ESG, Wokeness, and Morality

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Increasing criticism of ESG (an often incoherent investment “discipline” under which actual or portfolio companies are scored in part by how they score against various environmental, social, and governance measures) and the pushback against it in certain (red) states are worrying those in the ESG ecosystem who have done so well politically and economically (or both) out of it. Newspapers such as the Financial Times complain about elected politicians meddling in topics such as ESG, even though ESG is nothing if not political. Billionaires such as Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer have issued warnings that those who oppose ESG just don’t understand capitalism, as has (more or less) Al Gore, climate change “prophet” and profiteer.

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ESG: Warren Buffett Scrambles the Narrative

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With the pushback against ESG (an investment “discipline” under which actual or prospective portfolio companies are measured against various environmental, social, and governance benchmarks) gathering momentum, its proponents have finally had to mount a credible defense of a once seemingly irresistible concept that, up to now, has had no need of one.

That’s not proving easy…

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ESG’s Bad (But Not Bad Enough) Year

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The year 2022 was not the best of years for ESG (an investment discipline under which portfolio companies are measured against various environmental, social, and governance standards). To take one example, as of January 5, the price of BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF had declined by around 22 percent over twelve months, underperforming the S&P 500, which fell by around 20 percent. Those are only one year’s results (and they would have been marginally improved by dividends), but it’s still not the greatest of looks for an investment approach often sold (typically with higher fees) as a way of doing well by doing good. Making matters more embarrassing still, stocks in those wicked fossil fuel companies (in which ESG investors tend to be underweight) did well. The S&P 500 Energy sector index rose by around 44 percent over the same period…

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To Be Anti-ESG Is to Be against Free Market Capitalism? Not So Much.

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With environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing — a profoundly political “discipline” in which actual or prospective portfolio companies are measured against a varying selection of environmental, social and governance metrics — finally coming under the fire that it deserves, its advocates are rushing to its defense, many of them seemingly outraged that a political agenda has attracted the attention of elected politicians who disagree with it…

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Losing the Plot: Finance, Natural Gas, and ESG

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It’s a crowded field, but as an example of the destructive uselessness of ESG (an investment “discipline” based on analyzing how companies measure up against somewhat vague environmental, social, and governance standards), this story from Bloomberg takes some beating.

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China and an ESG ‘Dilemma’

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The Financial Times’ Moral Money section is so nauseatingly named that many will be tempted to look away after one glimpse of its title. That would be an error. Grimly fascinating, Moral Money is an invaluable window into the orthodoxies of the corporatist elite, particularly — but of course — when it comes to planetary catastrophe. The FT being what it is, Moral Money’s climate message (in reality an updated version of an ancient blend, millenarianism and rent–seeking) is camouflaged, with the crazy played down. It is earnest and preachy, but — underpinned by the comfortable assumption that writer and reader alike see things the same way — not too preachy.

And it is nothing if not revealing.

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Elon Musk’s Twitzkrieg?

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How Twitter polices speech on its platform is, assuming it remains within the law, up to Twitter. If those who run the company wish to do so in a way that offends our notions of free expression, that is, with one crucial exception, solely up to them. Twitter is privately owned, and the U.S. government has no business regulating how legal conversations are supervised behind the company’s virtual walls. Nor, for that matter, should any “independent” body be set up under the auspices of the state to review Twitter’s speech policy.

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The ‘Sustainability’ Business: A Gathering of Rent-Seekers

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The Economist Group, publisher of the Economist, has been hosting its seventh annual “Sustainability Week,” with one day in London and three others on virtual platforms.

The event’s website offers a revealing glimpse into the ecosystem that “sustainability” has created — an ecosystem that contains true believers, to be sure, but is also one in which opportunists can take advantage of the pathway it offers to power, profit, and prestige — or at least a job.

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Larry Fink, ‘Emperor’?

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We live in an age when the Left is increasingly focused on the supposed evils of business concentration, from the “big is bad” ideology of the new antitrust enforcers at the FTC to the attempts to blame inflation on Big Grocery, Big Oil, or any of the other “bigs” allegedly exploiting the beleaguered consumer. And yet the concentration of corporate ownership positions held by a relatively small number of massive investment funds, particularly (but not only) the indexers, has drawn comparatively little criticism from the same quarters. Perhaps their managers’ role in helping create our emerging corporatist state through an ever tighter embrace of “socially responsible” investment and larcenous stakeholder capitalism has acted as a shield of sorts.

Nevertheless, the degree of that concentration has been something to see….

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The CEO as ‘Lawmaker’: A Corporatist Manifesto

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On Monday, the Financial Times ran an article by Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever (a company that, as he mentions, was recently in the news over its pursuit of objectives seemingly unconnected to its bottom line). A forceful, if unpersuasive, argument for stakeholder capitalism, it is an interesting and unintentionally revealing read. Above all, it demonstrates how, whatever BlackRock’s Larry Fink may claim, stakeholder capitalism is intrinsically political. Indeed, as it is an expression of corporatism, that is — or ought to be — a statement of the obvious. Corporatism, regardless of the form it takes, is an ideology revolving around an idea of how society should be organized. That is the very essence of politics…

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