By Steve Friess, Photographs: Andrew Eccles

ne of the sexiest women in the television news business is having an especially good week, and it's only Tuesday. She has managed to persuade a triumvirate of hard-to-get stars to sit down with her for important exclusives on the biggest issue of the day, and she is very, very excited.

Whom could we mean? Maybe it's Diane Sawyer, having gotten Britney, K-Fed and Shar to talk about child custody? Or perhaps it could be ESPN's Erin Andrews visiting with Barry Bonds, Floyd Landis and Marion Jones about performance-enhancing drugs? Naw. It's Maria Bartiromo, and her "gets" are actually really, really important.

"I spoke to Hank Paulson, Richard Syron and Angelo Mozilo," she gushes. "So I got to the trio of the housing big hitters." Um, who and what? If you don't know, that's okay. They're only three of the most significant economic leaders, and their thoughts on the burgeoning housing-market crisis are heavily sought and sparingly dispensed.

And the fact that a 40-year-old Italian from Brooklyn with supple lips and glowing hazel eyes can get this much of a buzz from chatting up a group of wrinkly old guys ought to reassure us that the Republic is, indeed, strong. The complex minutiae of economics and government would seem beyond most of our comprehensions or curiosities, but then there's Bartiromo on CNBC's Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo every day and in innumerable other venues making it all seem relatable and -- dare we say it? -- hip. After all, no less than the late Joey Ramone of The Ramones wrote a song about her in which he crooned, "Those eyes make everything okay/I watch her every day."

All of it adds up to life as "the Money Honey," the affectionate moniker applied to her in the late 1990s by one of the New York tabloids when her CNBC star began to rise as the first woman to report live daily from the boisterous, jostling floor of the New York Stock Exchange. What could have seemed like a stunt akin to a barely standing Dan Rather shouting to the audience from the eye of a hurricane became a key you-are-there experience for viewers, who came to rely on Bartiromo to offer a sophisticated analysis of the Dow's activities in language graspable by even the less informed.

But let's get one important thing out of the way: Everybody asks her and, no, she does not find the nickname demeaning or sexist. She revels in her unlikely role as an economic analyst with a Manolo fetish, a girl's girl in what, until she arrived, was largely a man's world. In fact, she recently trademarked "Money Honey" for use in forthcoming efforts to create animated programming aimed at explaining the economy to children, akin to the Schoolhouse Rockof the 1970s. (Her trademark registration does include everything from jigsaw puzzles to visors, but she insists that her educational outreach is the true extent of her merchandizing plans.)

Says Bartiromo of the tag: "I'm flattered and grateful I've been noticed. It's fine, it's cute, whatever. I've never had a problem about not being taken seriously, about getting belittled."

Well, at least not since Roger Ailes, then helming CNBC's programming, put her on the air. Before that she hadn't been able to convince CNN's Lou Dobbs, for whom she produced in the early '90s, to give her an on-camera shot. Dobbs wanted her to stay behind the scenes ...

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