It is winter fund raising season on public television which means that WEALTHTRACK might be pre-empted on your local television station.

We are revisiting an exclusive interview we had with the Fairholme Fund’s Bruce Berkowitz this fall. Berkowitz is a Great Investor who always generates a great deal of interest and controversy because of his deep value and extremely “concentrated” investment approach. This time was no exception! The week after the interview a Federal Court judge dismissed a lawsuit Fairholme and others had filed against the U.S. Treasury Department over its 2012 decision to take all of the profits generated by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fairholme has a big position in both. In a message to shareholders Berkowitz said we “strongly disagree with the court’s conclusions,…and will continue to pursue our legal rights”…including continuing another lawsuit to obtain “just compensation” for minority shareholders.

You can re-watch that episode here.

Three Financial Thought Leader Views

For our online viewers we are tackling one of the most debated issues in business, what is the primary responsibility of corporations? Is it to maximize shareholder value as it is now, or also serve the interests of other stakeholders including customers, suppliers, employees and the community? We posed that question to three recent WEALTHTRACK guests, Professor Richard Sylla, professor of the history of financial institutions and markets at New York University’s Stern School of Business and co-author of The American Corporation, a research paper on the topic, Tocquevile Fund’s Robert Kleinschmidt and Gotham Funds’ Joel Greenblatt. We started by asking Sylla for the historical perspective.