Filed under: Venture capital industry, Private equity industry, Investments

The CalCEF Clean Energy Angel Fund I, LP announced this day that it has secured initial investments for its fund that focuses on “earning market-based returns” on early-stage clean energy companies.

The CalCEF Fund investors include several limited partners as well as private and institutional investors. Founded by California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF), the Angel Fund strives to fund the developments of new clean energy technologies, a sector that accounted for less than 4% of total venture capital funding in 2007.

A primary focus will be on giving very early stage companies a small boost to be more attractive to later stage venture capital funding. It’s probably a safe bet that some private equity will end up in here as it has in so many other competing deals.

Susan Preston is General Partner of the Angel Fund, and she believes there is a significant funding gap for this industry and really wants to push new clean energy technologies in California and possibly nation-wide through the Angel Fund. Interestingly enough, no size of deals were listed, nor was the total amount of this sub-fund. As it is an “angel” stage, many such investments might run even under $1 million.

After seeing public solar companies flourish with exponential returns in recent years, it’s no massive surprise that more and more money will work its way to renewable energy, substitute energy, clean energy, and even less-dirty energy.

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Filed under: Economic data, Politics, Headline news, Housing, Federal Reserve, Recession

Recently, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan announced that the country is currently in a recession and that “the U.S. economy won’t stabilize until the housing markets recover.” He compared this to the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and mentioned that another organization similar to the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) might be necessary to resolve the situation.

I have repeatedly highlighted the parallels between the late 1980s and our current crisis. Part of the solution might clearly involve an organization similar to the RTC. This has generated debate over the role of government in resolving the crisis and who should ultimately bear the cost. Nevertheless, based upon comparing this to the S&L crisis of the late 1980s, there is decent evidence that this crisis won’t be resolved until the housing crisis abates.

We may want to examine the differing ways that the Japanese Banking Crisis and the Swedish Banking Insolvency of the 1990s were resolved for guidelines. Under the Japanese scenario, the banks were given a lifeline and hesitated to write down the bad loans. This resulted in one of the longest economic slumps and bear markets in current history. Only now is Japan starting to emerge from this downturn, almost 20 years after it began.

The Swedish Banking crisis involved the temporary nationalization of insolvent banks by the government. The banks were restructured and then sold. Regulations were put in place to prevent a repeat of the situation. This crisis was much shorter in duration, and the banking system emerged in a much stronger position.

There are many issues associated with such differing solutions, including “moral hazard” and who pays the bill for the cleanup. These are serious matters and should be debated strongly before any action is taken. However, such a discussion and action plan is preferable to the current developing situation — a piecemeal bailout with the taxpayers paying the bill and having no state in the process. To borrow a phrase from the Revolutionary War, there should be “no taxation without representation.”

Doug Roberts is the Founder and Chief Investment Strategist for ChannelCapitalResearch.com and the author of Follow the Fed to Investment Success: The Effortless Strategy for Beating Wall Street . He previously held executive positions at Morgan Stanley Group and Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

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Filed under: Ripoffs and Scams

You signed up for FaceBook or MySpace and eagerly started filling in your profile. Name, check. City, check. Birth date, check. (Gotta have your friends send you happy wishes on your birthday, right?) Job history, check. Spouse, check. Throw in some photos of yourself and the children for good measure.

Except there’s a catch. Each tiny bit of information that you add to your profile could be one more piece of the identity theft puzzle. And some information is more telling than you can imagine. Did you add your birth date? That’s something that might be superior left unpublished, as it is one critical piece of information that banks and credit card companies use to identify you.

Have you hooked up with some family members? That might give a clue to your maiden name, another potential identifier. Even worse… those socializing on genealogy websites might be sharing information like your mother’s maiden name, another key piece of information for financial services companies.

Don’t take my word for it. Computer security experts state that information shared on social networking sites leaves people very vulnerable to identity theft. And often they don’t realize how much information they’ve shared until it’s too late. Tread carefully when sharing information on any website. Before your share your life’s story, ask yourself what an identity thief would be able to do with that information.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Bookkeeping, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

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Filed under: Ripoffs and Scams, Tax, Fraud

The high-profile prosecution of actor Wasley Snipes a few months before tax season was pretty clearly an effort to scare people into paying their taxes. It might have backfired given that Snipes got off pretty light, but the IRS and the Justice Department state they aren’t backing down in their fight against tax cheats.

In a press release, Nathan J. Hochman, the Justice Department’s Tax Division Assistant Attorney General, announced the “creation of a national tax defier initiative,” According to the press release:

This initiative is aimed at stopping those tax defiers who do not meet their federal tax obligations and seek to transfer those obligations to their neighbor’s back. The tax defier is not someone who has a legitimate or factual dispute about the amount of tax due … The tax defier is someone who rejects the legal foundation of the tax system, despite decades of legal precedent upholding the system’s constitutional and statutory validity, and who takes specific and concrete action to violate the law. It is this tax defier conduct, which results in fraudulent claims, frivolous returns and bogus schemes, that threatens the foundation of our tax system and must be vigorously countered.

You can read the press release for details on what exactly they plan to do. It contains lots of phrases like “strengthen and expand coordination,” “Leverage expertise and resources,” and “maximize our use of technology.” When I hear government officials using language like that, I tend not to have a lot of confidence in their capability to get things done. But that’s just me.

To learn about some of the frivolous arguments that cheats make to shirk taxes, check out this series from Tracy Coenen.

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