Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Halliburton v. Erica P. John Fund --  discontented stockholders allege that at the turn of the century (from June 1999 to December 2001) Halliburton misrepresented significant facts about the company's financial health. Significantly, the execs undervalued an asbestos liability claim. The Erica P. John Fund is an investment fund created to support the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. It bought stock in Halliburton during the period of the alleged deception.  In September 2007, EPJ moved to certify as a class all investors who bought the common stock of Halliburton during the period of the alleged deception,  a period that came to a screeching end with a stunning write-off of $4 billion. In support of this motion EPJ invoked the notion of a "fraud on the market," and presented an expert report by Jane Nettesheim of the Stanford Consulting Group. Netteshein contended that the market in Halliburton stock is efficient, and accordingly th...

The story of a man who made a fortune on dynamite, then cleansed his name by creating a Peace Prize, is well known. Recently I've learned of an analogous story, of a man who made a fortune  running one of Europe's largest asbestos firms, then cleansed his name by turning himself into a philanthropic environmentalist. This later story is that of Stephan Schmidheiny, founder of the Business Council for Sustainable Government, one of the organizers of the Rio de Janeiro earth summit, and founder of Avina. a Latin-American oriented endowment for the study of ecological sustainability. But cleansed though he might have thought he was, Schmeidheiny found that his asbestos-,marketing past was hard to shake, and late in the spring of this year he was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his part in the deaths of thousands . This came to my attention as a page one story in the Hartford Courant last week. It was a front page story only because the Courant cares about our sta...