At Caffe Vivaldi in New York’s Greenwich Village, Peter Muller bangs out a repertoire full of Carole King riffs on the piano along with his own soft-rock compositions that draw on the likes of Van Morrison and Cat Stevens.

Andy Beal’s road to becoming a billionaire, doing deals with the likes of Carl Icahn and Donald Trump, runs straight through the slums of Newark, New Jersey.

ICICI Bank Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Chanda Kochhar says it doesn’t seem so long ago that she was worrying that she wouldn’t be able to handle her job at what’s now India’s largest nongovernment lender while managing her household and caring for her infant son.

Money manager William Fries went to India in the summer of 2010 in search of investments for his Thornburg International Value Fund. Visiting companies in Mumbai and Delhi, he found they kept diesel backup generators on hand for the power interruptions that are common as the country struggles with an inadequate electricity supply.

Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, took his seat before a Senate appropriations subcommittee on May 4 to make his case for a $106 million budget increase.

Howard Marks was failing miserably. It was 1977, and the research group he oversaw at Citibank had recommended Nifty 50 stocks that lost 90 percent of their value over the previous decade.

As a hedge-fund manager who thrives on turbulence in the commodities markets, John Burbank couldn’t have done better than the first week of May.

As Robert Arnott was deciding whether to start his own investment firm, he met with his hero John Bogle for dinner. At a steakhouse in downtown Philadelphia in 2001, the founder of indexing powerhouse Vanguard Group Inc. spoke with enthusiasm about running his own firm. Bogle, who’s now 82, told Arnott that starting a company could be rewarding once your investing ideas catch fire.

On a sweltering Sunday in April, more than 300 people pack a room above GC Curry House, a popular eatery on a tree-lined avenue in Kuantan on Malaysia’s east coast. They’re here to discuss the potential hazards of a rare- earth refinery Sydney-based Lynas Corp. is building about 25 kilometers away that will process radioactive ore into the exotic metals that go into tech gadgets, hybrid cars and weapon systems.

Prescient bets against the stock market have helped endowment manager Alice Handy regularly beat the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. Handy, who manages money for Smith, Barnard and Middlebury colleges at a firm she founded called Investure LLC, has also done something more satisfying: vanquish Harvard and Yale.

BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink told investors on a conference call in January last year that the world’s biggest money manager was “very well positioned” for 2010. At the end of the year, the market sent a different message: New York-based BlackRock’s total share return was negative 16 percent, while the Standard and Poor’s 500 Asset Management and Custody Bank Index rose 13 percent.

Helena Morrissey remembers her worst moment as a woman in the City, London’s financial district. It was almost 20 years ago, when she was the only female on a team with 16 male bond fund traders at Schroders Investment Management. Her young family’s breadwinner, she’d just returned from her first maternity leave and her boss passed her over for a promotion, saying he doubted her job commitment.

On a sunny Friday afternoon in June 2003, Rajat Gupta was greeted at his waterfront home in Westport, Connecticut, by scores of his McKinsey & Co. partners. They had come from London, Frankfurt, New Delhi and other cities around the world -- and brought along an elephant, which they tethered on the front lawn.

Ask David Conner, chief executive officer of Singapore’s Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp., what makes a world-class bank and he smiles and tells the story of how he was hired. It was April 2002, and Singapore’s banks faced a struggling economy, poor demand for credit and rising competition from foreign lenders that had just won greater access to the Singaporean market.

Luis Picado’s mother remembers the day her son thought he had won the lottery. He came home to their tin-roofed cinder-block house in a Managua, Nicaragua, slum and said he’d found a way to escape poverty and start a new life in the United States.