[P2P-F] Fw: The Wisdom of Melville

Tue Nov 29 10:38:10 CET 2011

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: John Fullerton <jfullerton at capitalinstitute.org>
To: Robert Searle <dharao4 at yahoo.co.uk> 
Sent: Tuesday, 29 November 2011, 0:30
Subject: The Wisdom of Melville

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The Wisdom of Melville
"If your banker breaks, you snap." - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
During the summer between the day I resigned from JPMorgan after eighteen years, and the horror of witnessing 9-11 up close and personal, I joined a couple of friends on their fifty foot sailboat in an attempt to sail across the Atlantic Ocean. What better time to read Moby Dick, I thought. 

One thousand miles into the journey, about a third of the way to England, we were struck by a humpback whale, destroying our rudder and leaving us floundering on the Atlantic."

Read more at the Future of Finance Blog.

Profit-making Over Charity?Last Friday, a New York Times article on program-related investing highlighted the $10 million equity stake the Gates Foundation took in Liquidia Technologies. Some in the foundation world are concerned that the investment blurred the lines between profit-making and charity. We and our Braintrust advisor Stephen Viederman say foundations should blur those lines as long as they use their endowment assets to do so. We would argue that foundations should use all of the tools available to them to meet their mission and purpose: grants, program-related investments and, most powerfully, their endowment assets.

Read more about how foundations should invest their endowments here.
Financial Transactions Tax: Update 

In the past month, a number of high-profile individuals have joined the international call for a Financial Transaction Tax. Former Vice President Al Gore, British Hedge Fund Magnate David Harding, Philanthropist and Business Leader Bill Gates, and American Political Activist Ralph Nader have all boldly stood up for the tax.

Nader's support for the tax was most publicly expressed on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal in a piece titled "Time for a Tax On Speculation." In the piece, he cited Capital Institute as one of the leading voices supporting the tax and used an argument made in John Fullerton's blog post "Why We Need a Financial Transactions Tax." A number of leading bloggers, including Angry Bear and A Taxing Matter picked up on this reference and covered the Capital Institute portion of Nader's op-ed.

We are proud to have impacted the debate by influencing a number of these voices. We will continue to provide critical commentary on the FTT and make arguments rooted in complexity theory, a deep understanding of how financial systems function, and the connection our financial decisions have to the real economy and the natural world. 
Read all of John's FTT blog entries here. 

What We're Reading 

Carla Sequist wrote a fascinating piece this week on the striking similarities between Jon Corzine's as CEO of MF Global (and Wall Street titans in general) and Captain Ahab.  She calls on Wall Street to learn the critical lessons of humility, prudence, and cooperation.
Brush Up On Your Melville
Quote of the Week 

"Today's free-marketers need to re-learn the wisdom of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, whom they praise but don't read."

Jeffrey Sachs, Fairness and the Occupy Movement Revisited 
Comment of the Week 

"It is such a relief and delight to read 'A National Strategic Narrative' from the perspective of a Chinese student in the U.S., in a time when China-bashing is (again) the new fashion in Washington. I have always believed that the competition between US and China is not a zero sum game, just as the competition in the ecosystem keeps all parties adaptive and healthy."

-Zilong Wang, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and OWS... Who Knew?

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