Forget the stock market, you should really be worried about your job
A year ago, I was worried about the stock market. Today, I’m concerned about the job market.
In December 2017, I penned an article entitled Best Investment 2018, which turned out to be surprisingly prescient. That wasn’t really my goal. At the time, I was simply pondering rich stock market valuations, tiny bond yields and the new tax law, with its higher standard deduction and limits on itemized deductions. Putting it all together, it struck me that paying down debt—even mortgage debt—seemed like an awfully smart move.
Since then, the S&P 500 SPX, +0.98% has dipped modestly, while reported earnings per share are expected to climb 28% in 2018. The passage of time has done the work usually done by market declines: It’s helped to sharply improve stock market valuations.
A year ago, the S&P 500 companies were trading at 25 times their reported corporate profits for the prior 12 months. Today, that multiple is down to 19.9, based on earnings for the 12 months through 2018’s third quarter from S&P Global. A year from now, the S&P 500’s price-earnings ratio could be as low as 17, assuming stocks continue to tread water and earnings come through as expected.
To be sure, stocks remain expensive by historical standards. But that isn’t especially alarming. After all, stocks have been overvalued for much of the past three decades, plus today’s lowly bond yields are hardly a compelling alternative.
And to be sure, 2018’s handsome earnings growth has been fueled by 2017’s corporate tax cut and by continued fat company profit margins. The onetime boost from cutting taxes won’t, of course, be repeated in 2019. But there doesn’t appear to be any immediate risk that the tax cuts will be reversed.
Does that mean the recent market turmoil has run its course? I have no clue. Forecasting short-term market performance is a mug’s game, because it necessitates predicting not just the news, but also how investors will react to that news.
Indeed, when it comes to stocks, I find myself firmly on the fence. On the one hand, we haven’t seen anything that looks like a market bottom. There’s been no revealing of financial excesses, no squeals of economic pain, no horrendous decline in stock prices, no relentless declarations of doom from the pundits. On the other hand, thanks to improved valuations, buying stocks today doesn’t seem nearly as perilous as it did a year ago.
That brings me to the question everybody seems to be asking: Will the economy weaken? The financial markets appear to think so. The stock and bond markets are suggesting that a recession could be in the offing. When I look around, I don’t see many signs of a U.S. economic slowdown. But it’s foolish to argue with the markets, which reflect the collective wisdom of all investors.
If the economy does indeed weaken, the big worry for many families won’t be the stock market. After all, only half of Americans even own stocks and stock funds. Instead, the top concern for most Americans will be the job market.
We’re now at 3.7% unemployment, down from 10% in October 2009. The Federal Reserve expects 2.5% real economic growth in 2019, with unemployment dropping even further, to 3.5%. Let’s hope the Fed is right.
But in case the folks there have it all wrong, there’s good news: You might have 12 months or more to prep your finances for rough times. How come? The stock market is a leading indicator: It starts falling before the economy contracts and it rallies before a recession is over. By contrast, unemployment is a lagging indicator: Companies are slow to shed workers when the economy turns sluggish, though they’re also slow to rehire when economic growth resumes.
Also read: You may have to reapply for your job one day — here’s how to keep it
Worried you could lose your job in the next economic downturn? The obvious move is to stockpile cash. While that’s prudent, it shouldn’t necessarily be your top priority. Here are seven other things to do now:
• Get rid of credit card debt. No matter what happens to the economy, that’s a smart move. What if you later need cash because you got laid off? While not advisable, you can always “reborrow” from your credit cards.
• Pay off 401(k) loans. If you lose your job, any 401(k) loans must be repaid right away. Don’t have the necessary cash? The unpaid loan becomes a taxable distribution, triggering income taxes and tax penalties.
• Keep funding the 401(k), especially if it comes with a matching employer contribution that vests immediately. Even if a bout of unemployment forces you to dip into your retirement account, you’ll likely come out ahead, because the matching contribution you collect could be worth more than any tax penalty you pay. On top of that, you may be able to delay any retirement account withdrawals until the next tax year, when your lack of income puts you in a lower tax bracket.
• Fund a Roth rather than a tax-deductible IRA. If you need cash, you can withdraw the dollars you contributed to your Roth with no taxes or penalties owed. Taxes only become an issue if you touch the account’s investment earnings. (There are income limits for Roth accounts.)
• Set up a home-equity line of credit. This could provide another source of cash, should you find yourself out of work. One warning: If we get a deep recession, some banks may respond by cutting the size of credit lines, including those already established.
