franklin templeton

lost what got my atten re russia

proto hedge find

see fdn

---

wiki 6 26

Sir John Marks Templeton (29 November 1912 – 8 July 2008)^[2] was an American-born British investor, banker, fund manager, and philanthropist. In 1954, he entered the mutual fund market and created the Templeton Growth Fund,^[3] which averaged growth over 15% per year for 38 years.^[4] A pioneer of emerging market investing in the 1960s,^[5] Money magazine named him "arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century" in 1999.^[3]

Early life and education

John Marks Templeton was born in the town of Winchester, Tennessee, and attended Yale University, where he was an assistant business manager for campus humor magazine Yale Record and was selected for membership in the Elihu society.^[6] He financed his tuition^[7] with a scholarship, odd jobs and winnings from playing poker, a game at which he excelled.^[8] He graduated in 1934 near the top of his class. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar and earned an M.A. in law. He was a CFA charterholder^[9] and was a student of the "father of value investing", Benjamin Graham.^[10][11]

Investment career

In 1939, Templeton, during the Depression of the 1930s, had his broker purchase 100 shares of each NYSE-listed company which was then selling for less than $1 a share (equivalent to $23 in 2,025) (104 companies, 37 in bankruptcy, in 1939), later making many times the money back when US industry picked up as a result of World War II.^[12][13] According to Templeton, he called his broker the day World War II began and instructed him to make the purchases. This strategy helped make him a wealthy man.

Templeton became a billionaire^[14][15] by pioneering the use of globally diversified mutual funds. His Templeton Growth Fund, Ltd. (investment fund), established in 1954, was among the first American firms to invest in Japan starting in the mid-1960s.^[16] Templeton also created funds specifically in certain industries such as nuclear energy, chemicals, and electronics. By 1959, Templeton's company made their initial public offering, with five funds and more than 66 million dollars under management.^[2]

In 2006 he was listed in a seven-way tie for 129th place on The Sunday Times's "Rich List".

...

Personal life

Templeton married Judith Folk in 1937, and the couple had three children: John, Anne, and Christopher. Judith Templeton died in February 1951 in a motorbike accident. He remarried, to Irene Reynolds Butler in 1958; she died in 1993.^[24] A Christian, he was a lifelong member of the Presbyterian Church. He served as an elder of the First Presbyterian Church of Englewood (Englewood, New Jersey). He was a trustee on the board of Princeton Theological Seminary, the largest Presbyterian seminary, for 42 years and served as its chair for 12 years.^[25]

In 1964, Templeton renounced his US citizenship, which some sources claim was a strategy to minimize taxes (the United States taxes citizens globally regardless of residency).^[26][27][28] However, in a 1997 interview with Charlie Rose, Templeton asserted the Bahamas had a higher tax rate than the United States and denied he renounced his citizenship to avoid paying taxes to the United States, stating he intended to live out his life in the Bahamas and felt obligated.^[29] He held British citizenship and lived in the Bahamas full-time from 1968.^[30] His neighbors included Joe Lewis, Sean Connery, Arthur Hailey, and Fahad Al Sabah.^[31]

Uninterested in consumerism, Templeton lived relatively frugally and never flew first-class. A friend jokingly described Templeton as Calvinist in his approach to wealth: "He believes it's okay to make money so long as you don't enjoy it."^[4]

On 8 July 2008, Templeton died at Doctors Hospital in Nassau, Bahamas, of pneumonia at 12:20. He was 95,^[2] and was survived by two of his three children, Christopher and John Templeton Jr. His daughter, Anne Dudley Templeton Zimmerman, predeceased him in 2004, dying during heart surgery.

...

---

Templeton was an evangelical Christian and an elder in the Presbyterian Church in America.^[4] The Templeton Honors College at Eastern University is named in his honor. He was a substantial contributor to conservative causes. In 2008, he donated $450,000 to the National Organization for Marriage, and his wife, Josephine, contributed $100,000.^[5] In 2009, he donated $300,000, again to the National Organization For Marriage.^[6] In a Philadelphia Inquirer article it was asserted that the Templetons had, between John and his wife, Josephine, donated $1 million to parties opposing same-sex marriage.^[3]

In 2010, Politics Magazine had named Templeton as one of the most influential Republicans in Pennsylvania.^[7]

