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Integrating finance with agriculture and finding sustainability’s ‘Northstar’

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Integrating finance with agriculture and finding sustainability’s ‘Northstar’

Defining sustainability and serving to corporations construct it into their foundations had been key themes woven all through a current three-day working occasion for StrikeTwo.

Based mostly in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and run by blockchain-focused meals and beverage guide The New Fork, StrikeTwo examines how know-how can positively impression the meals system. Consultants, startup founders and entrepreneurs come collectively to collectively deal with a number of the world meals system’s most urgent issues.

This 12 months’s key themes targeted on constructing extra shopper belief, creating farm revenue, and managing the provision chain.

Inside these themes had been discussions on constructing extra sustainable options, with a particular emphasis on integrating the monetary sector deeper into ag in lots of elements of the world. Every theme was break up out as a monitor and run by “monitor homeowners.”

Sustainability wants a ‘Northstar’

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“There are about 400 competing labels within the market in Europe alone, all claiming to be sustainable,” Lise Colyer, OmniAction founder and a monitor participant, mentioned throughout a presentation on the finish of the StrikeTwo summit.

These labels, she mentioned, are very contradictory and don’t at all times make a lot sense.

This has led to a whole lot of shopper cynicism.

“Research after research exhibits that buyers completely wish to stay extra sustainably they usually need data that they will belief,” mentioned Colyer. “However they’ve little or no religion within the data they’re seeing on labels for the time being.”

Sustainability wants what she known as “a Northstar,” which is a framework for sustainability metrics that’s “harmonized, agreed, and absolutely globally accepted.”

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OmniAction, in fact, is growing such a framework, although Colyer identified that the method has concerned round 600 specialists and scientists from world wide. Its focus areas are surroundings, diet, meals security, land rights, and labor rights.

Making farmers bankable

StrikeTwo’s perspective on sustainability was appropriately broad. It encompassed not solely dialogue round soil well being and carbon but additionally the incomes and livelihoods of thousands and thousands of individuals world wide.

Smallholder farmers make up a serious portion of those individuals.

Kenya-based eProd addresses this by its provide chain platform for agribusinesses and co-ops. The corporate participated in StrikeTwo as a monitor proprietor.

On the occasion, COO Scott Lout laid out the actual finance issues his prospects face.

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“Our core shopper, which is an agribusiness, a co-op, is carrying the complete load of bringing inputs or extra capital to a farmer. So farmers don’t have entry to capital, they don’t have entry to finance, and normally they’re reliant on the co-op to make that occur. These co-ops are working very a lot on the margins.”

EProd’s purpose is to hyperlink farmers on to monetary establishments

One other monitor proprietor, aESTI, addresses the finance query round regenerative agriculture. The digital market focuses on small- and medium-sized farmers, offering them with credit for sustainable soil administration.

aESTI plans to first promote CO2 soil sequestration credit earlier than branching out into water storage, water high quality, and biodiversity credit. The corporate says 90% of the gross sales worth goes on to the farmer and 10% is used to cowl the prices of aESTI.

“We have now a great set of metrics that measure the precise worth of regenerative farming,” Frank Sloot mentioned throughout the occasion. “That mainly implies that you don’t solely have a look at yields, however you additionally have a look at the entire parts that carry worth to regenerative farming.”

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StrikeTwo overview

The year-long StrikeTwo bundle features a three-day working summit that includes “tracks” the place corporations and specialists work on urgent issues within the world meals system.

Attendance is free, albeit selective. These not attending as monitor homeowners can attend as specialists and be a part of a selected monitor.

The working occasion is adopted by a shark tank earlier than corporations “buckle down” with the assist program.

Each monitor has an proprietor. These are corporations and entrepreneurs aiming to unravel an issue in agrifood with know-how. Working with StrikeTwo-chosen specialists, monitor homeowners refine each drawback and answer over the three-day working occasion.

Observe homeowners go on to pitch on the shark tank occasion earlier than engaged on a roadmap in subsequent months.

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“The factor that I’m most pleased with is that each monitor proprietor made their innovation roadmap with a concrete 12 months[long] plan, together with commitments from completely different specialists, they usually had been all proud of their outcomes, StrikeTwo director Patricia Leek tells AFN.

Further tracks & takeaways

4 different monitor homeowners spoke to the actual issues they’re addressing by know-how:

Beverage options supplier Refresco underscored the challenges and complexity of guaranteeing a dwelling wage within the provide chain.

ChefChain supplies cooks, farmers and customers with an open, searchable blockchain that may enhance meals security, traceability and transparency.

