The holiday gift that everyone loves to hate may be just the thing to “re-gift” on Facebook this holiday season, providing support for those in need.

Two-pound fruitcake bricks will be given away through a PayPal application built on Facebook Platform by Tony Hawk, Jimmie Johnson, Yao Ming, Nicole Richie and Joel Madden, Ben Roethlisberger, and Fall Out Boy — to benefit their favorite charities.

Recipients will be invited via a personal video to contribute through PayPal to the charities and “re-gift” the fruitcake to friends and family all across the world.
The celebs sent out 10 virtual fruitcakes, the time-honored gift that no one wants, to ten friends on Facebook with a video message urging them to give back through PayPal or to simply re-gifting the fruitcakes to their friends for free to drive more awareness.

Everyone who re-gifts is featured on a map of the world that lets you track the fruitcake’s voyage around the globe – and you can see how much money each fruitcake has raised.

http://apps.facebook.com/regiftthefruitcake

Academy Award®-winner Matt Damon and WaterPartners’ Executive Director Gary White held a Fundraising Gala together with the ONEXONE Foundation on October 23 in San Francisco to raise awareness of the drinking water crisis and other critical health issues impacting millions of children around the world.   Celebrity guests included Carlos Santana, David Arquette, and seven-year-old piano prodigy Ethan Bortnick. The gala featured storytelling, live and silent auctions, as well as musical performances by Grammy® Award-winner Wyclef Jean, Josh Groban and the world-renowned African Children’s Choir.

“I want people to know that these problems can be solved, that it’s not impossible and it can be solved in our lifetime,” said Damon.  “If we don’t do it, the outlook for the world is extremely bleak, and if we do, it will be truly wonderful as this is about the world that we’re leaving behind for our kids.”

Water-related diseases are the leading cause of death for children under the age of five, and over one billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water.

“Lack of clean water contributes to disease, poverty and conflict, but the problem is not too big to solve with a partnership of resources and expertise,” said White, executive director and co-founder of WaterPartners. “We are working with similar-minded organizations such as ONEXONE so that eventually everyone in the world will be able to take a safe drink of water.”

About WaterPartners

WaterPartners is a highly respected 20-year-old U.S. non-profit 501 (c) (3) with a mission to provide safe drinking water and sanitation to people in developing countries. WaterPartners fills a key role in addressing the water crisis worldwide. WaterPartners has transformed thousands of lives with access to safe water and sanitation in eight countries - Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Guatemala, India, Kenya, and the Philippines. WaterPartners’ vision: the day when everyone in the world can take a safe drink of water.  Visit www.water.org for more information.

About ONEXONE

ONEXONE is a unique umbrella organization that partners with talented and dedicated NGOs to implement specific programs that align with its mission statement – the alleviation of suffering of children locally and globally – and important programs targeted toward health, education, self-esteem and dignity.  Through its ongoing campaigns, the ONEXONE foundation is committed to supporting, preserving and improving the lives of children at home and around the world.  Please visit www.onexone.org for more information.

From Denny Hatch’s e-newsletter:

Take a gander at this paragraph from a Wall Street Journal story by Robin Sidel on Oct. 20, 2008:

AmEx recently slapped a $1,100-a-month spending limit on John and Monica Bell’s platinum AmEx charge card. The reason: AmEx customers who pay with plastic at the same places where Mrs. Bell shops and have the same mortgage lender have poor repayment histories, according to a letter sent by AmEx.

The couple pays $450 a year for the card which promises “no pre-set spending limit.” The couple routinely spent $5,000 a month that’s $60,000 a year and has never been late with a payment.

If the data goons are allowed to start treating blue-ribbon American Express Platinum Cardmembers like chronic deadbeats, what will happen to the rest of us?

The excess of zeal that fueled the subprime real estate debacle has turned into an excess of fear.

Click to Continue

November 15, 2008, will at last see a summit on how to reform failed global finance.  Invited to the USA, the heart of the failures, by President George W. Bush will be the “leaders” of global finance.  Architects of the failure range from economic globalization enthusiasts Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Alan Greenspan and free market Chicago School de-regulators and privatizers.  Add Wall Street “financial engineers” and quants who “innovated” all those mortgage-backed and credit card-backed securities and the $60 trillion of credit default swaps.