Templeton died on May 16, 2015, from brain cancer in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Survivors include his wife, Josephine (Pina) Gargiulo Templeton, whom he married in 1970; two daughters, Heather Dill and Jennifer Simpson; a brother; and six grandchildren.^[8][4]

wiki 6 26

Franklin Resources, Inc. is an American multinational investment management holding company that, together with its subsidiaries, is referred to as Franklin Templeton; it is a global investment firm founded in New York City in 1947 as Franklin Distributors, Inc. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BEN, in honor of Benjamin Franklin, for whom the company is named, and who was admired by founder Rupert Johnson Sr. The firm became the world's largest asset managers, providing services operating in 150 countries. In 1973, the company's headquarters moved from New York to San Mateo, California.^[2]

History

The company was founded in 1947 in New York by Rupert H. (Harris) Johnson Sr. (1900–1989), who ran a successful retail brokerage firm from an office on Wall Street.^[3] He named the company for American polymath Benjamin Franklin because Franklin espoused frugality and prudence when it came to saving and investing.^[4] The company's first line of mutual funds, Franklin Custodian Funds, was a series of conservatively managed equity and bond funds designed to appeal to most investors.

After Rupert Sr. retired, his son, Charles B. Johnson (Charlie), took over as president and chief executive officer in 1957 at age 24. At that time, the funds had total assets under management of US$2.5 million.^[5] Rupert Johnson Jr., Charlie's brother, joined the company in 1965.^[6]

Franklin went public in 1971.^[7] In 1973, the company acquired Winfield & Company, a San Mateo, California-based investment firm, and moved Franklin's offices from New York to California. The combined organization had close to US$250 million in assets under management and approximately 60 employees. In 1979, Franklin Money Fund began a growth surge that made it Franklin's first billion-dollar fund and launched the company's significant asset growth in the 1980s.

Starting in 1980, the company's total assets under management doubled (or nearly doubled) every year for the next six years. The company's stock began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 1986. In the same year, the company opened its first office outside North America in Taiwan. In 1988, Franklin acquired L.F. Rothschild Fund Management Company. Assets under management for Franklin grew from just over US$2 billion in 1982 to more than US$40 billion in 1989 (the crash of 1987 had little impact on Franklin's income and bond funds).[citation ^needed]

In October 1992, Franklin acquired Templeton, Galbraith & Hansberger Ltd. for a reported cost of $913 million, leading to the common name Franklin Templeton.^[8] Mutual fund pioneer Sir John Templeton was the owner of Templeton, Galbraith & Hansberger Ltd together with his son Dr. John Templeton and John Galbraith who together owned 70% of the firm.^[9]

In November 1996, Heine Securities Corporation, known for the Mutual Series of funds, merged into the Franklin Templeton complex. In October 2000, Franklin acquired Bissett Funds to increase its Canadian presence, and Bissett remains a key brand from Franklin in the Canadian market. The Fiduciary Trust Company was acquired by Franklin Templeton in April 2001.^[10]

Fiduciary Trust Company International, a member of the Franklin family, maintained an office of over 650 employees in 2 World Trade Center at the time of the September 11 attacks in 2001.^[11] 87 employees died in the collapse.^[12][13]

...

In 2021, Franklin Templeton launched the first "tokenised" US mutual fund as a pilot – it uses a blockchain to process transactions and record share ownership. The technology is provided by the Stellar network and Blockchain Administrator, a Delaware company. The OnChain US Government Money Fund pilot started with $1.4M of seed money and investment from employees. The automated administration can trade around the clock and removes the need for brokerages, which should result in a "highly significant decrease in fees". However, the fund actually has a high level of costs because of its small size and the fact that, as a pilot, it is maintaining traditional records in parallel.^[35][36]

In February 2025, Franklin Templeton launched a spot crypto exchange-traded fund that holds a combination of roughly 80% bitcoin and 20% ether.^[37] That same month Franklin applied with the SEC for a spot Solana ETF.^[38]

---

https://www.franklintempleton.com/investor/products/etf/overview/26356/franklin-ftse-russia-etf/FLRU

Provides access to the Russian stock market, allowing investors to precisely gain exposure to Russia at a low cost.

Execute views on Russia within your emerging markets exposure
Provides targeted exposure to large- and mid-sized companies in Russia
Seeks to provide investment results that closely correspond, before fees and expenses, to the performance of the FTSE Russia Capped Index

hmmn

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/09/the-global-financial-system-is-dying-in-a-london-courthouse/

In the four years that Russia and Ukraine have been at war, the front line has hardly shifted—and when it has, it has generally been in Russia’s favor, as when the town of Debaltseve was seized in February 2015. Last month, however, Ukraine finally notched a major victory. It wasn’t the result of fighting in the Donbass but rather a ruling by the Court of Appeal in London.

