Word: profiteer
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...dollar dumps cold water on some of Japan's largest corporations and exporters, since a higher yen value makes exports from the likes of Sony and Sharp to Toyota and Honda less competitive. On Thursday, Toyota Motor Corp. president Katsuaki Watanabe said that his company will need to maintain profit growth, since it forecast record profit for this fiscal year when the dollar was about 113 yen. For every yen the dollar drops, Toyota's operating profit falls...
...return. (But at least the VCs are spending money - federal investment in renewable energy research is a paltry $1 billion, or roughly a day of revenue for Exxon Mobil.) But there's no reason that business can't be a major part of the climate change solution, or that profit isn't concordant with a desire to save the Earth. Krupp writes about Jack Newman, a California surfer and former college dropout who helped found the promising biofuel start up Amyris. The company is working on ways to bioengineer better, cleaner and more efficient biofuels. It's extremely cool stuff...
...Diego law professor, who is one of the sharpest critics of the ratings status quo, is a "regulatory license" for the ratings agencies. It's certainly a license to print money. Moody's, the lone ratings firm for which data are available, made $702 million in after-tax profit last year, up from $289 million just five years before. Its operating profit margin was a stunning 50% of revenue. By comparison, Google...
...keep that profit machine going, Moody's and S&P have to keep finding new things to rate. And they're under intense pressure from issuers and investors alike to get as many securities as possible into the top ratings categories. The result is grade inflation, especially in new products like CDOs. That's how banks and investors around the world ended up owning billions of dollars in triple-A mortgage junk. It also helps explain the growth of bond insurers, companies that used their own triple-A ratings to bump ever more bond issues into the top categories--even...
...original version of this article said Moody's made $702 billion in after-tax profit last year. The correct figure is $702 million...