Read the full article by Hazel Henderson at www.ethicalmarkets.com

The Network for Sustainable Financial Markets (NSFM), an international, non-partisan network of finance sector professionals and academics with an interest in long-term investing, is conducting a survey of investment professionals to ask their opinion on how financial services should be reformed in the light of the current global financial crisis. NSFM argues that the financial system had become flawed in that it no longer reflected the interests of ordinary savers, and that insufficient attention had been paid to sustainable wealth creation.

In order to assist in formulating the necessary reforms to overcome the crisis, the NSFM has drafted a set of seven Principles for Financial Reform that address sustainable value creation, the identification of hidden risks and rewards, the balance between short and long-term views, market participants taking responsibility for their actions, improvements to governance in financial institutions, better aligning financial interests, and a coordinated global approach to better protect financial markets.

Mastering value creation in the knowledge economy demands an appreciation for the pivotal role of intangible capital and a thorough understanding of network dynamics.

One of the most challenging questions for modern business people is, “How can we convert intangible assets such as human knowledge, internal structures, ways of working, reputation, and business relationships into negotiable forms of value?”

Intangible assets are converted into value when, for example, an asset such as ‘professional expertise’ is converted into another form of value such as ‘consulting services.’ The conversion dynamic also applies to value realization: when a tangible value input such as ‘purchased market intelligence reports’ is converted into a non-financial knowledge asset of ‘increased levels of marketing competency.’

This paper will show value network analysis offers a way to model, analyze and improve an organization’s capability to convert both tangible and intangible assets into other forms of negotiable value.

Value Network Analysis: Value Conversion of Tangible and Intangible Assets

The Magazine of the Rotman School of Management / Fall 2008

Former President Clinton will officially launch LeapFrog Investments, the world’s first micro-insurance investment firm, at the finale Special Session of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, at 12:00pm ET on Friday (September 26, 2008). The President will be joined on stage by Prime Minister Tony Blair and several heads of state.

The session will be streamed live at www.clintonglobalinitiative.org.

LeapFrog invests in companies that meet the insurance and financial needs of low-income people in developing countries. The firm represents the largest-scale micro-insurance initiative in the world – a crucial next frontier in the development of micro-finance. LeapFrog is led by several of the world’s foremost experts in micro-insurance, and has strong partnerships with leading global law firms, actuaries and consultants in financial services to low-income people.

Micro-insurance helps vulnerable low-income people to escape poverty by dampening the shocks that could leave families destitute. It also enables micro-entrepreneurs to take the risk of adopting new technology that raises their income. It makes lenders more willing to lend to the financially excluded. And it improves health by reducing the costs of seeking care.

The market for microinsurance is estimated to be 1 billion people, according to the Landscape Report, the largest-ever study of microinsurance in 100 countries authored by LeapFrog’s leaders.

For more information about LeapFrog and the, please visit:www.leapfroginvest.com

A good piece on the value of value destruction

Submitted by John Berlau of  http://www.openmarket.org

My reaction to Lehman Brothers’ declaring of Chapter 11 bankruptcy and the refusal of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and others to take extraordinary Bear Stearns-like measures for the government to prop the firm up can be summed up in three words: It’s about time!

Business failure is not only a permissible outcome of capitalism, it’s a necessary one.  As the great economist Joseph Schumpeter has written, the process of “creative destruction” is essential for the market to function. For innovation to flourish and the standard of living of the populace to improve, the market must be free to reward success and punish failure. 

As Schumpeter wrote in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, there is an ongoing “process of industrial mutation — if I may use that biological term — that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in, and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”

There is no doubt Lehman’s failure will be difficult for the firm’s employees, investors and others affected by the firms’ dealings. But Wall Street and the U.S. economy has survived similar failures before and come back to prosper. The investment banking firm Michael Milken’s Drexel Burnham Lambert, a powerhouse of the ’80s, went bankrupt in the early ’90s. The ’90s decade still roared, and many of the innovative companies financed by Drexel, such as Turner Broadcasting, still continue to prosper to this day.

At press time, the stock market was recouping some of its losses, and the trouble with the financials seems not to be affecting consumer and technology stocks, some of which are even posting price gains. Those investors and companies seem to be treating Lehman’s failure as business as usual, which in a capitalist economy, is exactly what business failure - though not usually of Lehman’s size — is.

