Home » Posts tagged 'us securities and exchange commission'

Tag Archives: us securities and exchange commission

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Exxon To Disclose The Real Risk Of Climate Change

December 13, 2017

Exxon To Disclose The Real Risk Of Climate Change

XOM

ExxonMobil finally conceded to the multi-year campaign by shareholders and activists to disclose its risk to climate change, a notable departure after years of trying to dismiss the issue.

According to a new filing by Exxon to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Exxon said that its board “has reconsidered the proposal requesting a report on impacts of climate change policies” by major shareholders at its annual meeting earlier this year. The company will disclose more information regarding “energy demand sensitivities, implications of two degree Celsius scenarios, and positioning for a lower-carbon future,” the company’s filing stated.

The pressure from activists and shareholders to disclose more information related to Exxon’s vulnerability to climate change are the latest in a series of headwinds over the past few years, Bloomberg writes. The oil supermajor has also had to contend with its inability to find and replace all of the oil and gas reserves that it produces in a given year, and for several years in a row, that reserve-replacement ratio has been under 100 percent, an indication of a declining reserve base.

Also, Exxon’s total oil and gas production has actually declined in four of the last five years—Bloomberg calculates that Exxon averaged 4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d) in the first nine months of 2017, down from 4.51 mb/d in 2011. Part of that is because of Exxon’s size—a depletion rate that leads to the erosion of several percentage points from a rather large number is still a large number.

On top of that, Exxon’s shale activity is only beginning to ramp up, having spent billions to acquire acreage earlier this year. Bloomberg says that these obstacles now have Exxon trading at a discount relative to other energy companies in the S&P 500 Index, the first time that has occurred in 20 years.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

One Way to Unrig Stock Trading

December 25, 2015

One Way to Unrig Stock Trading

AMERICA’S equity markets are broken. Individuals and institutions make transactions in rigged markets favoring short-term players. The root cause of the problem is that stocks trade on numerous venues, including 11 traditional exchanges and dozens of so-called dark pools that allow buyers and sellers to work out of the public eye. This market fragmentation allows high-frequency traders and exchanges to profit at the expense of long-term investors.

Individual investors, trading through brokers like Charles Schwab, E-Trade and TD Ameritrade, suffer first as the brokers profit by hundreds of millions of dollars from selling their retail orders to high-frequency traders and again as those traders take advantage of the orders they bought.

Market depth, critically important to investors who trade large blocks of securities, also suffers in the world of high-frequency traders. Startling evidence for the lack of robustness in today’s market comes from a 2013 Securities and Exchange Commission report that found order cancellation rates as high as 95 to 97 percent, a result of high-frequency traders’ playing their cat and mouse game. Market depth is an illusion that fades in the face of real buying and selling.

Brad Katsuyama, founder of IEX, testified about the state of U.S. stock markets last year on Capitol Hill.Doug Mills/The New York Times 

Securities markets work best as a central clearinghouse where all buyers and sellers of stocks come together. Not so long ago, when the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq operated as virtual monopolies, American equity markets were the envy of the world. Until 2000, Nasdaq was wholly owned by a nonprofit corporation; the New York Stock Exchange was nonprofit until 2006. To ensure that they would operate in the public interest, they were treated much like public utilities.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Groups Hand 360,000 Signatures to Justice Department Calling for “Exxon Knew” Probe

November 21, 2015

Groups Hand 360,000 Signatures to Justice Department Calling for “Exxon Knew” Probe

Exxon social license revoked

With the hottest October in world history recorded recently, a slew of advocacy groups have delivered 360,000 petition signatures to the U.S. Department of Justice, calling for a probe of petrochemical industry giant ExxonMobil’s history of funding climate change denial despite what the company knew about climate science.

The groups ranging from 350.org, Food and Watch Watch, Climate Parents, Moms Clean Air Force, The Nation, Sierra Club and others have asked DOJ to investigate what ExxonMobil knew about climate change and when the company knew it, juxtaposing that insider knowledge, exposed by both InsideClimate News and The Los Angeles Times, with the climate change denial campaign it funded both in the past and through to the present.

“That’s right: decades before climate change became a hotly debated political issue, the biggest oil company in the world was doing cutting-edge research into just what was causing it and how dangerous it might be,” reads the petition, pointing back to the research the company did on climate change dating back to the 1970’s and 1980’s.

“But Exxon chose to protect their profits over the planet, and proceeded to cover up their findings for nearly forty years.,” it continues. “They hid the work of their own scientists, while financing an elaborate network of climate-denial think tanks, organizations, and politicians.”

“Might Get Away With It”

The petition also says that while it’s unsurprising ExxonMobil committed such a deed, what’s scary is that in the legal sphere “they just might get away with it.”

That concern by the groups does not arise out of a vacuum.

Case in point: coal giant Peabody Energy recently got off the hook in the aftermath of a New York State Attorney General Office investigation by merely amending some line-items in its corporate securities filings with the U.S.Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress