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West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – The following statement was issued by Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) President and CEO Jim Greenwood following the U.S. elections:
"On behalf of the more than 1,200 members of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, I offer our congratulations to Senator Barack Obama on his election victory. We also offer our congratulations to the newly elected and returning members of Congress, governors and other elected officials across the United States.
"From health care to energy to climate change to environmental sustainability, President-elect Obama will enter office facing a daunting array of complex challenges threatening the well-being of our nation and the environmental health of our planet.
"Biotechnology is uniquely suited to help provide answers to these challenges. Biotechnology provides hope for millions of people suffering from debilitating diseases like cancer, H.I.V.-AIDS, Parkinson’s and diabetes. By reducing the incidence of disease, we can dramatically reduce health care costs and help spur economic growth. Biotechnology provides the key to sustainable, renewable alternative fuels that increase our nation’s energy security. And we develop crops that produce more food per acre while requiring less plowing, reducing fuel use, carbon dioxide emissions, and overall environmental impact.
"Biotechnology is one of the most promising sectors of America’s burgeoning innovation economy. To continue our nation’s global leadership in innovation and continue to fulfill the promise of biotechnology, we will work with President-elect Obama and the new Congress to ensure that we have the proper public policies that promote and facilitate continued innovation.
"We must maintain strong protections for intellectual property – the key to an innovation economy – while enhancing patent quality and the objectivity, predictability, and transparency of the patent system. We must increase resources for the federal Food and Drug Administration to enable the agency to keep pace with rapidly evolving biomedical science and make sound regulatory decisions in a timely and efficient manner. We must provide the tax and investment incentives that promote continued biotech innovation and help accelerate the commercialization of advanced biofuels technologies. And we must ensure the National Institutes of Health have the funding needed to sustain the public-private collaboration that is transforming biomedical discoveries into innovative treatments for patients. At the same time, we need the proper policies and incentives at the state and local level to help grow and nurture biotechnology research and product development to ensure America remains the world leader in biotechnology innovation.
"We look forward to working with President-elect Obama, the new Congress and public officials at all levels of government to achieve these goals and continue to build our nation’s innovation economy. Together, we can implement the public policies necessary to help heal, fuel, feed and clean our nation.”
BIO represents more than 1,200 biotechnology companies, academic institutions, state biotechnology centers and related organizations across the United States and in more than 30 other nations. BIO members are involved in the research and development of innovative healthcare, agricultural, industrial and environmental biotechnology products. BIO also produces the BIO International Convention, the world’s largest gathering of the biotechnology industry, along with industry-leading investor and partnering meetings held around the world.
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New York Times Blogs – After pouring money into Barack Obama’s campaign, what can hedge funds and their executives expect from the new president?
If history is any exmaple, says FINAlternatives, they shouldn’t expect a cuddly relationship.
Mr. Obama didn’t appear sympathetic to the industry on the campaign trail, the publication noted, calling John McCain the candidate of “Joe the Hedge Fund Manager,” a riff on McCain’s pledge to serve the “Joe the Plumbers” of the U.S.
And during his time in the Senate, FINAlternatives noted, Mr. Obama sponsored a bill that would have required hedge fund managers to set up anti-money laundering programs supervised by the Treasury Department. (The Treasury abandoned a similar proposal last week).
The president-elect has also backed tax proposals that increase the burden on hedge funds and private equity shops, the publication said.
Opalesque – For the US financial markets, as the credit crisis unfolded there was, along with the desire for immediate action, a sense that the government was taking temporary steps until the election would decide which administration would be the next to hold office.
As the November 4th election has determined the next US President to be Barack Obama, hedge fund managers gathering at the Walkers "Fighting the Tape" seminar on Thursday (November 6th) will include in their discussions on the outcome of the Presidential Election and the direction of the hedge funds industry.
"I do not look for a President-elect Obama to increase taxes on successful individuals as he has proposed. It is one thing to get elected, another to govern." Professor Jeffrey Rosensweig, Director of the Global Perspectives Program at Goizueta Business School of Emory University told Opalesque. A speaker at the "Fighting the Tape" seminar, Prof. Rosensweig will examine the global economy, market trends, changing demographics and global opportunities for investors and investment managers. "Given the backdrop of looming recession, he will realize this is no time to raise taxes on those who create jobs and/or put capital to productive use, and would face the disincentive of high marginal tax rates which he currently proposes."
Bloomington Pantagraph – Democrat Barack Obama on Wednesday brushed aside Republican charges that his tax plan amounts to socialism, but acknowledged it involves “spreading around opportunity’’ so that wealthier Americans — like himself — pay a little more to help lower-rung workers. |
Obama noted that when President Bush’s tax cuts were first proposed, his opponent for the White House, Republican John McCain, opposed them as irresponsibly targeted.
“Was John McCain a socialist back in 2000?’’ Obama asked at a news conference. Responding to the late-campaign line of attack repeated daily by McCain and running mate Sarah Palin, he said: “I think it’s an indication that they have run out of ideas.’’
Obama commented at a news conference after meeting with foreign policy and military luminaries to discuss “urgent issues’’ facing the country from abroad, an attempt to inoculate himself against the fresh charge from the McCain side that he is too untested for the White House.
Myrtle Beach Sun News – The financial turmoil has pushed the Obama campaign into the lead, and this is mostly justified. Barack Obama is more thoughtful on the economy than his opponent, and his bench of advisers is superior. But there’s a troubling side to the Democratic advance. The claim that the financial crisis reflects Bush-McCain deregulation is not only nonsense. It is the sort of nonsense that could matter.
The real roots of the crisis lie in a flawed response to China. Starting in the 1990s, the flood of cheap products from China kept global inflation low, allowing central banks to operate relatively loose monetary policies. But the flip side of China’s export surplus was that China had a capital surplus, too. Chinese savings sloshed into asset markets ’round the world, driving up the price of everything from Florida condos to Latin American stocks.
