BlackRock has warned it will vote against most shareholder green activism this year for being too extreme, in a significant u-turn by the world’s biggest money manager.
Fashions and fads, like ESG, may indeed be a method of displaying social virtue. Displaying it with other peoples’ money has its attractions.
And yet one of those grand virtues of markets and capitalism. At some point someone’s going to demand “Show me the money”. Meaning that there’s a limitation on how much of other peoples’ money is going to get pissed away on social willy waving.
Perhaps not as tight a limit as we’d desire, but there is one. Unlike systems that don’t have measurements of reality built into them.
I own some shares in a Blackrock fund. I was going to ditch them because of BR’s ethics. But if they stop having any, I might buy some more.
’Unlike systems that don’t have measurements of reality built into them.’
Are those such systems becoming increasingly rare?
I’ve seen at least 2 pension companies advertising how they’re ethical and all that, and well, I think I’ll run my own SIPP.
Apart from the thing of maybe not actually working, and that a lot of it’s going to crash, it strikes me that a lot of this stuff doesn’t have particularly high barriers to entry, so even if solar or wind get big, the margins are not going to be there.
I’ve had a good go at my company pension scheme for their virtue signalling. I have zero expectation that it will have any effect though 🙁
Ottokring
May 12, 2022 at 6:23 am
Sensible Otto!!!! +100000%
Ah, the Vice Fund – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitium_Global_Fund. Basically pissed all over the returns provided by ethical funds launched at around the same time.
No offense to Mr. Worstall (you’re right on the threshold), but ESG is a quintessential example of the boomer mentality: making important decisions with global implications based on focus groups, polling and media optics.
Don’t actually look for empirical evidence that any of this virtue signaling is good for your business (or your employees, customers, shareholders). And if you’re dead wrong about everything and the company has to sell, no big deal, you still got a short-term spurt of growth you can retire on with the severance you collected as you jumped ship. Fuck everyone else.
ESG, CRT, “sustainability,” “corporate responsibility” and the rest of it will all go the way of eugenics and lobotomies. They’re the Mengele experiments of economics. Gen-X and millennials are now trying to keep it alive with the “green revolution.”
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