Monday Morning Links are Feeling Charitable

I'm going to be travelling for a large part of this morning, and then having coffee with an expert on estate planning, so here's a few links to keep you going until I can get up and running.

If you invest your money well and give some of the proceeds to charity, are you really doing a good thing? Tim Harford says yes, but he's talking about donations on the order of a thousand bucks or so. What would he think about TCI's Chris Cooper-Hohn, whose idea of giving money to children seems to be to give away £5.1 million in disbursements, while investing about £200 million back into his own hedge fund? We're assured it will all find its way to good causes eventually, and indeed so far the hedge-fund investments have worked out very well indeed for the charity. But if those monies aren't actually making their way to children, who really benefits here?

Of course, you don't need to be English to be a successful hedge-fund manager. Kim Mikkelsen, "a golfer who enjoys Spanish wine" according to Bloomberg's Anchalee Worrachate, has been making a killing in Danish mortgage-backed securities. Factoid of the day: "Denmark, with a population of 5.5 million, has Europe's second-biggest mortgage market behind Germany." And trust me, there's nothing more boring than the German MBS (or Pfandbrief) market. Go Denmark!

Also, Go Norway! Lance Knobel finds an FT article in which Knut Kjaer, the manager of Norway's $350 billion public pension fund is revealed to make less than $500,000 per year. (If he was making just, say, 1% of assets, that would put him on $3.5 billion a year.) Also, Wal-Mart won't answer his questions, so he won't buy their shares.

On the subject of Wal-Mart, BusinessWeek's Pallavi Gogoi asks whether the retailing giant should be allowed to start a bank. The magazine also hosts a debate on the subject. I hope to have more on this subject later this week, but ultimately it's simple: of course Wal-Mart should be allowed to offer banking services. And of course it won't be allowed to do so, because fearful banks and credit unions will do everything in their power – and that's a lot – to stop it from happening.

Finally, Colin Oakes left a very interesting comment on a blog entry of mine from early May, on the subject of when the investing profits of charitable organizations are tax-exempt. If you're reading this, Colin, send me an email – I'd love to delve deeper into this subject, since it has very interesting implications for a lot of university endowments.