That gave central bankers a choice: Should they carry on targeting regular consumer inflation, which Chinese exports had pushed down, or should they restrain asset inflation, which Chinese savings had pushed upward? Alan Greenspan’s Fed chose to stand aside as asset prices rose; it preferred to deal with bubbles after they popped by cutting interest rates rather than by preventing those bubbles from inflating. After the dot-com bubble, this clean-up-later policy worked fine. Not so with the real estate bubble.
KTAK – U.S. lawmakers and President George W. Bush eased pressure on financial markets on Tuesday by starting work to revive a $700 billion bailout plan to stem a credit crisis that has spread beyond Wall Street to claim more European banks.
U.S. stocks roared back — a day after their worst sell-off in 21 years — and the dollar rallied as investors bet Washington would manage to salvage a package to stabilize the financial sector after Monday’s shock defeat on Capitol Hill.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index shot up by more than 5 percent, the biggest one-day gain for that measure of the broad market in six years.
The relief rally came as the White House, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the two candidates hoping to succeed Bush as president, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, reaffirmed their support for a bailout plan. Congressional leaders started talks to relaunch the package this week.
Edmonton Sun – Stop worrying about a carbon tax driving up the cost of everything we buy after this election.
Start worrying about a cap-and-trade carbon market doing the same thing.
Canada will only get a carbon tax if Liberal Leader Stephane Dion wins a majority government Oct. 14, or a minority in which Green Party Leader Elizabeth May holds the balance of power — both unlikely.
By contrast, it’s very likely the next Parliament will create a cap-and-trade system.
To varying degrees, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, NDP Leader Jack Layton, Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe, Dion and May all support cap-and-trade, as do U.S. presidential contenders Barack Obama and John McCain, neither of whom supports a carbon tax.
The American position will put economic pressure on Canada to adopt a cap-and-trade system consistent with the U.S. Both countries already have voluntary carbon markets whose volume would skyrocket under cap-and-trade.
There’s also more support for cap-and-trade, rather than a carbon tax, among provincial governments.
Politicians prefer cap-and-trade to carbon taxes because they never have to say the word "tax," which is also why Dion doesn’t talk about carbon taxes but a "green shift."
But cap-and-trade does exactly what a carbon tax does — puts a price on emitting carbon — an added cost to businesses they will pass along to us for everything we buy from utilities to fuel, manufactured goods and food.
HedgeFund.Net – According to Joseph Biden, the hedge fund industry and private equity deserve the blame for the global credit crisis.
The Delaware senator and running mate of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama made that assertion in a primary debate last year when he was himself running for president. Obama, a senator from Illinois, is running for president against Arizona Sen. John McCain.
During that debate Biden, named vice president on the Obama ticket over the weekend, characterized the hedge fund industry and private equity as “no transparency, no accountability.”
The alternative space was “causing this thing to go under,” he said in the debate.
This is Money – Perhaps you’ve been imagining that if Barack Obama becomes President of the US, he will impose tough new rules on Wall Street, sweep away the economic inequalities of the Bush years and demand that the gigantic banks that created the present mess are broken into a hundred powerless pieces. In which case, prepare to be disappointed.
On paper, the Democratic candidate sounds like a reformer.
He called the last Bush tax cuts exactly what they were: ‘The Paris Hilton tax break. It’s about giving billions of dollars to billionaire heirs and heiresses.’ Stirring stuff.
He claims that if elected he would increase the tax rate on capital gains to 25% and go after hedge-fund managers with venom.
Under Obama, the speculators would see gains on their income taxed at 35% rather then the measly 15% they currently enjoy. Other corporate taxes are also supposed to rise.
In practice he is unlikely to do any of those things for one simple reason: Wall Street owns him. Each year The Centre for Public Integrity in Washington DC compiles a list of the donors to top politicians for its annual book The Buying of The President.
New York Times – In an effort to cast himself as independent of the influence of money on politics, Senator Barack Obama often highlights the campaign contributions of $200 or less that have amounted to fully half of the $340 million he has collected so far.
But records show that one-third of his record-breaking haul has come from donations of $1,000 or more: a total of $112 million, more than Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, his opponent in the Democratic primaries, raised in contributions of that size.
Behind those larger donations is a phalanx of more than 500 Obama “bundlers,” fund-raisers who have each collected contributions totaling $50,000 or more. Many of the bundlers come from industries with critical interests in Washington. Nearly three dozen of the bundlers have raised more than $500,000 each, including more than a half-dozen who have passed the $1 million mark and one or two who have exceeded $2 million, according to interviews with fund-raisers.
While his campaign has cited its volume of small donations as a rationale for his decision to opt out of public financing for the general election, Mr. Obama has worked to build a network of big-dollar supporters from the time he began contemplating a run for the United States Senate. He tapped into well-connected people in Chicago prior to the 2004 Senate race, and once elected, set out across the country starting to cultivate some of his party’s most influential money collectors.
FINalternatives- An Illinois pension fund official caught up in the trial of a prominent supporter of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) may be joining a new hedge fund.
Jon Bauman, executive director of the $38.7 billion Teachers’ Retirement System of Illinois, is mulling a departure to join Abraham Lincoln Alternative Investments, which is set to launch its first fund of hedge funds in August. But Bauman sounds far from certain he’ll be leaving TRS, and the pension fund says he’ll be staying put for at least another year.
“The long and short of it is, I’m not ready to pull the trigger yet,” Bauman told Crain’s Chicago Business. “There are considerations on both the TRS and Abraham Lincoln sides of the situation that need to be worked out before I would resign this position and make the move over.”
