Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has died. He was 100 years old and had spent more than a year in hospice care. The Georgia peanut farmer served one turbulent term in the White House before building a reputation as a global humanitarian and champion of democracy. He defeated President Gerald Ford in 1976 promising to restore trust in government but lost to Ronald Reagan four years later amid soaring inflation, gas station lines and the Iran hostage crisis. He and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, then formed The Carter Center, and he earned a Nobel Peace Prize while making himself the most active and internationally engaged of former presidents. The Carter Center said the former president died Sunday afternoon in Plains, Georgia.
He’s one of the most famous corporate leaders in the world, delivering products embraced by billions. But it’s the haters that companies like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta worry about. In an era when online anger and social tensions are increasingly directed at the businesses consumers count on, Meta last year spent $24.4 million on guards, alarms and other measures to keep Zuckerberg and the company’s former chief operating officer safe. Some high-profile CEOs surround themselves with security. But the fatal shooting this week of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson while he walked alone on a New York City sidewalk has put a spotlight on the widely varied approaches companies take in protecting their leaders against threats. Thompson had no personal security and appeared unaware of the shooter lurking before he was gunned down. And today’s political, economic and technological climate is only going to make the job of evaluating threats against executives and taking action to protect them even more difficult, experts say. “We are better today at collecting signals. I’m not sure we’re any better at making sense of the signals we collect,” says Fred Burton of Ontic, a provider of threat management software for companies. After Thompson’s shooting, Burton said, “I’ve been on the phone all day with some organizations asking for consultation, saying, ’Am I doing enough?” Since the killing, some health insurers have taken steps to safeguard their executives and rank-and-file workers. Medica, a Minnesota-based nonprofit health care firm, said Friday it is temporarily closing its six offices for security reasons and will have its employees work from home. “Although we have received no specific threats related to our campuses, our office buildings will be temporarily closed out of an abundance of caution,” the company said in a statement. A Medica spokesman said the company had also removed biographical information about its executives from its website as a precaution. UnitedHealth Group, parent of the insurer Thompson led, removed photos of its top executives from its website hours after the shooting, later removing their names and biographies. But well before the attack, some of the biggest U.S. companies, particularly those in the tech sector, were spending heavily on personal and residential security for their top executives. Meta, whose businesses include Facebook and Instagram, reported the highest spending on personal security for top executives last year, filings culled by research firm Equilar show. Zuckerberg “is synonymous with Meta and, as a result, negative sentiment regarding our company is directly associated with, and often transferred to, Mr. Zuckerberg,” the Menlo Park, California, company explained earlier this year in an annual shareholder disclosure. At Apple, the world’s largest tech company by stock valuation, CEO Tim Cook was tormented by a stalker who sent him sexually provocative emails and even showed up outside his Silicon Valley home at one point before the company’s security team successfully took legal action against her in 2022. Cook is regularly accompanied by security personnel when he appears in public. Still, the company’s $820,000 allotted last year to protect top executives is a fraction of what other tech giants spent for CEO security. Just over a quarter of the companies in the Fortune 500 reported spending money to protect their CEOs and other top executives. Of those that did, the median payment for personal security doubled over the last three years to about $98,000. In many companies, investor meetings like the one UnitedHealthcare’s Thompson was walking to when he was shot are viewed as very risky because details on the location and who will be speaking are highly publicized. “It gives people an opportunity to arrive well in advance and take a look at the room, take a look at how people would probably come and go out of a location,” said Dave Komendat, president of DSKomendat Risk Management Services, which is based in the greater Seattle area. Some firms respond by beefing up security. For example, tech companies routinely require everyone attending a major event, such as Apple’s annual unveiling of the next iPhone or a shareholder meeting, to go through airport-style security checkpoints before entering. Others forgo in-person meetings with shareholders. Government health insurance provider Centene Corp. joined that group Thursday, citing the UnitedHealthcare executive’s death in announcing that its upcoming Investor Day will be held online, rather than in-person as originally planned. “But there are also company cultures that really frown on that and want their leaders to be accessible to people, accessible to shareholders, employees,” Komendat said. Depending on the company, such an approach may make sense. Many top executives are little known to the public, operating in industries and locations that make