View from J.P. Morgan offices at 10 Aldermanbury
At a time when many people are thinking back to Presidents like Lincoln and FDR for clues on how to rescue the US economy, it might also be worth recalling John Pierpoint Morgan, credited with saving the US economy on two separate occasions. Was reminded of him this afternoon, which I spent chez J.P. Morgan Chase & Company, the financial services firm, which hosted (alongside The Rockefeller Foundation, Social Finance, Generation Investment Management and Citigroup) a meeting of people and institutions interested in building out a London node for the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN). Obvious acronym would be GIIN, though that’s already taken by Groupe Intersyndicale de l’Industrie Nucleare, it seems.
In any event, GIIN — due for launch in 2009 — is “a select global group of investors and intermediaries who put capital to work at scale to generate social and/or environmental value as well as financial return.” Among those present were a number of people I knew, including Mark Campanale, who reminded me that he and I had first started working in the socially responsible investing field as long ago as 1988, with the Merlin Ecology Fund and Tessa Tennant.
In any event, the triple bottom lives — and, indeed, seems to be gaining traction in the heart of the economic beast. Look out for an impending report from the Monitor Group on the potential for impact investing. Meanwhile, I sometimes find myself wishing I hadn’t given up economics at university in 1968, though I doubt I would have learned that much that would have been directly relevant to today’s work, though a more thorough immersion in the works of Kondratiev, Schumpeter and Keynes would have been an advantage in these times.
Mark Campanale in one of the rooms where reception will shortly be held
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