I see Bank Of America, JPMorgan and Citigroup have just announced a new $100 billion facility to help troubled Structured Investment Vehicles  (SIVs) by creating and providing liquidity support  in the market for asset-backed commercial paper and medium-term notes issued by these SIVs. The US Treasury is supporting the facility as it should help “foster orderly capital markets”

I had the good fortune to attend the 1st Annual JPMC IBTech golf outing on Monday which was organized to help raise money for a fantastic charity, China Care.

China Care is an organization that raises awareness for and offers direct assistance to hundreds of babies and children in China that have either been abandoned and/or are in desperate need of medical attention. The great thing about this charity is that every single dollar goes directly to aid these childeren - all the overheads of the charity are funded separately by the board of directors. Even better, you can specify which “proposal” your money goes to: whether you want to help a family foster a child,  help fund an orphanage, or pay for a specific child’s medical treatment, the decision is yours. The founder of China Care, Matt Dalio (son of Ray Dalio the founder of Bridgewater Associates - one of the largest hedge finds in the US) , also came to the event to show his appreciation and to tell us about the history of the charity. A remarkable story (and presentation) that clearly tugged at everyone’s heart strings. And what really struck me was a) how much we all take for granted our health and comfort, and b) how many lives can be positively affected/saved by only a few cycles of our time and few extra bucks (I know, not exactly Churchillian)

The golf event itself was a remarkable achievement by the executives at JPMC - they organized it in only a month; arranged fantastic weather (!); many vendors chipped in a LOT of money to sponsor holes, fund lunch & dinner, etc; and, many generous gifts that were donated and raffled/auctioned off. Lab49 was in the mix with us providing “commemorative” water bottles for everyone who attended. The generosity across all JPMC staff and vendor polulation was staggering. It was also good to see a lot of the top JPMC execs turning out to promote and support the event.

Apart from a lovely day on the golf course (and my team making a podium appearance in 3rd place with a 7 under par score, only 1 shot off the winners), the real punchline is that all in all the event raised somewhere around the $90,000 mark. That will fund 2 orphanages (for 60 kids) for a year, or pay for 20+ adoptions, or life-saving medical operations for hundreds of kids.

Announcement today from IBM and Google that they are ”..to offer a curriculum and support for software development on large-scale distributed computing systems, with six universities signing up so far.” With Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2, I wonder who is next to bring compute capabilities to the masses ?