Trim and tanned at 81, T. Boone Pickens leans forward in his swivel chair to better hear Al Gore exhort solar and wind power. It’s a scorching August day at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas. Pickens, who has made and lost billions betting on energy in his boom-and-bust career, waits with Democratic Party bigwigs for his turn to speak. His topic: why the US must wean itself from foreign oil.

Every weekday at 8:35 a.m., Galleon Group’s 70 analysts, portfolio managers and traders pack into a conference room on the 34th floor of the IBM Building, a gray- green polished granite skyscraper on New York’s Madison Avenue. Tardy arrivals are fined $25.

In a wood-paneled boardroom in downtown Shanghai, Everett Chu pauses from his job overseeing the finances of snack food giant Want Want China Holdings Ltd. to marvel at the fickleness of history.  Sixty years ago, Chu’s father, an officer in Chiang Kai-shek’s army, was on the losing Nationalist side in China’s civil war.