PBS Offers Retooled ‘Wall Street Week’

“Wall Street Week With Fortune” has finally made its initial public offering, but as with most of the market’s IPOs these days, there isn’t much to get excited about. Unlike the dregs of the dot-com IPO days, however, it’s no disaster.

The timing was right as the successor to “Wall Street Week With Louis Rukeyser” premiered Friday night, unveiling hosts Geoff Colvin and Karen Gibbs. Amid a wave of scandal, the stock market finished its worst first half year in three decades, so there was plenty to talk about with guests Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, and portfolio managers James Chanos and James Barrow.

Colvin and Gibbs know their stuff but face a tricky task following the affable Rukeyser, who split with PBS in April after 32 years and joined CNBC, where he now does a competing program.

Maryland Public Television, which produces “Wall Street Week” with new partner Fortune magazine, struck a balance in revamping the show: The pace has been quickened in a bid to reach a younger crowd, but only from second to third gear so as not to unnerve longtime fans. The format still features opening remarks, a main guest and a round-table talk. At one point Colvin sounded like vintage, bullish Rukeyser when he advised viewers to take the long view: “Bail out of stocks? No way.”

Colvin, the editorial director of Fortune, and Gibbs, a Fox News and CNBC alum, have a promising chemistry: He’s nerdy, she’s smooth. They kept Friday’s discussion lively but at times seemed to pull punches.

Colvin hinted at a debate with Gibbs that never came: Despite Enron, Tyco, etc., she thinks most of corporate America is on the up-and-up; he fears a rise of the down-and-dirty.

Rubin easily brushed off a Colvin hardball: Can anyone trust analysts from brokerages such as Salomon Smith Barney (a unit of Rubin’s employer, Citigroup) amid all the talk about conflicts of interest in the industry? Rubin called it a “manageable conflict,” and Colvin moved on.

Though Rubin was the star guest, Chanos--known for smelling the Enron rat well before the rest of Wall Street and cashing in on the stock’s fall by selling shares “short”--offered the sharpest insights into the crisis plaguing U.S. markets. He noted that none of the frauds now making headlines was detected by outside auditors, and in a poke at a current short-sale target, he said Yahoo’s stock option costs last year, “buried in the footnotes” of financial statements per U.S. accounting standards, exceeded the company’s revenue.

If the new “Wall Street Week” is hardly a radical remake, that can be taken as reassuring. Unlike Wall Street itself, it never needed major reform.

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“Wall Street Week With Fortune” airs Fridays at 8:30 p.m. on KCET and Saturdays at 6 p.m. on KOCE.