Ferme Ardhi is creating an app for the African diaspora to spend money on native farming processes.

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Vegan Sushi Bar hopes to develop a plant-based fish with excessive dietary worth through “an knowledgeable consortium.”

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UBS latest bank to announce NJ job cuts as finance sector shrinks

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UBS latest bank to announce NJ job cuts as finance sector shrinks


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Swiss bank UBS is laying off 51 employees at its Weehawken office, public records show, as New Jersey’s banking and finance sectors more broadly grapple with tightening budgets amid uncertain economic times. 

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UBS is reportedly looking to trim its costs by $13 billion, which includes cutting one in every 12 employees, according to Reuters. A spokesperson for UBS declined to comment for this story. 

Data from state filings showed that five financial institutions announced New Jersey layoffs so far in 2024: The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, TD Bank, Prudential Financial, Citibank and JPMorgan Chase Bank. 

Some of those banks — including Citibank and Charles Schwab — are cutting their head counts by the thousands or tens of thousands across their entire operations.

Nationwide, Charles Schwab is cutting 2,000 employees and Citibank 20,000 of its staff. 

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“Banks are reducing back-office costs, and this includes people and head count reductions, unfortunately,” said Christopher Marinac, director of research at Janney Montgomery Scott, a financial services firm. “Overall, bank earnings are stable and generally not growing. Further, bank balance sheets are not expanding much this year.” 

One factor — the Federal Reserve, which has raised interest rates 11 times since the COVID-19 pandemic. That pushed mortgage rates higher for homebuyers, meaning fewer people obtained mortgages, prompting Wall Street to respond with layoffs, said a report by CNBC. 

That resulted in the state’s first job losses in half a year, unemployment figures show.  

“Banks are being careful on new lending and trying to retain more capital as the Federal Reserve is tightening standards and raising capital requirements soon,” Marinac said. 

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James Hughes, an economist at Rutgers University, told NorthJersey.com that white-collar jobs in banking and finance have become saturated after a two-year hiring spree that followed the COVID-19 pandemic.

Layoffs this year

New Jersey companies are letting go of more than 4,600 employees in 2024, public records show. 

The layoffs include 2,774 job cuts announced in 2023 for this year, and another 1,847 cuts announced in the first three months of 2024. 

Those cuts come at a time when New Jersey’s workforce posted a net loss in jobs for the first time in six months. Meanwhile, the state unemployment rate has hovered at 4.8% since September, state data shows.

Daniel Munoz covers business, consumer affairs, labor and the economy for NorthJersey.com and The Record. 

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Email: munozd@northjersey.com; Twitter:@danielmunoz100 and Facebook

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Espresso House appoints Daniel Sandström to lead finance department

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Espresso House appoints Daniel Sandström to lead finance department

Sandström joins the Swedish coffee chain after more than 25 years as McDonald’s Sweden, where his senior roles included Senior Commercial Finance Manager, Head of Finance and a temporary spell as Chief Financial Officer

Espresso House operates over 500 stores across Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Germany | Photo credit: Stephan Mahlke


 

Swedish coffee chain Espresso House has appointed former McDonald’s Sweden Head of Finance Daniel Sandström as its new Chief Financial Officer. 

 

Sandström joined McDonald’s Sweden in 1996, serving as Head of Finance 2013-2017 and acting Chief Financial Officer in 2015. Most recently, he was Chief Operations Officer for McDonald’s Sweden franchisee Food Folk Sverige AB. 

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Sandström succeeds Anders Ljungdahl who left the post in December 2023 to join student exchange firm Educatius Group. 


Espresso House is the largest branded coffee chain in the Nordics and the 12th largest in Europe with more than 500 stores across Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Germany. 


As part of a move to increase its market share in Germany, Espresso House awarded a license agreement to MF KAESO GmbH to expand into North Rhine-Westphalia in March 2023 and has also partnered with Autogrill Deutschland to scale its presence at airports and railway stations across the country. 

The coffee chain currently operates 45 sites across Germany and is seeking further franchise partners to lead European outlet growth. 