• Calculate your fixed living costs, so you know the minimum sum you need to make it through each month. While you’re at it, ponder whether there’s any way to cut those fixed costs. If you don’t have a paycheck coming in, you want to do everything possible to limit the dollars going out.
• Think hard before taking on new financial obligations. For instance, you might keep your current car for a few more years. If your job is at risk, this probably isn’t the best time to take on a car loan or use your spare cash to buy a new vehicle. What if you still have money owed on the last car you purchased? If the interest rate is, say, 4% or above, you might make extra payments to get the loan paid off sooner.
Jonathan Clements’s most recent articles include No Kidding, Taking Us for Fools, The View From Here and A Little Perspective.
This column originally appeared on Humble Dollar. It was published with permission.
Major investment firm to prioritize sustainability, back off coal
Enlarge Bloomberg/Getty Images reader comments 115 with 63 posters participating, including story author Share this story
When it comes to taking action on climate change, the world has entered a very strange place. Scientific results continue to indicate that the consensus on our role in driving climate change has every reason to be accepted. Several years of the predicted impacts of climate change—record-high temperatures, massive storms, and out-of-control wildfires—have left ever more of the public ignoring the few skeptics and denialists who persist. Aside from a handful of holdouts, governments have accepted that they need to do something about climate change.
Despite all that, we continue to do very little, and carbon emissions have continued to rise. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the financial markets. It's very clear that companies are assigning value to the rights to extract fossil fuel deposits, even though governments will almost certainly block some of them from being developed. And they continue to do so because governments and investors allow them to.
Divestment campaigns have started to change that, causing $12 trillion in assets to be pulled from businesses dependent upon fossil fuels. But the movement may have picked up some significant additional momentum this week as one of the largest investment firms, BlackRock, announced that it will be making sustainability, and climate change in particular, central to its strategies. Included in its announcement is that it would immediately begin pulling out of many coal investments and complete the change before the year is out.
What BlackRock can and can’t do
BlackRock's new policy was announced in an open letter from its CEO to the companies that it invests in (or might invest in). The consequences of that policy were elaborated by an accompanying letter from its management team to its investors. We'll spend some time on the details of this policy and the reasons for it below. But we'll first explain why BlackRock's decision is significant and a number of factors that can limit its overall impact.
One key to the importance of the decision is simply the scale of the company: BlackRock manages roughly $7 trillion in assets, investing money on behalf of institutional investors and individuals. Purely from a PR perspective, a company that size focusing on sustainability puts pressure on other investment firms to follow, lest they be seen as poor global citizens. But BlackRock's announcements also lay out a strong argument that focusing on sustainability is a powerful tool for avoiding financial risks. If other investors find these arguments compelling, then other firms could be forced to follow suit.
In managing the money investors have put into it, BlackRock and these other firms are bound by "fiduciary duty," which means that it has to act in the best interests of its investors. Effectively, this means the company has to make the case that changes in its investment strategy represent sound financial decision-making.
BlackRock's ability to act, however, is limited by the nature of some of the things it offers to investors. Assets are often invested in specific funds that are meant to identify the best-performing companies in specific markets, like health care or energy. Here, BlackRock can do a number of things: changing its definition of best-performing to include sustainability metrics; offering funds that focus on companies that have sustainable business models; and offering funds that invest in specific sustainable businesses, such as renewable energy.
Many of the assets BlackRock manages, however, are invested in passively managed index funds, which put their money into companies that fit a specific definition: all the companies in the S&P 500, or all stocks that fit a definition of "small cap," for example. Here, regardless of BlackRock's focus on sustainability, there's little the firm can do to change what companies it invests in.
BlackRock can, however, potentially change the companies themselves. Investors in these funds typically give the investment managers the ability to act as proxies in votes on the company's governance. These include things like approving members of the company board or changing the way the company does business. Due to the fact that major investors like BlackRock own a large number of shares, changes in its voting patterns can make a substantial difference.
What it plans on doing
With a better sense of what the company can do, we can turn to what it plans on doing. In the open letters, the company's management lays out its case for focusing on sustainability.
"BlackRock does not see itself as a passive observer in the low-carbon transition," CEO Larry Fink argues. "We believe we have a significant responsibility—as a provider of index funds, as a fiduciary, and as a member of society—to play a constructive role in the transition." And, just as significantly, Fink says, customers have consistently asked for it to act on climate and sustainability issues.
