn the tide of momentum very quickly.
A lot of it is confidence. That's the one thing that has been underscored to me the most in the past year and a half is that everything is about confidence. Take the Dow at 10,000. It's anecdotal right now, but in talking to a lot of strategists, traders and investors, they feel it will give Main Street more confidence to come back.
Q: Speaking of Dow 10,000, is the rise of many companies' stock prices reflective of their improved health? A lot of them are in a lot better position. It's also relative. Nine months ago or a year ago, we were considering whether a lot of these businesses were going out of business. And now they're back on more solid ground.
The big key right now is jobs ... where the growth is going to come from. Compared to a year ago, everything is going to look great this quarter and next quarter and even the first quarter because earnings were so poor. The question now is when do they start bringing back workers. We know, obviously, the consumer is the key to the economy.
Q: What are investors saying about opportunities in the stock market going forward? A lot of smart folks that I talk to seem to think that the easy money has been made. So now you really need to do more homework. You really need to look individually company by company. Because the herd moved, and sure it can move higher, but don't rely on the momentum to send it higher. That's sort of the theme that I'm getting from a lot of people of late.
Q: How did you end up working in the Czech Republic for four years? I went to Prague in the summer of 1992. Thereweren't many job opportunities if you recall back at that time. I went over and taught English for six months, and then I helped to launch a radio station that was broadcasting in Czech and English. One year turned into four.
It was an amazing time. My wife was with me. Every year we just kept saying, "Let's stay another year."
Q: How did you come to focus on business reporting? I was going to be a sports guy. I had worked ... shooting Carolina games and got a couple packages on the air for Friday night football. And I was in Prague, and it was the first day of trading at the Prague stock exchange since before World War II, when they briefly had a functioning stock market.
So my news producer said, "Hey, I want you to go down to the Prague stock exchange." I was like OK, why not. That was sort of my entree into business journalism. From there on I started covering it. I found that there's only so many "Americans in Prague" stories you can do, but when you start looking at the business aspects -- here's an economy in the nascent stages of capitalism -- people were very interested in what was going on. I sort of developed this expertise over time.
Q: What made you take the job at Fox Business Network just a week before it started? I had launched the radio station in Prague and then the chance to do a startup of this magnitude with someone like Fox, the No. 1 broadcaster out there in cable news, it was an unbelievable opportunity.
Q: What's your network's relationship with Fox News? We work with them very closely, particularly last fall as the market was swooning and the credit crunch was taking hold. We were doing a lot of reports pretty much hourly. In some cases, I thought I was on Fox News as much as the Business Network just trying to keep people up to date because it was just moving so fast, so furiously at the time. We're still available, and we do reports with them from time to time. My role is breaking news for the business network, so I'm always on call.
Q: Have you been back to Roxboro recently? And what do you think of the economic situation there? Last fall, I did a couple of stories on Roxboro and the economy there, and I did a lot of reporting in Roxboro and Chapel Hill. I think it's gotten a lot worse in the last year. The layoffs have picked up. It seems like the jobs are very slow to come back there, just like everywhere else. It is definitely very slow.
