A fascinating piece. I had no idea. Intrigued to know if there are any other examples from19C or indeed later. I wonder if charity law permits the grant-giving foundations to do this? Charitable leverage to use your expression….
As a user of the London Chatham and Dover Railway's infrastructure, I consider myself a beneficiary of Sir Samuel Morton Peto's exceptionally dodgy financial engineering (the construction, however, was good).
I assume modern banks would need rather more assurance than Victorian banks, which means the process for gathering co-signers would be quite involved, which would mean the smallest sums that would be worth it would require more than a little due diligence.
And then you either need to 1) convince all potential co-signers that they ultimately *won't* have to spend their money or 2) find people who don't mind giving you the money. But if they don't mind giving you the money, you can save *so much* time and effort by just taking a donation. If you have a really great plan that you're pretty sure will make back the money you're spending on it, *and* you have the administrative ability to organize an army of co-signers, you're probably not going to have trouble finding someone to give you a few million dollars.
At least I don't think so? My impression of organizations like the Gates Foundation is that they're always looking for people to give money to, and the reality is that most philanthropic endeavors "lose" money. I would think that the number of enterprises that do good in the world *and* make money *and* can't find conventional funding is rather small.
Reading this just makes me believe that this could work brilliantly today, like this could defiantly be a thriving business with someone inspired at the helm...
A fascinating piece. I had no idea. Intrigued to know if there are any other examples from19C or indeed later. I wonder if charity law permits the grant-giving foundations to do this? Charitable leverage to use your expression….
Donors want control. Investors want profits. This approach provides neither. So it does not appeal to the people with the money.
As a user of the London Chatham and Dover Railway's infrastructure, I consider myself a beneficiary of Sir Samuel Morton Peto's exceptionally dodgy financial engineering (the construction, however, was good).
I assume modern banks would need rather more assurance than Victorian banks, which means the process for gathering co-signers would be quite involved, which would mean the smallest sums that would be worth it would require more than a little due diligence.
And then you either need to 1) convince all potential co-signers that they ultimately *won't* have to spend their money or 2) find people who don't mind giving you the money. But if they don't mind giving you the money, you can save *so much* time and effort by just taking a donation. If you have a really great plan that you're pretty sure will make back the money you're spending on it, *and* you have the administrative ability to organize an army of co-signers, you're probably not going to have trouble finding someone to give you a few million dollars.
At least I don't think so? My impression of organizations like the Gates Foundation is that they're always looking for people to give money to, and the reality is that most philanthropic endeavors "lose" money. I would think that the number of enterprises that do good in the world *and* make money *and* can't find conventional funding is rather small.
Reading this just makes me believe that this could work brilliantly today, like this could defiantly be a thriving business with someone inspired at the helm...