Money Tree, a collaboration of PWC and NVCA, has been reporting on venture capital trends for many years and is considered by many as the go-to data source. This April they added CleanTech as a category. Money Tree pulls data from Thomson Financial. They report than in Q1 2007, $264 million was invested in […]

The other month I received an emergency call from a friend. A major corporation was holding its annual shareholder meeting the following day, and a socially important shareholder resolution would be silenced unless a qualified shareholder could be produced to support it at the meeting. With one telephone call we found a sympathetic […]

When Fast Company Magazine listed R&R Consulting and CDSF’s microfinance project as 15th in their 2007 Fast Fifty, they went out on a limb picking something incomprehensible to Editor Keith Hammond as world-shifting disruptive technology. What Fast Company hit upon was a Byzantine slice of the financial markets: debt ratings. As I wrote […]

I came to California as a toddler when there were 20 million fewer people in the state, gas was two bits a gallon, technology came in a vacuum tube, and the closest thing to global warming was a nuclear mushroom cloud. Call me a dinosaur, but the thing I can’t get out of my […]

Capital markets and investor conferences annually draw tens of thousands of attendants from mainstream financial circles. The usual business model revenue stream is pay-to-speak plus vendor (investment bankers, guarantors, rating agencies, data systems) sponsorships and attendance fees (investors get in free). Thus these conferences tend to be clubby and redundant sales pitches. […]

My telephone started ringing this morning and when I picked it up, I heard the crackly voice of Gordon Studebaker. Gordon was calling me from Dulles. As he has done so many times in the past 30 some years, Gordon was heading off to foreign soil to provide economic assistance. What […]

“Shareholder Value” ranks somewhere down there with indulgences when it comes to socially-sanctioned moral turpitude. By indulgences I mean the type of absolution the Catholic Church sold to wealthy patrons prior to the Reformation. Shareholder Value is the excuse corporate executives, shareholders and others involved in the investment business give when they do […]

Transparency. I’m fascinated by its place in Utopian thinking. Hertzka fantasized about an economy where everyone knew each other’s wealth and wages, and how much goods cost to manufacture and sell. Cool. But how do you know that what you are told is true? We have this problem today in […]

turn over any social rock and if you look hard enough, you’ll find a bank under it