Fink goes on to elaborate how sustainability fits with the company's fiduciary duty. He argues that "Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects." As a result, investors are starting to "reassess core assumptions about modern finance," which will mean that "in the near future—and sooner than most anticipate—there will be a significant reallocation of capital." Because of this impending reallocation, firms that have a focus on sustainability provide the lowest risk, and best returns for investment, Fink argues. This provides the rationale for changing investment policies as protecting the interests of its investors.
BlackRock's CEO calls for companies to use recently developed standards to report their climate- and sustainability-related risks, as well as how they plan to operate within the limits posed by the Paris Climate Agreement. He goes on to indicate that if the companies fail to do so, BlackRock will assume they're not managing risks properly. He then drops the big threat: "we will be increasingly disposed to vote against management and board directors when companies are not making sufficient progress on sustainability-related disclosures and the business practices and plans underlying them."
Sustainable alternatives
The letter from the company's Executive Committee provides the details on some of the practical changes that will be made. For funds that are actively managed, sustainable alternatives will be developed and will ultimately become the firm's central focus. For unmanaged index funds, the company will develop alternatives that have a similar focus and investment returns but include only companies that meet its sustainability standards. All fund managers will be required to report on how they're managing sustainability risks, and the company will develop tools to better evaluate them. The results of those evaluations will be used internally and provided to potential investors as part of the fund's advertising and disclosures.
As a first step toward limiting the company's exposure to climate risks, it's focusing on coal. "Thermal coal is significantly carbon intensive, becoming less and less economically viable, and highly exposed to regulation because of its environmental impacts," BlackRock executives argue. "With the acceleration of the global energy transition, we do not believe that the long-term economic or investment rationale justifies continued investment in this sector." Before 2020 is over, the company will sell off investments in any company that gets more than a quarter of its revenue from coal production.
That leaves a lot of space for continued investment in diversified companies where coal is only a portion of their revenues. But those are also the companies that are best positioned to exit the market as its prospects become increasingly bleak.
Good, but not enough
While most of the individual steps being taken by BlackRock are commendable, the full extent of its impact will be determined by how many additional companies the decision compels to follow suit and how quickly companies move to adopt BlackRock's standards for risk. The challenges here are substantial and are nicely reflected by another recent open letter from a corporate CEO.
This one came from the CEO of Siemens, Joe Kaeser, who was responding to criticism of the company's role in a coal-mining project in Australia—criticism that has mounted in the wake of the country's out-of-control fire season. Siemens' role in the project is small—it's supplying signaling equipment to the railway that will serve the mine—but its participation is jarring given that the company has pledged to go carbon neutral within a decade.
The letter is a bizarre mishmash of justifications and confused messaging. We signed a contract and can't back out. But we've modified the contract so we could back out if bad things happen. The Australian government and local native Australians approved it, so it's OK. And other companies were bidding on the contract we won, so it would have happened anyway. We love the environment, but we also love our workers and wanted to make sure we didn't lose money on this. But environmental care should not be about money. We want Greta and other teenagers involved to approve our actions, but they keep saying no. Did I mention we have a large renewable energy division? We're also going to help with wildfire recovery.
(No, I am not exaggerating. Everything above, other than a specific mention of Greta Thunberg, is there.)
It takes Kaeser until the final paragraph of the letter to come to the real issue: "We should have been wiser about this project beforehand." In other words, our commitment to handling climate change isn't deep enough to have changed the way the company makes its business decisions. That deep-seated tendency to continue business as usual is exactly how we've ended up having done so little despite the public consensus to act, and it represents the biggest challenge BlackRock will be up against.
How Nipsey Hussle’s Vision Is Being Executed By Our Opportunity Investment Initiative
Nipsey Hussle and David Gross. Photo by Ann Marie Clark
"Nipsey Hussle manifested leadership by doing, not by saying, 'I believe this' or 'you should do this.' He did it," says David Gross, Nip's longtime business partner.
Nipsey's hands-on leadership can be traced throughout his career. For years, we heard stories of him selling 1,000 limited edition copies of his Crenshaw mixtape for $100 a pop and setting up his Marathon Clothing store on the corner of Slauson and Crenshaw in Los Angeles. Now, Nip's entrepreneurial spirit has been continued by partners like Gross, in the wake of the rapper's senseless death in 2019.
