I'll bet it would be pretty enlightening to eavesdrop on these phone calls.

Reuters reports that new consumer financial chief Richard Cordray, the former Ohio attorney general, “has been calling the heads of some of the top U.S. banks in an effort to build support for his agency, which is viewed skeptically by the financial industry.”

Since becoming director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Jan. 4, Mr. Cordray “has reached out to about 100 people at banks, trade associations and consumer groups to make introductions and get feedback.”

Among those he has chatted up, Reuters says, are James Rohr, CEO of PNC Financial Services Inc., Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit and JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon.

Through the phone calls and public statements, Mr. Cordray “has been eager to show that he is not a wild-eyed activist but a level-headed regulator who will seek feedback from all sides,” Reuters reports. (Anyone who has met or worked with Mr. Cordray knows he's not a “wild-eyed activist,” but that's how politics works these days.)

He tells Reuters that his pitch to the business community is that he plans “to go after those breaking the law or abusing consumers, and that will help the majority of lenders who are on the up and up.”

The chief economist for the state of Washington is leaving his job for a gig in Cleveland.

The Bellingham Herald reports that Arun Raha, who was appointed to the Washington state Economic and Revenue Forecast Council in 2008, has taken a job as director of corporate economics for Eaton Corp.

Mr. Raha's tenure in Washington state coincided with the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The newspaper says he was “known to inject jokes into the often dire economic reports.”

It does seem like he has a sense of humor. In announcing his departure, Mr. Raha told reporters, “I'm going back to the private sector and anonymity, hopefully.”

U.S. stocks have risen the past four days, pushing the S&P 500 to its highest point since July 28. But don't expect Bruce McCain, chief investment strategist at the private-banking unit of KeyCorp, to throw a party.

He's quoted in this Bloomberg story and sounds a highly cautious note.

“It's a four-day rally, but a fairly miserable carry through,” Mr. McCain tells the news service. “There's improved optimism, yet people still don't want to take risk. We have become more sanguine about the problems in Europe and they still have a mess. That has the potential to take us by surprise and it's not going to be a good surprise.”

See what you started, Cleveland Clinic?

HealthDay News reports that Pennsylvania's Geisinger Health System is the latest health care system to follow the lead of the Clinic and turn away job applicants who smoke. Geisinger's ban starts next month.

“This is quite a trend. Hospital systems throughout the country are doing this increasingly," says Dr. Michael Siegel, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health.

The Clinic in 2007 became one of the first hospital systems — and certainly the most influential — to pursue an aggressive anti-smoking policy.

If you check out page 19 of next Monday's print edition of Crain's, in a Reporters' Notebook item by health care reporter Timothy Magaw, you'll see more about this topic.

You don't have to be much of a movie fan to recognize that the most famous line from ”Apocalypse Now” — Robert Duvall's declaration, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” — has had huge cultural resonance since the film's release in 1979.

This three-minute video mashup goes to great lengths to show just how widespread versions of that line have been in other movies for the last 30+ years, and there's a Cleveland tie.

At the 2:05 mark, you'll hear a character say, “I love the smell of Cleveland in the morning.”

It comes from a 2004 television movie, ”Bet Your Life,” about a man who bets he can elude the hitmen who want to kill him and flees Las Vegas for Cleveland to do it.

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