cryptogon.com

Now Goldman is turning that franchise on its head, creating its own private system to trade the stocks of companies that don’t want the scrutiny and regulatory burdens of going public.

The new system, GS TRuE — short for Goldman Sachs Tradable Unregistered Equity — was announced two weeks ago and made its debut on Monday with an $880 million sale of a 15% stake in Oaktree Capital Management LLC, an alternative-investment manager.

It is the first of several new, private exchanges like these being considered by Wall Street firms and others. Nasdaq is also planning its own new market for smaller, unregistered securities.

These markets will generally be closed to individual investors. For instance, Goldman’s market is open only to large institutional investors with assets of more than $100 million. That is because the stocks traded on GS TRuE aren’t registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission and issuers aren’t subject to SEC regulations designed to protect individual investors.

It represents the latest step in the creeping exclusion of individual investors from a growing proportion of financial-market activity. For instance, giant private-equity firms are busy buying public companies and delisting them from stock exchanges. The growing importance of hedge funds — which are generally limited to wealthy investors, institutions and endowments — also excludes individuals.

The new system is “a manifestation of the growth of private-equity relative to public equity,” said Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, pointing to the record-setting pace of private-equity buyouts of public companies recently. (For more on Goldman’s product, see Breakingviews column.)

Traditional mutual funds — one of the main investment tools at the disposal of individual investors — are also limited in the amount of unregistered securities they can buy or sell. Hedge funds, by contrast, have more freedom to buy unregistered stocks and bonds.

Indeed, bankers and capital-markets executives at rival firms say that, at GS TRuE’s debut, hedge funds were prominent among buyers for the issue by Los Angeles-based Oaktree.

Some investor advocates criticized the trend of selling more securities faster with less disclosure. “It becomes much more of a buyer-beware marketplace with little regulatory oversight or protection,” said Steven B. Caruso, a New York lawyer who represents investors in disputes with Wall Street.

Goldman’s move partly reflects a business-community backlash against increased regulation of public-company accounting practices — a favorite theme, as it happens, of Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., who is also a former Goldman chief executive.

Wall Street executives said the market offers an alternative to companies that don’t want to wait for regulators to approve their financial disclosures needed for an initial public offering, which can take 90 days or more.

The 20 parking attendants, who work for NCP Services, will be the first in the country to be issued with the equipment.

Their main role is to issue parking tickets but under legislation brought in last year they will also have powers to give on-the-spot fines for anti-social behaviour.

Salford council has asked the wardens to issue penalties up to £80 for offences which include littering, flyposting and allowing dogs to foul the pavement. NCP will use the film as evidence to back up their wardens if any fine is challenged and also in the event of any attack or abuse.

In some cases the footage could be handed to police and used in court.

…

Though the date is highly symbolic, the researchers – Dr. Ron Wimberley, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at NC State; Dr. Libby Morris, director of the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia; and Dr. Gregory Fulkerson, a sociologist at NC State – advise avoiding the urge to interpret this demographic transition to mean that the urban population has greater importance than the rural.

Urban and rural populations, they say, rely heavily on each other.

Cities refine and process rural goods for urban and rural consumers. But if either cities or rural areas had to sustain themselves without the other, Wimberley says, few would bet on the cities.

Scent traces collected directly from everything from people’s palm sweat to their vests and cigarette lighters have been made available to investigators so that sniffer dogs can detect potentially violent protesters, federal prosecutors confirmed yesterday following reports in the German media.

“This has happened to several suspects,” said Andreas Christeleit, a spokesman for the prosecutors. It is believed that most samples were collected during recent early-morning raids across Germany.

The revelations have immediately led to comparisons with the methods of the former East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, who habitually collected the scents of dissidents to identify suspects at a later date. It was thought that such chilling espionage techniques had been consigned to history.

But the news that similar methods are to be deployed at the upcoming summit in a democratic Germany has further angered activists already fuming over the construction of a 7.5-mile barbed-wire fence around the venue, at Heiligendamm on the Baltic coast.

…

A 68-year-old atomic energy protester from Hamburg, identified by police as a possible danger to the G8 summit, reported how investigators knocked on his door at 8am and demanded scent samples from him.

The Food and Drug Administration has no evidence that contaminated toothpaste has made its way into the United States but is taking the step as a precaution, agency spokesman Doug Arbesfeld said.

China is the second-largest exporter of toothpaste to the United States behind Canada, according to the FDA.

The FDA’s action comes after the lethal chemical diethylene glycol was found in toothpaste sold in the Dominican Republic and Panama.

It follows a wave of concern over pet food from China containing another toxic chemical, melamine, thought to have sickened thousands of U.S. cats and dogs and made its way into livestock feed.

“We are going to be sampling and testing all shipments of toothpaste that come from China,” Arbesfeld said. “We’re doing this as a precautionary measure. We have no evidence that toothpaste containing diethylene glycol has entered the country.”

Tests on product pulled from shelves in Panama showed they contained high levels of diethylene glycol, used in engine coolants. Investigators in that country said two toothpaste brands were imported illegally from China through a free-trade zone.

Tainted toothpaste has also been reported in Australia, Arbesfeld said.

Rice farmers along the Euphrates, to the west of the city of Diwaniya, south of Baghdad, have stopped cultivating rice, for which the area is famous, and are instead planting poppies, Iraqi sources familiar with the area have told The Independent.

The shift to opium cultivation is still in its early stages but there is little the Iraqi government can do about it because rival Shia militias and their surrogates in the security forces control Diwaniya and its neighbourhood. There have been bloody clashes between militiamen, police, Iraqi army and US forces in the city over the past two months.

…

It is unlikely that the farmers’ decision was spontaneous and the gangs financing them are said to be “well-equipped with good vehicles and weapons and are well-organised”.

…

The Six-Day War in 1967 arguably had its origins in a water dispute – moves to divert the River Jordan, Israel’s main source of drinking water.

Years of skirmishes and sabre rattling culminated in all-out war, with Israel quadrupling the territory it controlled and gaining complete control of double the resources of fresh water.

A country needs water to survive and develop.

In Israel’s history, it has needed water to make feasible the influx of huge numbers of Jewish immigrants.

Therefore, on the margins of one of the most arid environments on earth, the available water system had to support not just the indigenous population, mainly Palestinian peasant farmers, but also hundreds of thousands of immigrants.