Juggling Dynamite

“One of the most important issues in this year’s election is energy.

Our ongoing addiction to Mid-East oil leaves us dependent on countries that are often unstable and hostile. Developing our own domestic energy resources and investing in renewable energy lessens this dependence. It also has the potential to create jobs and improve our trade deficit.

The two presidential candidates have laid out energy plans that sound similar: both President Obama and Governor Romney want to continue to develop domestic energy resources, including renewable energy, with the aim of making the U.S. less dependent on foreign oil.

But according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president of environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance, the plans are different in several important ways. And President Obama’s plan, Kennedy says, is much better for the country.

“We need to be energy independent but we can’t look into the future by looking in a rearview mirror…”

Here is a direct link.

This interview is fascinating in its revelations about Spielberg, his impressions of Abraham Lincoln, parent-child relationships and humanity in general. Here is a direct link.

Greg Smith, who publicly resigned in a scathing op-ed, says the investment bank’s unethical culture threatens the firm’s future. Anderson Cooper reports. Smith is a conflicted character and his motivation is most certainly self-serving, but this discussion is revealing all the same. Especially the bits about how pension managers have been buying financially suicidal derivative securities in desperate attempts to juice their performance returns. This is the financial world’s version of illegal doping to try and garner a performance advantage and it is inherently dangerous to the beneficiaries they are hired to serve. Their actions are the opposite of what fiduciary duty requires of ethical risk managers. Here is a direct link.

As we watch, I offer this timeless quote from the Pecora Commission (held 1932-1934) report of the Senate banking and currency committee. The more things change…

“The deplorable consequences to the American investing public, with their misplaced reliance upon and confidence in the competency and integrity of purpose of the investment trustees, is woefully exemplified by the Goldman-Sachs Trading Corporation.” –Senate banking and currency report, June 1934