Posts Tagged ‘Wall Street’
Goldman Sachs Rejects Proposal To Run For Political Office
Friday, 29 March 2013 09:40
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The investment banking giant needed intervention from the SEC to ensure that a shareholder’s satirical proposal—that the firm drop all pretense and simply run for political office as a candidate called “Goldman Sachs”—will not be put to a vote at its annual meeting, reports Bloomberg:

A shareholder proposal that the New York-based company run for office instead of funding political campaigns was discarded, according to a letter last month from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which agreed the firm can exclude the measure from its annual meeting.

Harrington Investments Inc. President John Harrington submitted the proposal last year, saying the $6. (Read more…)39 million in 2012 political contributions from the firm’s employees risks doing more harm to its reputation. He said the bank should explore running for office, using a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that corporations have similar political rights to individuals.

“It would be less damaging to the integrity of our political system and our company, for our corporation to directly run for office as a person under federal or state law, than to continue in the current form of political participation,” Harrington wrote in the proposal.

 
Wall Street Exploring Ways To Profit From Global Warming
Monday, 11 March 2013 08:00
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Turning lemons into really pricy lemonade. Bloomberg on the investment companies banking on massive windfalls as the planet heats:

Investing in climate change used to mean putting money into efforts to stop global warming. Now some investors are taking another approach. Working under the assumption that climate change is inevitable, they’re investing in businesses that will profit as the planet gets hotter. (Read more…)

Derivatives that help companies hedge against abnormal weather and natural catastrophes are drawing increased interest from big players. In January, KKR bought a 25 percent stake in Nephila Capital, an $8 billion Bermuda hedge fund that trades in weather derivatives.

Drought is helping spur business at Water Asset Management. The New York hedge fund, which has about $400 million under management, buys water rights and makes private equity and stock market investments in water treatment companies.

Ole Christiansen is also investing to take advantage of rising temperatures. “Last summer we were exploring in south Greenland, mainly for gold,” says the chief executive officer of NunaMinerals (NUNA), a local mining company. “It has previously been covered by a glacier, but most of that glacier has disappeared.”

Piet Dircke, who oversees water management at Arcadis, says his phone was ringing nonstop in the days after Sandy. “The climate is changing. Sea level is rising. That’s quite obvious,” says Dircke. “It’s almost a natural growth market.”

 
Wall Street Whistleblower Gets Reamed
Thursday, 07 March 2013 12:15
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When the odds are stacked this heavily against whistleblowers, there’s not much incentive to rat out wrongdoers. Matt Taibbi looks at how even the courts are in on it, for Rolling Stone:

A great many people around the county were rightfully shocked and horrified by the recent excellent and hard-hitting PBS documentary, The Untouchables, which looked at the problem of high-ranking Wall Street crooks going unpunished in the wake of the financial crisis. The PBS piece certainly rattled some cages, particularly in Washington, in a way that few media efforts succeed in doing.

(Read more…)

Now, two very interesting and upsetting footnotes to that groundbreaking documentary have emerged in the last weeks.

The first involves one of the people interviewed for the story, a former high-ranking executive from Countrywide financial who turned whistleblower named Michael Winston. You can see Michael’s segment of The Untouchables at around the 4:20 mark of the piece. The story Winston told during the documentary is essentially an eyewitness account of the beginning of the financial crisis.

When I spoke to him last week, Winston was still as amazed and repulsed by what he saw at Angelo Mozilo’s crooked subprime mortgage company as he was when he worked there. Winston, who had worked for years at high-level positions at companies like Motorola and Lockheed before joining Countrywide in the 2000s, described a moment in his first months at the company, when he rolled into the parking lot at the company headquarters.

“There was a guy there, a well-dressed guy, standing next to a car that had a vanity plate,” he said. “And the plate read, ‘FUND’EM.’”

Winston, curious, asked the guy what the plate meant…

[continues at Rolling Stone]