Our Opportunity is the latest organization to carry on Nipsey's vision. Co-founded by Nip and Gross, it's a grassroots investment initiative that's described as "a community-aligned organization focused on spreading transformative economic opportunity in low-income neighborhoods throughout the United States." So, while it started in Hussle’s neighborhood in L.A., Our Opportunity's larger goal is to work with leaders in inner cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Washington DC, and New Orleans, to build transformative projects.
Introducing Our Opportunity to the world, Gross launched the #InvestorChallenge in October 2019 with the purpose of encouraging new investors to get active. The objective was to open 1000 new accounts, then offer free introductions to investing curriculum. Since December 2019, 450 new investors have opened accounts, but Gross says that number has increased within the past month.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
The social media campaign and curriculum is only the beginning for Our Opportunity. There are two funds, Own Our Own and the Opportunity Fund, both of which will focus on real estate investment and development in inner cities. Launching now, the Own Our Own fund is targeting a $50 million raise, which is being crowdfunded to allow small investors from each communities to participate with minimum investments of $1,000. The Opportunity Fund is targeting a $100 million raise, which will target investors with capital gains who can benefit from the Opportunity Zone legislation. Gross says the legislations' goals are "to get people to make long-term investments in inner cities." He adds, "To simplify, this is the biggest tax gift ever written into a new tax code."
Our Opportunity honors Nipsey's life's work of building up his community, but Gross says the task of completing the project without him still weighs heavy on the team. "Everyone is pushing themselves to return to normalcy in the context of things we were doing with him," he says. "It's for his legacy or on par for his legacy, so it's been a slow process."
POST CONTINUES BELOW
Gross also reveals that a documentary, which they shot when Nip was alive, will give a more in-depth look at Nip’s vision. For now, though, the team has delayed its release until they "find a tasteful way to acknowledge what's happened in completing the documentary without shifting the focus from being a documentary about this movement to being a documentary about his life."
David Gross spoke with Complex about his plans with Nipsey Hussle, Our Opportunity, and more. The interview, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, is below. You can learn more about Our Opportunity at their website here.
Nipsey Hussle and David Gross. Photo by Ann Marie Clark
Can you explain what Our Opportunity is all about? How does it stem from the previously launched community space, Vector 90? It's funny to look back now at the early conversations and vision. The first time I actually pitched Vector 90, I had a deck that was so involved. It had phase one through five with everything that Vector 90 was going to be. It was going to lead to incubators and Shark Tank-type events in every city. It was going to lead to VC funds. It's kind of a moonshot concept, which is what got [Nipsey Hussle] into it. So the kernels of the idea of Vector 90 and Our Opportunity are the same. With Vector 90, we were trying to find a grassroots, high-impact way to reach people. Then we wanted to take the things that worked and scale it to other places. That's at the heart of what Our Opportunity is. Our Opportunity is all about finding very localized, high-touch grassroots ways to make a positive change in every city. And then replicating and scaling [the things that worked] to a much larger plateau.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
To simplify, this is the biggest tax gift ever written into a new tax code.
The name Our Opportunity comes from something called Opportunity Zones. What is an Opportunity Zone? An Opportunity Zone is a concept that was created in a tax bill that was passed in December of 2017. The tax bill itself was pretty robust, and it resulted in a lot of tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations. But included in that was something radical that was intended to help positively impact inner cities. So, it's tax incentives based off of the investment of capital gains. It wants to get people to make long-term investments in inner cities.
The longer term your investment is, the bigger the tax returns. The way it works is, if you're investing in a capital gain, which is the profit from another investment, and you put them into a designated opportunity zone, you start receiving these tax benefits. The first benefit is a deferral you get for five years. For the first five years, you don't have to pay taxes on your capital gain. After five years, you get a deduction on the taxes you owe. After two more years, you get a greater deduction. You have to pay your initial taxes, but the big part of the incentive, where it becomes magical, is if you invest in an opportunity zone—say you buy some real estate in South Central that qualifies—you hold it for two years, and whatever your profit on that real estate is, you never pay capital gains taxes on it. To simplify, this is the biggest tax gift ever written into a new tax code.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
How much of this organization was outlined prior to Nipsey's passing and how much of it was done afterwards? It's a very fair question. The best response I can give is we actually shot a documentary about this and completed it while Nipsey was alive. We shot the Our Opportunity documentary in the middle of March last year. We already had a rough cut of the documentary, and we laid out our strategy to partner with the local heroes. So, for lack of a better way to phrase it, kind of a “Nipsey figure” in each of the target cities that are important in our culture: Detroit, DC, Atlanta, Baltimore, New Orleans. This documentary laid everything out. That speaks to it being well-defined when Nipsey was alive. It was out in the atmosphere that we were doing this, and we'd already been invited to go and speak to Congress prior to his death.