The fact that a London courthouse has become one of the key battlefields of the war underscores that there’s far more at stake in the Russia-Ukraine war than territory in eastern Ukraine—the fate of the international financial system, at least in its current shape, also hangs in the balance. The only thing that is certain is that, as a result of the war in Ukraine and the ongoing court case it has produced in London, the global financial system will never be the same.

The international financial system as it exists today was designed to sever questions of global economic policy from parochial political disputes—or, if necessary, to reconcile them—by establishing and empowering technocratic international institutions. The system was established in the aftermath of World War II, as the Bretton Woods Agreement effectively made the U.S. dollar the world’s reserve currency, and also led to the establishment of the World Bank (the world’s leading development bank) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came to serve as the lender of last resort to sovereign states. A series of other institutions sprang up around these to serve the same technocratic ends, such as the Paris Club, which has come to oversee most restructurings of sovereign-to-sovereign loans.

Russia has supported the global financial order when it serves its own political interests, as demonstrated by a recent effort to use some of its own sovereign bond issuances as a tool to repatriate capital. But the Kremlin has simultaneously always complained that the allegedly nonpolitical system was designed by the United States and Europe to structurally advantage their own interests over those of other countries—complaints that have only grown more vocal in recent years amid the imposition of international sanctions against Moscow.

Russia and Ukraine’s battle over a bond in Britain represents Moscow’s latest challenge to the international financial system, and its ostensible separation of economic disputes from political ones, by brazenly seeking to entangle the two, and tempting Kiev to respond in kind.

The dispute began when Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovych, flew to Moscow in December 2013 to meet his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, as protests against his decision to abandon an association agreement with the European Union raged in central Kiev.Yanukovych and Putin announced a bilateral action plan that included $15 billion in loans from Russia to Ukraine. One week later, the first loan was issued as Ukraine sold a dollar-denominated bond issued under English law directly to Russia’s National Wealth Fund.

On the face of it, this was not unusual. Emerging markets often issue dollar bonds under English or New York law. Ukraine had used almost the exact same structure to sell debt to private investors many times before.

It is unprecedented in modern history, however, for one country to loan to another directly through such a bond, which is typically an instrument of private-to-sovereign loans. Structuring the loan in this way had several advantages for Russia. First, it allowed Moscow to weaken the international financial system by highlighting its limited reach; the Paris Club has traditionally been the venue for sovereign-to-sovereign debt restructurings, but Russia simply chose not to file its Ukrainian bond there. This approach also allowed Russia to intervene in Ukraine’s private debt market. The latter effort was telegraphed by the fact that the legal wording in the bond was nearly, but not entirely, the same as in Ukraine’s previous bond issuances. These terms granted the bond’s holder, the Kremlin, significant leverage over Kiev by effectively allowing it to trigger default any time it saw fit—again, not unusual in the case of a private bond holder, but certainly so when borrowing from a sovereign government.

The only reason Ukraine would have considered such a loan was the fact that it was relatively cheap—Yanukovych’s teetering government needed money urgently, and the cost of servicing Russia’s bond was well below the market rate from private investors at the time. Putin nevertheless claimed the bond sale was “commercial” and said $12 billion in further loans, using the same structure, was in the offing.

Those loans never arrived. Although Yanukovych’s government filed plans to sell an additional $1.98 billion in debt on Feb. 17, 2014, Yanukovych fled Kiev for Russia five days later. The Euromaidan revolution brought his political opponents into government, who vowed they would sign the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and reject Putin and Yanukovych’s bilateral plans. Moscow then moved to annex Crimea and fomented a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine’s economy subsequently collapsed. Its currency, the hryvnia, hit a 10-year low only days after Yanukovych’s ouster and would continue to weaken throughout 2014 while investment fell more than 18 percent in each of the first two quarters. The yield on Ukraine’s debt spiked, as did the cost of its credit default swaps, a financial instrument used to insure against default.

...As Russia’s aggression ravaged the Ukrainian economy, it became clear that Ukraine needed to restructure its debts. Ukraine came to an agreement with its private creditors in August 2015, including with the investment firmFranklin Templeton, which held the lion’s share of Ukraine’s bonds—an agreement that guaranteed those involved would receive better restructuring terms than any holdouts, including Russia. No private creditors joined the Kremlin in holding out.

