OpenEco is a new global on-line community that provides free, easy-to-use tools to help participants assess, track, and compare business energy performance, share proven best practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and encourage sustainable innovation. Akin to social networks, OpenEco aims to help build support for carbon-reduction strategies though sharing information among companies, government institutions …
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Month:September 2007
Fast and loose culture of top finance houses.
A recent article in the NYT describes how financial analysts are opting to learn on the job, rather than do MBA’s. While the article is largely anecdotal, what is apparent is that the culture of Wall Street encourages a cut-throat approach to business. While you can make more money than you need (maybe even more …
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Japanese housewives trading FX
Its not just the professionals that have benefited from the yen carry trade. Japanese housewives have been moonlighting as currency speculators too. Unfortunately, in the past couple of months the reality that there is no risk free investment has hit them hard, often wiping out savings in a few weeks because of leveraged/margin positions. This …
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A different scale of leverage has accelerated our progress and imbalances
As has been discussed over the past months, the economic imbalances around the world have grown beyond normal measures for some years now. Trade imbalances, government debt, consumer spending have all been beyond expectations in the US and other mature economies. With the tremors of collapse touching many since the cracks in US housing started …
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Case studies in green portfolios
The September issue of Sustainable Business‘s Progressive Investor discusses three green portfolios describing the manager’s rationale and an analysts’ evaluation in each case. It is a useful starting point for building your own green portfolio. If you are not US based, it still offers insight in to the trade-offs you’re likely to have to make …
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Stop giving drugs to infants
Stop giving drugs to infants is the thrust of recommendations made in the US by safety experts for the Food and Drug Administration who urged an outright ban on over-the-counter, multisymptom cough and cold medicines for children under 6. This recommendation is underpinned by the recognition that warnings about their use on infants just do …
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Gaining calories impulsively
IHL consulting polled 1,000 shoppers in the US on what they grab while waiting in the check-out line, from nothing to chocolates. I have a regular battle with my sweet tooth and children while paying for groceries because of the raft of delights staring me in the face. None of those sweets are good for …
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Israel secretly bombs Syria for nukes …
former Israeli prime minister and Likud opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that Israel launched an air strike against Syria on September 6, aafter weeks of refusing to confirm the operation. It appears the rationale for the strike is that Syria had nuclear weapon making materials from North Korea. While this may have been true and …
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Be The Change – book now
Be The Change 2007 will take place in November. Supported by The Independent newspaper, The Sky’s The Limit is a collaboration between Be The Change, the World Future Council, The Converging World, the new economics foundation and Rights and Humanity. In three days of presentations, panels, world cafés – and with film and music – …
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Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?
An article by the New York Times based on a series of recent articles and a book, “The Happiness Hypothesis” by Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, who has been constructing a broad evolutionary view of morality that traces its connections both to religion and to politics. Here’s an extract: Of …
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