Wall Street bankers go 'green'

The financial district of Wall Street is slowly turning 'green'.

Pressed by environmentalists and in increasing evidence that global warming could play havoc in a not too-distant-future, elite global investment bankers have started paying attention to how environment-friendly the companies they invest in are.

Elite global investment banks like Citi, J P Morgan and Merrill Lynch, who never used to think twice about filling up the tanks of the nation's biggest polluters looking for cash, are advising clients that the way to get 'green' (money) is to go green, Newsweek reports in its upcoming issue.

Since the late 1990s, environmentalists have been pressuring bankers to clean up their act, and to make it their business to persuade clients to do the same.

"Sometimes we will decline to do a piece of business," Mark Tercek, Goldman's green czar told the magazine. "But more frequently, we recommend how we'd like to see the transaction proceed.

"Usually the client is open to our advice." In an age when Al Gore wins an Oscar for a film on global warming, no one wants to look like they're beating up on Mother Nature, the magazine comments.

The magazine says it looks as though Goldman Sachs is leading the greening of Wall Street. It all started in 2004, when the firm acquired a loan that was secured by 680,000 acres of land in southern Chile near Antarctica, on Tierra del Fuego.