Once Ukraine agreed to restructure its other private debts and received a tranche of its IMF bailout in late 2015, it then defaulted on the Russian loan.

The Kremlin moved to sue, seeking to exploit the full force of the global legal financial system to pursue its claims—and to weaken Ukraine. It quickly discarded Putin’s assertion that the bond was a commercial loan, insisting it be treated as official intergovernmental debt. Claiming a private bond as such sovereign debt was an unprecedented situation and one that posed an immediate challenge to the IMF. At the time, the fund’s rules prohibited it from loaning to countries that were in default on their official debts, defined as loans from multilateral institutions and other sovereigns.

In December 2015, just before the bond came due and Ukraine was meant to repay the $3 billion principal, the IMF agreed with Russia’s position: It ruled that the bond was official debt. Nearly concurrently, however, the IMF changed its rules, enabling it to grant loans to countries in default to official creditors. The Kremlin was outraged, alleging this was evidence that the international financial order was biased against it.

Ukraine persisted in its default on the Russian bond, confident that the Kremlin’s ability to frustrate its IMF bailout was barred by the rule change. However, Moscow had another avenue to pursue: British courts, which had legal jurisdiction over the bonds. It quickly sued to demand full repayment.

Ukraine quickly mounted a defense for why it need not repay the debt. First, it argued that the bond was “odious debt,” a legal argument that sovereign creditors have often attempted to make against repaying the debts of previous governments, albeit with little success; Kiev hoped to bolster its case by claiming the Yanukovych regime was despotic, as evidenced by the unbelievably ostentatious displays of wealth at his residence. Another of Ukraine’s later legal arguments was that Russian actions in Ukraine in late 2013—imposing a partial trade blockade and threatening a gas war, among other actions—were part of an intentional effort to put Yanukovych’s government under duress to force it to agree to the debts.

In March 2015, London’s High Court of Justice issued a summary judgment in Russia’s favor, holding that the various defenses submitted by Ukraine were not justifiable. But the Court of Appeal’s ruling this September held that the abovementioned duress argument was one that the court should hear and ordered a full trial. Russia immediately appealed, sending the case to the U.K. Supreme Court for final judgment.

No matter what the Supreme Court decides, the international financial system will change. A Ukrainian victory would lead to a trial on the merits of Ukraine’s duress argument and potentially set a new precedent that could reverberate through sovereign debt markets. Upholding the duress argument would mean that, in the future, the political conditions under which sovereign bonds are issued could become a way to dispute repayment.

Russia, for its part, would be highly averse to a full trial given disclosure requirements that could require it to reveal details about exactly how it convinced the Yanukovych regime to sign a loan so disadvantageous to Ukraine. This might be reason enough for Russia to abandon the $3 billion in principal it is still owed, though the Kremlin would be all but certain to cloak this retreat in an argument against the bias of the international financial order.

A ruling in Russia’s favor would risk immediately pushing Ukraine into default—and lead to an extremely complicated process of negotiating with Moscow, in contravention of Ukraine’s pledge to creditors in its 2015 restructuring. It would also give legal legitimacy to Russia’s strategy of using private debt markets in combination with aggressive foreign policy to assert its power. That could potentially inspire similar such moves by other hostile powers.

Indeed, it is unlikely this will be the Kremlin’s last foray into blending private debt markets and politics. The latest evidence is the lien secured by the Russian state oil company Rosneft over a 49.9 percent stake in the American refiner Citgo resulting from a loan from Rosneft to Citgo’s Venezuelan parent company, PDVSA.

The Kremlin has been warning of the implications of the IMF’s rule change, with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev labeling it akin to opening Pandora’s box in terms of maintaining confidence in international financial institutions. The bond was an opening salvo in Russia’s war with Ukraine. It may prove to be the same for Russia’s attempts to challenge the international financial order.

franklin templeton

Early life and education

Investment career

Personal life

History

Russian Interests | Mark Mobius

Russia and China's Neighborly Interests | Mark Mobius blog

Investing in Russia | Mark Mobius Blog

The Global Financial System Is Dying in a London Courthouse ...

Franklin Templeton Bet on Ukraine Gives Some Investors Pause - WSJ

Russia-Ukraine $3 Bln Battle Back in London Court - The Moscow Times

Franklin Templeton in $5 billion Ukraine debt gamble - CNBC.com

Mark Mobius not certain about Franklin Templeton's participation in ...

Ukraine Debt: Putin's Trump Card - The Daily Beast

Forget Templeton, Ukraine Still Has Putin Bond to Deal With ...