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Could the Consumer Protection Finance Bureau (CFPB)’s Victory in the Supreme Court Last Week Boomerang to Disempower the Bureau and Invalidate its Regulations? Not if the Case is Read Carefully and Properly: A Response to Professor Hal Scott’s Wall Street Journal Op-Ed

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Could the Consumer Protection Finance Bureau (CFPB)’s Victory in the Supreme Court Last Week Boomerang to Disempower the Bureau and Invalidate its Regulations? Not if the Case is Read Carefully and Properly: A Response to Professor Hal Scott’s Wall Street Journal Op-Ed

On May 16, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the notion that the way the operations of the Consumer Protection Finance Bureau (CFPB or Bureau)—a powerful regulatory agency created by Congress to protect fair treatment of consumers after the 2008 Financial Crisis—are financed runs afoul of the so-called Appropriations Clause of the Constitution. That Clause, housed in Article I, § 9, provides in relevant part that “No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” Challengers to the CFPB argued that because, under the Dodd-Frank statute creating and empowering the CFPB, the Bureau receives its operating monies from the earnings of the Federal Reserve System rather than via a yearly budget law approved by Congress, the strictures of the Appropriations Clause have not been respected. They won on this argument in the lower court.

But last week, the Supreme Court, in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America, Ltd., reversed. In an opinion of the Court for himself and six other Justices, Justice Clarence Thomas explained that:

Under the Appropriations Clause, an appropriation is simply a law that authorizes expenditures from a specified source of public money for designated purposes. The statute that provides the Bureau’s funding meets these requirements. We therefore conclude that the Bureau’s funding mechanism does not violate the Appropriations Clause.

The ruling was, predictably, cause for celebration among fans of the Bureau, including its chief congressional architect, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). But in an op-ed in this week’s Wall Street Journal, Emeritus Harvard Law Professor Hal Scott (a colleague of Senator Warren when she served on the Harvard Law faculty) wrote the following:

Not so fast. It’s true that CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association of America, a 7-2 decision . . . held that the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause authorizes Congress to fund the bureau with profits from the Federal Reserve. The Appropriations Clause requires that any money “drawn from the Treasury” be pursuant to “appropriations made by law.” Justice Thomas observe[d] that under the Federal Reserve Act, “surplus funds in the Federal Reserve System would otherwise be deposited into the general fund of the Treasury.” Since the money would otherwise have gone to the Treasury, it counts as having been “drawn from the Treasury” and therefore the law redirecting it complies with the Appropriations Clause. But for nearly two years the Fed has been losing money because of rising interest rates. Even if the Fed can justify [continued] payment [in recent years under the terms of] the Dodd-Frank statute, the constitutional problem remains. Since the Treasury no longer receives any surplus from the Fed, central-bank funding can no longer be considered “drawn from the Treasury.” This means the agency can’t rely on the Appropriations Clause—or last week’s decision by the high court—to justify the legality of its continued operations. That calls into question the legitimacy of the CFPB’s funding since September 2022—and all regulations issued during that period. The CFPB’s dramatic victory may turn out to be a stunning defeat [emphasis added and some sentences reordered for clarity].

Before I analyze Professor Scott’s take on the case, let me say that I have not always been a fan of what I see the CFPB doing. But putting that to one side, and with all due respect to Professor Scott (whom I do not know but who seems to be a true leader in his regulatory fields), the notion that last week’s case could end up being a defeat for the CFPB is simply wrong, and it reflects a failure to read the Court’s opinion carefully and to understand constitutional law basics. That is not to say that the ruling last week insulates the CFPB from future challenges based on other constitutional claims, but Professor Scott’s contention that the decision (combined with changes in the real world) could itself enable another challenger to succeed against the CFPB on a claim based on the Appropriations Clause is wide of the mark.

The fundamental problem with Professor Scott’s argument is his apparent belief that the Appropriations Clause was, in the eyes of the Court, a shield successfully invoked by the CFPB to justify the Bureau’s funding. It was no such thing. The Court found only that the Appropriations Clause was not the sword that the challengers thought it was. In this respect, Professor Scott’s logical mistake is in suggesting that the Bureau “rel[ied] on the Appropriations Clause . . . to justify the legality of its continued operations.” Instead, the Bureau simply defeated the notion that the Appropriations Clause was something on which the challengers could rely.

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To see the point another way, note that the Court invoked the fact that Federal Reserve surplus funds not given to the CFPB would otherwise have been deposited with the Treasury only to make clear that the Bureau’s funding mechanism must adhere to requirements of the Appropriations Clause (whatever those requirements might be):

As a threshold matter, the parties agree that the Bureau’s funding must comply with the Appropriations Clause. The Appropriations Clause applies to money “drawn from the Treasury.” Art. I, §9, cl. 7. The Bureau draws money from the Federal Reserve System. 12 U. S. C. §5497(a)(1). And, surplus funds in the Federal Reserve System would otherwise be deposited into the general fund of the Treasury. §289(a)(3)(B). Whatever the scope of the term “Treasury” in the Appropriations Clause, money otherwise destined for the general fund of the Treasury qualifies (emphasis added).