POST CONTINUES BELOW 
David Gross. Photo by Elmo Kebour
The task of fulfilling this vision obviously falls on you and your team now that Nip is no longer here. How do you move forward with making that vision a reality from an emotional standpoint? Yeah. I mean, as you can imagine, everyone in L.A. was significantly impacted by Nipsey's death. I think he was probably one of the biggest stories in the country last year. But in L.A., you magnify the impact and how it felt by hundreds. Going back to the timeline I laid out, we started shooting a documentary in January of 2019 with the idea of releasing it by the summer. It was done by March, and we just put everything on hold. It didn't feel right to, in the wake of his death, go back to business as usual. We shut down Vector 90 for a few months. We didn't touch the documentary or think about it. And the fund was placed on hold for everyone to process it. I don't know if it'll ever be... It's not as if today everyone's fine and has moved on. But everyone is pushing themselves to return to normalcy in the context of things we were doing with him. It's for his legacy or on par for his legacy. So it's been a slow process.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
Why was this organization so important to Nipsey? Take it with a grain of salt, but I'm speaking based on insight that he gave me directly. You see reflected in all of his actions while he was alive, he manifested leadership by doing, not by saying "I believe this" or saying, "You should do this." He did it. He carried his neighborhood. He carried the ethos that he picked up in the neighborhood with him, and he made it look good. So for him, it was just a natural extension. As his platform got bigger and as he learned more things, he was expanding that activism, that radical entrepreneurship. It just aligned with his philosophy and worldview.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
Why is this important to you? For me, I don't have the platform that Nip had, but I had personal connections to L.A., and in particular, just the inner city in general. And I've always wanted to figure out a way to share the things that I've been fortunate enough to learn, and then to live my life in the way that I'm doing full time. I think the thing about him and the thing we were doing together, it was never us doing something for the people. It was trying to do it with them. I think that best describes how I want this to feel and what this should be. It's us doing something together. That's the only way to make real change and real impact—if it's done with the community, the people, or whatever your target is.
Did you anticipate any challenges in taking Our Opportunity out of South Los Angeles and bringing it to other inner cities?We didn't anticipate any challenges apart from the standard frictions you get whenever you're starting anything new. But after we had proof of concept, we anticipated there would be large scale buy-in and excitement from within the culture and the communities we were targeting. That was the rationale for embracing Nipsey in South Central and say Meek Mill in Philly, because we wanted the community to buy it, to accept it, and then embrace it. If someone was starting a real estate investment fund or private equity fund, and you're like, "pick your partners," for the most part, people aren't going to say, "Yeah, I want your local rapper, NBA player, or legend." They're going to want an institutional investor or a high net worth family. But our whole thing was a bit more radical and very much grounded in the community and culture. And we were confident that the culture and communities would embrace it.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
If 50 different groups spring up and they're doing this exact same thing, then that's the outcome we intended.
Is this model able to stand without a Nipsey or a Meek or another local figure? For sure. It's not a concept. We never wanted to represent that we invented it. The idea of buying back the block, I don't know where that started, but it's been ubiquitous in our culture: the ideas of black excellence and ownership. Obviously it's what Nipsey preached and rapped about for his entire career. So no, it didn't have to be tied to one person or a handful of people. We just wanted to catalyze. We figured the quickest way to shift the mindset, and then shift the culture, was to have a lot of the people who helped move culture. I threw out the Meek Mill name. At that point, we hadn't gone out to anyone, but in the documentary, there's a part where we go city by city. Those are the figures who make sense, but this is bigger than one person. That's why we always wanted it to be a coalition. It's about a group of representatives from this culture. If other groups do it apart from us, we want that. If 50 different groups spring up and they're doing this exact same thing, then that's the outcome we intended.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
Why did you decide to launch this organization through social media with the #investorchallenge? We want it aligned with our impressionistic vision and objective for our communities, which is to encourage the mindset of investment, ownership, and entrepreneurship broadly. But it was actually a reaction to [another social media campaign]. On Mondays, I used to do this thing on social media called "Market Mondays." I would answer specific questions about what was going on in the capital markets or financial markets. The reaction I got was so strong, but the majority of the questions I got were from people who would say, "I don't know anything about investing, but how do we get started?" So it was just a response to that.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
Initially, it was something I was going to do on a small scale with the people who were already following and engaging to get them to commit. There's no way to learn something unless you're doing it. After, I said I would give away $10,000. Other people started reaching out saying, "Hey, I'd give." Trae Tha Truth was the first person who reached out. He was like, "That investor challenge, when you do it, I want to give, too." It was super organic. Then we realized that other people would do it. Then a few other people reached out to me. It didn't start off as being some structured, organized thing, but because of the buy-in that we got, we had to give it some structure and build it out.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
According to the Instagram page, you’ve reached 450 investors by December 12. Has that number grown in the past month?Yeah, it has. We raised more money. It was super cool when I first issued the challenge and I started giving away money. We were just wiring money to people from me, and incurring a $30 wire fee. We didn't have a 501(c)(3) set up. After other people started giving, it forced us to go and partner with a financial sponsor that had the 501(c)(3) status. And when other people gave, it would be tax deductible. We've been able to attract some larger capital partners, and more significantly, been able to attract some institutional partners on the educational side who want to provide a lot of tools in the curriculum for a scalable educational model.
