The cost of being in the public eye rises

Security costs

I'd mentioned yesterday that one reason the real creator of bitcoin might not want to come out of the shadows is that they will become a target. As in, if the entire world knows you are sitting on a $70 billion-some-odd fortune, some people out there are going to want to take a piece of that, by force.

To some extent being wealthy or being a public figure has always carried with it some degree of this risk. There's a famous-ish story of James Annesley, an 18th-century Irish aristocrat who was kidnapped as a 12-year old by his uncle and taken to America to work as an indentured servant while his uncle tried to steal his fortune. Traveling abroad in a luxurious stagecoach could be enough to draw an attack from highwaymen. "Stand and deliver!" as they say. But in the ages before cameras, one could plausibly move about in public relatively anonymously. Most people didn't know what you looked like. That changed in the modern age; it reminds me of that picture from 1910 of John Pierpont Morgan — yeah, J.P. Morgan — lashing out with his cane at a photographer while he was walking down the street.

Public figures have only gotten more public since then, and it is way too easy today for malefactors to zero in on somebody and learn virtually everything about them. I'm not trying to scare you, but that's the reality. And bank executives are both wealthy and, often, public figures. And we live in an often violently politicized world. So it's no surprise that in the year or so since the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, banks including Goldman Sachs, Capitol One and others have been spending more on security, our Catherine Leffert reports. 

"We do not consider these security measures to be personal benefits but rather business-related necessities due to the high-profile standing of these executives," Goldman said in its proxy, in explaining a 15% jump in expenses to protect CEO David Solomon. The banks are drawing attention to this spending, it's usually recorded as business-related, just as Goldman said, but it can include spending on private flights, car services and home-security systems.

One bank that didn't increase its spending was the one that J.P. Morgan created. But JPMorganChase spends plenty to protect CEO Jamie Dimon, one of the best-paid and highest profile CEOs in the country. The bank spends roughly $1 million a year on security for Dimon.

You hope of course that there's never another murder like Thompson's, but in the world we live in today you have to do a little more than just hope.

The oil card

There isn't anything valuable underneath the land my house sits on, at least nothing I'm aware of. But there are about 12 million people in this country who own land that does sit on top of a valuable resource – oil. And Frontland wants to give them a credit card. 

Our Nathan Place reports on a fairly unusual offering. Frontlands is a new lender that will use those mineral rights as the collateral for a credit card line. The borrower gets to turn what could be an illiquid asset – the rights to, say, oil that has not been pumped out of the ground – into liquidity. Frontlands gets to target a very specific demographic. 

Not all of those people are sitting on top of spudded, producing wells, and that's the rub. They have the ownership of the asset, but it isn't producing a cash flow. If Frontlands manages to build a business around this, they plan to target other kinds of illiquid-asset holders as well.