To repeat, Professor Scott suggests that money directed from the Federal Reserve to the Bureau in years where there is no Fed surplus is not money “drawn from” the Treasury, since that Bureau-funding money would never have been deposited in the Treasury. (In this regard, it appears that only Fed surpluses, and not all Fed revenues, are placed in the Treasury general fund). But even if his suggestion here is correct—and that itself might be debatable—all that means is that any Appropriations Clause challenge against CFPB funding would be all the weaker, since the limitations of the Clause simply wouldn’t be applicable in the first place. To the extent that Professor Scott is suggesting that Clause has any application to funds not drawn from the Treasury, he is not reading constitutional text or the Court’s own words very carefully.

Of course, the Appropriations Clause isn’t the only constitutional game in town, and someone might make other constitutional arguments against the CFPB. But the meaning of the Appropriations Clause is the only question the challengers raised, the only one that was at issue in last week’s case, and thus the only one to which last week’s ruling speaks.

Indeed, the Court made itself quite clear on these points:

The [challengers, in arguing that the Appropriations Clause requires more active Congressional oversight than occurred here] err by reducing the power of the purse to only the principle expressed in the Appropriations Clause. To be sure, the Appropriations Clause presupposes Congress’ powers over the purse. But, its phrasing and location in the Constitution make clear that it is not itself the source of those powers. [Emphasis added]. The Appropriations Clause is phrased as a limitation: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” . . . And, it is placed within a section [Article I, § 9] of other such limitations [such as] “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed”) and “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State, [to be contrasted with Article I, § 8, which provides that] ”“The Congress shall have Power To . . . ”). The [challengers] offer no defensible [theory] that the Appropriations Clause [limitations] require[] more than [that Congress specify the purposes for which identified funds should be used]. Without such a theory, the [challengers’] Appropriations Clause challenge must fail.

Thus, although there might be other constitutional claims (besides violation of the Appropriations Clause) that people might try to raise against the way the Bureau is funded, last week’s opinion can never be invoked to affirmatively support such claims. (Indeed, the Court’s unwillingness to smuggle into the Appropriations Clause requirements not supported by historical practice tends to cut, at least to some extent, against other claims.)

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Although I offer no firm opinion on the force of other kinds of constitutional arguments that may be advanced against the Bureau, I do note that Professor Scott, like the challengers last week, offers nothing beyond the (now debunked) invocation of the Appropriations Clause. In the event that Professor Scott might think that expenditure of federal monies that are not drawn from the Treasury (as he defines the Treasury) is inherently unconstitutional, he would need to flesh out that argument. He would also need to explain why (under his own terms) the Federal Reserve itself is able to operate and spend money from its revenues these days, since (as pointed out above) federal statutes seem to require that only the Fed’s surplus, and not all Fed revenues, be deposited in what Professor Scott defines as the Treasury. In any case, and most importantly, such an argument has nothing to do with last week’s ruling,

I should also note that, at a more basic constitutional level, the Bureau’s statutory responsibilities (of consumer protection) seem to be amply supported by several of Congress’s powers (including the power to regulate commerce among the several states), and the federal government’s general ability to spend money even when it is running a deficit seems obviously permissible given that Congress has been given the power to borrow money on the credit of the U.S.

In addition to constitutional claims, someone might challenge as a statutory violation the CFPB’s funding in years when the Fed is in deficit. The meaning under Dodd-Frank of the Federal Reserve System’s “earnings” (from which CFPB funding is supposed to come) in years when the Fed is operating at a deficit is something that may need to be resolved (and something on which I have little to observe, except that “earnings” is a term that, even if it refers to bottom rather than top lines, needn’t always have to be understood by reference to a particular year). But that (perhaps interesting and important) statutory question is distinct from any constitutional constraints, and Professor Scott, in his op-ed, explicitly puts the meaning of the statute to one side and focuses instead on what he sees as “the constitutional problem” that remains. With regard to the Constitution, although the ruling isn’t an all-purpose constitutional clean bill of health for the Bureau (no ruling ever purports to insulate any entity from attacks beyond those made in the case at hand), there is no sense in which the “CFPB’s dramatic victory may turn out to be a stunning defeat.” At worst, it might not turn out to be a victory that resolves all other possible attacks, but that is always true, and Professor Scott doesn’t even seek to sketch any plausible constitutional attacks that should or will ensue.

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