The Next Gold Rush: Environmental Finance

What started as "Whole Earth Catalog" rhetoric is now economic truth.

Through a series of regulatory initiatives rooted in the Kyoto treaty and emerging with the pending Waxman legislation, the market's next new billionaires will be innovators who understands how to trade in the emerging economics of environmental finance.

Realities:

* in short order water will be 3x more valuable than oil
* the value of a wind field's offset will exceed the value of the power it produces
* companies will lose value in the marketplace when the offset they buy impacts shareholder value (stock prices will fall when companies don't have sustainable business models)

I won't re-hash all of the evidence of these marketplaces as provided by Tom Lewis or available in environmental finance courses from the likes of Johns Hopkins--but the marketplace for carbon offset and the related products may not sound sexy but these trillion dollar marketplaces have many high powered folks putting much effort into capitalizing on their emergence.

The Green Exchange

Tom Lewis was recently named the CEO of Green Exchange Holdings. The NYMEX Green Exchange has the backing of Constellation Energy, Credit Suisse, Evolution Markets, Goldman Sachs, ICAP, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, RNK Capital, Spectron, Vitol, TFS Energy, & Tudor. Essentially the Who's of Who of classic capital markets paired with the biggest players in global environmental markets.

Some Articles:

Key Players Quietly Building Carbon Market Infrastructure...

Environmental Finance - Emissions Trading | Socially...

Carbon Market? Build It And They Will Invest

Private Capital Looks To Cash In On Carbon Trading -...

Carbon Regulation Creating Rifts Within American Business...

Making Sense And Money Out Of Carbon - Carbon Challenge...

Is It All Beyond Me?

At some level, this high-flying finance backers and the associated economic products give us the impression they are so beyond us.

As usual, the makes of these markets create confidence by asserting knowledge (and Capital) unavailable to the rest of us. The picture might see like this new world of finance is not for the common man--in fact this new world of finance is not even for the brightest and even richest amongst us.

These new markets have the appearance of having the requirements of the esoterica of the derivative and futures wonks in the depths of the financial markets combined with the need for Ph.D in physics. But it ain't so!

The world has never been so flat and the NYMEX will find that the future of green futures will not emerge as a unified market the way Wall Street emerged. Many markets will be made, many by people who appear to have no business "doing the business."

My Favorite Example

My favorite example is Terrapass. A group of students and their professor 4 years ago put together the layman's version of what the Green Exchange will become. What's impressive is that Terrapass may "steal" the business of making millions form offsetting the footprint of their local cement factory from the NYMEX. Offset is offset, whether the market maker is Constellation energy or Terrapass.

Watch out! Its like the gold rush in the wild, wild west. Stake your claim!

Standards rivals' collaboration could have major impact - Modern Healthcare

The Medical Health Record:

The medical record is not the first standard to grow up with competing standards that have ground their way down into collaboration and consolidation. This industry like so many others will have data variablity compressed out of their wick by the needs of the people, services, and systems they serve. On a simple scale consider the radical retro-fit of the eLearning space from wild variablity, to competing standards, to the unifies standards for content today. This will happen in healthcare as well--its inevitable, Darwinian if you will.

Good article on Standards:

Standards rivals' collaboration could have major impact - Modern Healthcare

As interested as I am in re-thinking the modern "community" bank, I am even more interested in seeing the emergence of a unified medical record for patients that helps the doctor's practice inherit the history of the patient enabling the doctor to treat, manage, and bill that patient more effectively.

In the future, and this future is inevitable, (though the time frame is variable), the patient, doctor, and insurer will all win from the efficiencies created by the interoperable patient medical record.

Patient:

Patient's will move through their lives with a medical record as convenient as an email account. We will lve with our medical records as transparently as our Amazon shopping history.

Doctor:

Doctors will be able to handle patient histories with the ease of a blog post and bill patients with the ease of tagging. Through video, voice, phone, stylus, or keypad the doc will have every option for encapsulating diagnoses in the patient's lifelong record: from birth to death we will be anthologized in our medical record.

Insurer:

The insurer's will be pulling needed data from a cloud of data optimized for satisfying the criteria of that insurer's coverage. The insurer won't do any work to accomplish this--like IMS data --there will be a subscription to the patient's permission-based feed and every piece of form data that the doctor's office and the patient typically have to enter, and re-enter, and re-enter again will be automatically, securely, fulfilled.

Timeline?

This future is inevitable. The question now becomes are we 5, 10 or 50 years away from the seamless management of our health records?

Banks, banking... Do we love our banks? Hate them? Are we indifferent?

Banks, banking, the business model at the very heart of the current financial crisis.

Do we love our banks? Hate them? Are we indifferent?

If we could customize a bank to serve us as we saw fit, what would we ask of the institution?

Me? I'd like my bank to be:

* a "community"

* a place where I knew the people who handled my money

* a place where I knew the people who banked there

I'd like my bank to offer me:

* a micro-loan function that I could participate in both as lender and/or borrower

* state-of-the art technologies: for example, I'd like my bank to enable me to pay for my bills with cell phone number.

* better credit/debt service--proactively

* ways to optimize my financial services and options.

This is just a getting started list...

What else could I ask of my bank if I had my druthers?