Nipsey Hussle and David Gross. Photo by Ann Marie Clark
Is the idea to launch an investment curriculum? What would that program entail and how would people access it? The response has been overwhelming, and the demand has been overwhelming. We've been able to attract some partners on the educational side. We have people who want to develop tech solutions to teach everyone and allow them to remain connected. Initially, this is going to be something where I was going to give away $10,000, and then begin teaching a class the following week. And it just mushroomed. Now, it's about finding the balance between being real-time and rolling it out, but also being smart about embracing the offers for assistance that we've gotten from partners who can contribute a lot more than my team can do on its own.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
You mentioned the increasing interest in learning about investing. It seems that millennials are particularly interested in this. What is the demographic? It's kind of evenly spread out in terms of age group, but I'm surprised at not even the age of people who are interested, but just the sort of the profile of people who are interested, who don't seem like they would have ever thought about investing. Their response has been, "I've always wanted to learn to invest and it just seemed intimidating." Or, "It seemed like it was something that wasn't for me." That's been the biggest thing. When you make it accessible and welcoming and in their voice, they respond to it.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
What's next for Our Opportunity? What is the long-term goal? As part of Our Opportunity, there are two distinct things going on. Our Opportunity is actually a nonprofit advocacy group that's focused on trying to share and impart implementable things that a community can do to further themselves economically. And so, Our Opportunity is working with a national government, state, local government, and then corporations, and even individuals to fund a foundation that's grassroots and targeted. And it's creating and sharing curriculum, symposiums, and classes. Own our Own is the opportunity fund that we were planning and we're going to raise. The focus of that is going to be core inner cities, initially targeting large majority black cities, but we'll invest beyond that. We have a special emphasis on affordable housing. That's one of the key rights issues in this country at the moment: a dearth of affordable housing.
Right now, when you want to ride the fund, obviously there is a lot of documentation that takes place and you submit your concept to the SEC. They sign off, which means you can start raising the fund. Prior to that, there's a period where you can go out and tell people what you're doing. I'm raising a fund—here's how much I'm going to raise. Here's what we're going to invest in. You can even solicit commitments, and that's called testing the waters. So that's where we are right now. We're free to go out and market, and tell people about the fund and what we're doing, and how much we want to raise, and how we're going to deploy it. But we can't actually take that investment until the SEC gives their final sign-off. So we anticipate that the final sign-off for the SEC is coming into February, or beginning of March at the latest. Then, at that point, we'll begin accepting donations and making investments for the fund.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
Do you know when we can expect the documentary you mentioned earlier? No. We completed it, but it's back to that question you asked about timing, and getting back to normal. We shot every second of it while Nipsey was alive, and so it's jarring to watch a documentary that you're a part of, where you were talking about, "We're about to do this, we're about to do that." Now, he's not here. So we have to find a tasteful way to acknowledge what's happened in completing the documentary without shifting the focus from being a documentary about this movement to being a documentary about his life. I'm sure a documentary about his life is going to come, and his life deserves its own full documentary. And then, we just weren't in the mind space to finish it and put it out. We were still processing [his death]. Now we are entering the final stages of seeing how to release it, and how we address [his passing]. We're not going to go shoot anything new, but how we address his passing prior to releasing it in conjunction with marketing the fund—I think that's imminent.
Comments
Post a Comment