It must be only coincidence, but at the very time Democratic leaders are rounding up votes, leaning on undecideds and seeing if they can amend Waxman-Markey a tiny bit to accommodate some key voters' concerns, some Wall Street folks are practically pleading for it.
Not in so many words, perhaps, at least not in public. But big investor-types are throwing around the mantra that regulated utilities have invoked for years: regulatory certainty. If you want renewable energy development, they say, you have to define the playing field.
Certainly the financial community has held this view for a long time; it just seems to be reaching fever pitch right now, as the climate change/energy bill goes to a crucial stage tomorrow. It's hard to know how closely Wall Street lobbyists are working the issue, but one might assume they are making themselves felt.
In fact, Kevin Parker, global head of asset management at Deutsche Bank, said it over and over at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum Wednesday in New York, arguing for a price on carbon emissions:
When you don't have regulatory certainty, investors are just not playing the game ... You've got to prioritize. Where there's a high degree of risk that's uncontrollable, you move on to the next opportunity.We need regulatory certainty, regulatory certainty, regulatory certainty. There's $12 billion in money market funds. There's lots of cash on the sidelines looking for a home.
Our colleague Peter Maloney also reported from that event that Jeffrey Holzschuh, vice chairman of the investment banking division at Morgan Stanley, talked about a pent-up desire among institutional investors to put money into green technology. And Deutsche Bank's Parker pointed out that coal-plant financing suffers, too, without a price on carbon emissions -- whatever coal plants will in fact be financed.
As some wags have observed in recent months, being about Wall Street nowadays means being about Washington, since that's where key money is coming from, and where key decisions are being made more than ever before, about what should be built and when, where, why.
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