PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Pall Corporation (NYSE:PLL) announced today that R. Brent Jones has joined the Long Island-based filtration, separation and purification company as VP of Finance. In this new role, Mr. Jones will assume responsibility for Investor Relations, Treasury, and Corporate Financial Planning. In this capacity, Mr. Jones will work closely with the investment community as Pall’s direct point of contact for investors, analysts and bankers. He will also support Pall’s business development function.
Larry Kingsley, president and CEO commented, "The integration of these finance activities combined with Brent’s experience will serve the company and its shareholders well as we evolve our growth strategies and profitability profile and related communications. Brent provides significant added bench strength to our management team."
Mr. Jones has more than 15 years of broad financial experience in the areas of capital markets, mergers and acquisitions and capital structure. He has significant experience with the life sciences, industrial and technology sectors. Most recently Mr. Jones, who earned his bachelor’s degree at Dartmouth and his law degree from Yale, served as managing director for Corporate Finance and Restructuring at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
About Pall Corporation
Pall Corporation (NYSE:PLL) is a filtration, separation and purification leader providing solutions to meet the critical fluid management needs of customers across the broad spectrum of life sciences and industry. Pall works with customers to advance health, safety and environmentally responsible technologies. The company’s engineered products enable process and product innovation and minimize emissions and waste. Pall Corporation, with total revenues of $2.7 billion for fiscal year 2011, is an S&P 500 company with almost 11,000 employees serving customers worldwide. Pall has been named a “top green company” by Newsweek magazine. To see how Pall is helping enable a greener, safer, more sustainable future, visit www.pall.com/green.
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Money saving website sells for £87m - MSN UK News
Martin Lewis pledged to donate 10 million pounds to charity after agreeing to sell his MoneySavingExpert website
Personal finance journalist Martin Lewis has secured his own multimillion-pound fortune by agreeing the sale of his website for up to £87 million.
MoneySavingExpert.com, which was set up by Mr Lewis in 2003 and now sends a weekly email to around five million subscribers, is to be bought by price comparison website MoneySupermarket.
Mr Lewis, who is well known as a television pundit on money matters, will receive £60 million upfront in a mixture of cash and shares and a further £27 million conditional on meeting targets over the next three years.
He plans to donate £10 million to charity from the deal, including £1 million to Citizens Advice, while he will retain full control over the website.
According to Google Analytics, the MoneySavingExpert website attracted 39 million unique visitors and around 277 million page impressions in the year to October 31. It generated revenues of £15.7 million over the same period.
Mr Lewis said the deal, which needs the approval of MoneySupermarket shareholders, ensured the website would be around for many years to come.
He added: "MoneySavingExpert.com has become part of people's daily lives, far bigger than the man who founded it, and now is the right time for it to stand on its own two feet."
Mr Lewis said he chose Moneysupermarket because it is not owned by any product providers and had signed up to an editorial code which ensures the website's content will be free from commercial pressures.
He will stay as editor-in-chief for the next three years, with the help of Moneysupermarket's resources and the website's existing 42-strong staff.
"After that, the door is open for me to carry on, and I hope to do so, though perhaps with fewer hours than now, so I can spend more time on my media work and other projects I'm passionate about. These include getting financial education on the curriculum," Mr Lewis said.
Book review: Finance and the Good Society, by Robert J Shiller - Management Today
By Robert Skidelsky Friday, 01 June 2012
More innovation in the investment markets and in managing risk is socially as well as economically desirable, argues the author. But Robert Skidelsky is not convinced.
Book: Finance and the Good Society
Author: Robert J Shiller
I met economist Robert Shiller, famous for the Case-Shiller home price index, at a breakfast in London in 2009 to mark the publication of his book Animal Spirits, co-authored with George Akerlof. He explained how financial innovation might be used to limit the volatility of 'animal spirits', a bold claim after an economic collapse often attributed to an excess of financial innovation. I suggested what we needed was financial de-innovation; simpler, not more complex financial systems. Shiller looked puzzled.
In Finance and the Good Society, he looks forward to a rapid increase in the scope of financial services to create a more prosperous, stable and equal society. At its analytical heart lies the conviction that financial innovation is the road to 'complete' markets - markets for all possible desired contracts. Thus it can move the actual market system closer to the ideal market system envisaged by economists such as Arrow and Debreu, despite the absence of the perfect rationality and perfect information that those theorists considered necessary for Pareto efficiency.
Indeed, it is the absence of these conditions that justifies ever more extensive financial engineering, because, if they existed, trades would always be priced correctly, on average, and one would need no financial system at all!
It is the object of financial innovation to make 'previously untradable risks tradable'. Shiller shows how financial inventions (eg, limited liability, stock markets, securitisation, insurance, pensions, mutual funds) have contributed to human wellbeing, and offers his own ideas about how they may continue to do this. For example, the housing market could be made less risky by having continuous work-out mortgages. Instead of issuing debt, governments could issue shares - 'trills' - in the nation's GDP. Tax rates could be set to provide 'inequality insurance'.
Shiller is particularly keen to incentivise good causes. 'Benefit corporations' could specify objectives other than maximising profits; there might be different levels of tax deductibility for various kinds of philanthropic giving; there could be 'participation non-profit organisations', purchase of shares in which would count as charitable contributions, and so on.
As these examples show, Shiller does not rely on markets alone to discover and serve human needs. Government has a vital role in both facilitation and regulation.
Four years after the Great Collapse, a book in praise of finance and its practitioners has an air of both defiance and innocence. But Shiller argues his case skilfully and persistently, and with a wealth of quirky and interesting examples.
The first part, based on lectures to his finance class at Yale, can be highly recommended as a handbook for investors and money managers, as well as for explaining the mysteries of the financial system.
Apart from this descriptive section, Finance and the Good Society is an invitation to argument. First, Shiller ignores the possibility that financial innovation may be subject to diminishing social returns. At the macro level there is no clear correlation between financial intensity and the overall rate of economic expansion. Many countries achieved rapid growth in the period of 'financial repression' from 1945 to the 1970s. Nor have trend growth rates risen after the financial liberalisation of the 1980s. Such considerations have led Adair Turner, a former regulator, to argue that the benefits of financial innovation may vary by stage of development.
Second, Shiller's expectations for finance are closely bound up with his view of why markets fail. His explanation is behavioural. Over large swathes of their lives people act irrationally; their decision-making is subject to wide mood swings ('animal spirits') and herd behaviour. On this view, more 'complete' insurance markets, made possible by information technology, can limit the bad consequences of the erratic flight of the human butterfly. But it may be that our problem is epistemological: there are bound to be too few insurance markets, because much of the future is uninsurable - we don't and cannot know enough about it. If this is so, the programme of salvation through better 'risk management' may be misconceived.
Finally, one is left wondering what Shiller means by the 'good society' of his title. He implies that it is one in which all people have the maximum chance to achieve their goals; indeed, 'finance is the science of goal architecture'. On the content of these goals he has little to say. But, without being more specific about the goals, it is impossible to say how much or what kind of finance, or financial innovation, a society needs.
- Lord Skidelsky's latest book, How Much is Enough? (Allen Lane), co-authored with his son Edward, is out this month.
Finance and the Good Society
Robert J Shiller
Princeton £16.95
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