When even big losers can be winners for a night
To the Fabba dinner last night, where the financial community takes a break from making money for themselves and instead raises it for charity - this year, HK$8 million ... and counting. The Fund Managers Asian Bankers and Brokers Awards is the Hong Kong finance industries' equivalent to the Razzies, the Oscars alternative that awards the worst in cinema. The Fabba 'timing is everything' award for research went to CLSA for a recommendation on GS Holdings that started off as a sell at 38 and when it refused to go down, it quickly became a buy at 77 with a target of 92. Macquarie won the 'productivity award' for its 499-page report on Asian banks, 'as if anyone cared', as the citation unkindly says. There was a tax exile award for returnees who couldn't face massive British tax bills. HSBC's Michael Geoghegan (pictured) was a narrow winner even though he never made quite made it to Hong Kong before being diverted to Bermuda, where he would pay even less tax than in Hong Kong. The golden fleece for investment banking went to Samsung Securities for its February 2010 SetiCo IPO, which by the end of the year had achieved a decline of 76 per cent. A special 'couldn't see the wood for the trees' award went to Standard Chartered Bank for its part in the China Forestry HK$120 million placing. Two weeks after the placing the stock was suspended and the CEO and senior management have disappeared. The one serious award of the evening - 'The golden telephone', a lifetime achievement award for services to the industry, goes to David Webb, Hong Kong's 'standout gadfly'. His webb-site.com was praised as required reading for all in the industry and he has been 'pre-eminent' as an advocate for transparency and accountability.
Nasa to look the other way
It would appear that James Hansen, one of the foremost proponents of the view that we should be afraid of global warming, is about to get his wings clipped. He heads the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which last year spent 7.5 per cent of its funding - over US$1 billion - on studying global warming, or climate change, as it is now beginning to be called. Members of the US Congress have sent a letter to the House Appropriations Committee chairman and Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee chairmen asking for Nasa to redirect its efforts towards studying space. The US government spent US$8.7 billion on global warming studies in the last year alone.
One of the ways in which the GISS has distinguished itself has been in the area of temperature 'adjustment'. In the late 1990s the GISS published a graph of the yearly average temperature in the US showing that 1934 was one degree Fahrenheit higher than 1998, with the four warmest years being, in order, 1934, 1921, 1931, 1998. However, in an updated version of this graph in 2009, the temperatures had been 'adjusted' to show that 1921, 1931, 1934 were all cooler than 1998 - a quite remarkable development, but one not shared by the other three recognised temperature recorders.
A glass ceiling in the sky