Corporate change agent
Financial reform lies in his genes. On Moore's wall is a photo of a dour President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, the government's response to Depression-era banking scandals. Among those surrounding FDR is Frank Hancock, a North Carolina congressman and Moore's grandfather. The sixth generation of his family to have served in the state House of Representatives, Moore hails from Oxford, a former tobacco village outside Raleigh. He and his wife, Noel, have a daughter and two sons. He counts his days as a former federal prosecutor specializing in white-collar crime as among his most satisfying jobs. "I enjoyed putting smart, rich people in jail," he says.
During a 1994 run for Congress, he was swept aside by Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America." But now Moore is among three prominent Democrats circling one another in wait for the 2008 race for governor. (Gov. Mike Easley, a fellow Democrat, is up for re-election this year.)
It is Moore, though, who has most effectively used his obscure office as a political platform. After the Enron scandal in 2002, which cost the state pension fund $150 million, he wondered if the outside investment firms that he hired could have done a better job researching the companies in which they invest. He drew up a set of "investment protection principles" and, through a mutual friend, contacted Spitzer, who had recently settled with Merrill Lynch over conflicts at that firm.
Spitzer got then New York Comptroller Carl McCall on board. Moore and McCall were in unusual positions as two of only four state officials nationwide solely responsible for their state's pensions, but they assembled an alliance of state leaders who manage more than $1 trillion. They demanded an end to the Wall Street conflicts. And they demanded that investment firms strictly scrutinize how companies are managed and audited before investing in them. Similar guidelines for mutual funds have since been drafted.
The newfound activism of pension funds is long overdue, Moore says. Thirty years ago, the funds invested almost exclusively in bonds. In the 1980s and '90s, they moved into stocks, emerging with significant ownership of public companies. But the funds weren't really set up to exert any control.
Meanwhile, companies with a history of strong family ownership, like Disney, saw power shift away from them to outside investors who chose their own executives. "You've got the hired help spending other people's money," Moore said during a recent Manhattan visit. The pension funds were "passive bureaucracies unequipped to exercise both their right and their responsibility as a shareholder."
That is changing rapidly--and, with it, the profile of state officials like Moore. As he left a New York building recently, a giant TV screen on the skyscraper across the street stretched up several stories and blared CNBC. A few hours earlier, Moore had been on that screen looking down on Times Square. "It's a long way," he laughed, "from Oxford, N.C."
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