Hopefully, Paulson and other government officials have realized that bailouts pose their own systemic risk. The Bear Stearns precedent still carries the dangers that financial players won’t merge with troubled firms without trying to get a government guarantee. Also, firms that don’t even want bailouts may be wary to acquire companies without an official government blessing, fearing that the government could come back and undercut the deal. That why the Bear bailout, even though it was smaller, still poses more danger to a functioning market than that of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which as Open Market has pointed out were always quasigovernment enterprises. As Manhattan Institute scholar Nicole Gelinas recently wrote <http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1502&amp;status=article&amp;id=301273617649206>  in Investor’s Business Daily, the Bear bailout threatens to almost transform private investment banks into Fannie-like “government-sponsored enterprises.”

In fact, though most of Lehman’s failure must be left at its own door, the Bear and Fannie bailouts that Paulson engineered may have hurt Lehman’s prospects to find a buyer. His decision that creditors for these companies get 100 percent while shareholders get nothing turned out to be too clever by half. It made it nearly impossible, as CNBC’s Jim Cramer has said, for Lehman to issue new stock, because investors feared this stock too would be wiped out in another government-engineered creditor bailout deal at the expense of shareholders.

If not bailouts, what should public policy do? Economists Larry Kudlow and David Malpass and American Enterprise Institute scholar Peter Wallison have noted <http://aei.org/publications/pubID.27917,filter.all/pub_detail.asp>  that accounting regulations may be adding significantly to the turmoil. The mark-to-market accounting rules from the quasi-private Financial Accounting Standards Board and other regulatory agencies are complicating potential mergers by forcing valuation of assets at today’s market prices. This is the case even when that information is unavailable if markets for things like mortgage-backed securities have collapsed. 

With mark-to-market, many mortgages and other loans now have to be “written down” simply because they can’t be sold — even if they are still being paid and financial institutions plan on holding them to maturity. This forces an acquiring bank to record what is probably a paper loss, but one that could get it a credit rating downgrade and risk violating requirement for “regulatory capital.”

Also, private equity companies should be allowed to buy small stakes in banks without regulations treating them as “controlling” the bank, as they currently often do <http://http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=96683> . 

One thing we shouldn’t do is get rid of bipartisan financial deregulation of the past 20 years. These policies [The Glass-Steigel Act. Ed], such as the lifting of New Deal restrictions separating commercial from investment banking, predate the Bush administration and were pushed through by President Clinton and a GOP Congress. And they are largely responsible for the ’90s economic boom that everyone is so nostalgic for.  [up to a point, Lord Copper. Ed]

We should get rid of bailout policies and government support of institutions such as Fannie and Freddie that encourage excess. But we must also recognize that excess is a part of long-term economic growth and prosperity.

O3b Networks has announced plans to launch 16 satellites that will connect Africa, the Middle East and parts of Latin America to the internet. The project is backed by Google, Liberty Global and HSBC and is expected to cost around $750 million and so far has managed to raise only $65 million.

The three lead backers in O3b Networks reserve the right to contribute further to the estimated $150 to $180 million of financing in equity financing that will be needed for the project - the remainder will be financed through debt. O3b stands for the “Other 3 billion”.

This is a really goods news for the developing countries because it means that they have access to information and can benefit from it in many ways. The technology is not new but the service will cost up to 95% less than what is available today.

Entrepreneur Greg Tyler and founder of O3b thinks “This will be a especially good for Africa because so far, Africa makes up only 3.5% of the internet population and internet use has grown at a rate of 1,031.2 % (from 2000 to 2008) with Somalia having the highest growth rate.

What makes this news interesting is that Google is backing this initiative - indicating that it wants to increase the internet population so that it can benefit from it; a win-win situation.”

Here is a great example of a cross-sector partnership: 

Sony and Intel Corporation partner with Pulitzer Center and YouTube for a first-ever journalism competition! The project encourages aspiring journalists to produce short, high-quality video pieces focused on stories that are not usually covered by the traditional media.

The YouTube community will then vote to select the top five finalists and the ultimate winner. The winner will receive a $10,000 grant for travel abroad and the opportunity to work with the Pulitzer Center on a story of global importance.

“Central to the Pulitzer Center’s mission is coverage of stories that are being under-reported in today’s media environment,” said Jon Sawyer, executive director of the Pulitzer Center. “With YouTube’s global reach and popularity we have the unique opportunity to offer a program that encourages aspiring journalists to tell these stories in a fresh and compelling way.”

More details     Project:Report YouTube page    Pulitzer Center