them far less prone to public exposure and to threats. “Determining the need for and appropriate level of an executive-level protection program is specific to each organization,” says David Johnston, vice president of asset protection and retail operations at the National Retail Federation. “These safeguards should also include the constant monitoring of potential threats and the ability to adapt to maintain the appropriate level of security and safety.” Some organizations have a protective intelligence group that uses digital tools such as machine learning or artificial intelligence to comb through online comments to detect threats not only on social media platforms such as X but also on the dark web, says Komendat. They look for what’s being said about the company, its employees and its leadership to uncover risks. “There are always threats directed towards senior leaders at companies. Many of them are not credible,” Komendat said. “The question always is trying to determine what is a real threat versus what is someone just venting with no intent to take any additional action.” Burton, a former special agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service, points out that despite the current climate, there is little in the way of organized groups that target companies. Today, one of the primary worries are loners whose rantings online are fed by others who are like-minded. It’s up to corporate security analysts to zero in on such dialogue and decide whether or not it represents a real threat. And CEOs aren’t the only targets of disgruntled customers. In the U.S., there were 525 workplace fatalities due to assault in 2022, according to the National Safety Council. Industries including healthcare, education and service providers are more prone to violence than others, and taxi drivers are more than 20 times more likely to be murdered on the job than other workers, the group said. But the ambush of UnitedHealthcare’s Thompson this week is bound to get some CEOs second-guessing. “What invariably happen at moments like this in time is you will get additional ears listening” to security professionals seeking money to beef up executive protection, Burton says. “Because I can guarantee you there’s not a CEO in America who’s not aware of this incident.” ___ Associated Press writers Anne D’Innocenzio and Haleluya Hadero in New York and Jim Salter in St. Louis contributed. He’s one of the most famous corporate leaders in the Chipotle is raising its U.S. prices to offset inflation and The U.S. government on Friday ordered testing of the nation's A 7.0 magnitude earthquake shook a large area of Northern
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Matein Khalid I wrote a column on Vornado (VNO) as a buy at 18 in Sep’22 as it was slammed by the pandemic, its debt load and the Fed’s draconian rate hikes. So VNO’s price ascribed a $450 a square foot value to its prime Manhattan office/Fifth Ave retail portfolio even though its occupancy rate was 91% as the pandemic raged. To help my Dubai friends grasp that deep value discount in VNO, I wrote a post titled buying Manhattan at Karama prices at $18. After initially rising to $26 by February 2023, VNO was slammed by the depositor run and Fed bailout in Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic on investor angst on their bond portfolio after Powell raised the Fed funds rate from 0.5%-5.5%. A regional banking crisis could have escalated into systemic contagion, a no-no for Uncle Sam since regional banks owned 70% of all US CRE loans. So a Fed bailout of SVB and First Republic was inevitable while Powell’s tight money pivot led to a plunge in both inflation and interest rates by summer 2024. VNO rose from a cycle low of 14 to almost 44 now. Moral of the story, making big money in real estate means getting both the brick and mortar and interest rate cycle right. My friends who bought VNO at 18 have made an almost 150% profit on their capital in 2 years with near zero transaction cost. Sure beats flipping houses and praying for the greater fool theory to work in your favour in a notoriously illiquid speculative asset class. The REIT Index has underperformed the S&P 500 goosed by Mag-7. However, despite the goldilocks economy, there is valuation froth in the SPX at 23X. While higher transaction volumes, lower inflation and US Treasury bond yields tell me that it is now the time to rotate into real estate on the NYSE. Mr. Market is whispering to me that the pandemic/banking/tight money/remote work/telecommuting blues for CRE is now over and it is time to go deal hunting for discounted brick and mortar property on Wall Street. I love fundamentalists property analysts though not the beirdo-weirdos who operated from caves in Afghanistan. 67 I believe owning the right REITs will be a money making strategy in the coming US real estate cycles, even if my VNO trade idea was a roller coaster in the first half of 2023. I have made no secret about my fascination with industrial and data center REITs, segments that have rewarded patient investors with 10-20X multiples of their capital in the past two decades. In 2024, the first Baby Boomer turned 79 and the biggest/richest generation in American history with 74 million members are now prime candidates for senior housing demand. Yet there is a supply squeeze in this segment due to Uncle Jay’s tight money and Uncle Joe’s long permit/construction lead times. Data center REITs are priced to perfection and Prologis is the only industrial I like at the right price. New York office is still a winner but I will not touch San Fran with a barge pole, go COLD turkey! Also published on Medium .Election 2024: Donohoe defends McEntee's record amid Dublin safety concerns