ESG

There is no shortage of candidates for the title of the most dangerous business idea of the moment. Management-by-algorithm may remove what humanity there is left in the corporate world. The office-less future may dissolve workers into angst-ridden atoms. I want to suggest a less obvious contender for the title: “social purpose.”

A booming $4.9 trillion branch of the U.S. asset management industry is funneling investor cash into funds that are pricier and worse-performing than alternatives, new research claims.

Climate change concerns are growing among top executives at global firms, but they still struggle to implement solutions across their firms to address those worries.

Markets are weird right now. The value of risk-free assets has gone all out of whack, and if that doesn't seem scary, keep reading.

Impact investing seeks to achieve social good, but new research shows that it has had a negligible effect on the cost of capital for so-called “brown” companies.

Investing in ESG funds is like trying to navigate “the Wild West” as both regulations and enforcement fall short, according to Andrew Behar, the chief executive of As You Sow.

Rob Gough, who stars opposite Bruce Willis in “American Siege,” is launching the Strategy Shares Halt Climate Change ETF with David Miller, chief investment officer at Strategy Shares, who he knows through his past as a serial entrepreneur and investor.

Unlike the multitude of offshore armchair commentators expressing their views on the violent social upheaval that began in June 2019, I lived in Hong Kong through that period.

When Swedish bank SEB AB announced recently that it wanted to buy into the market for carbon credits, what it got was a pile of duds.

It’s official. For the first time since the unveiling of the Paris climate agreement in 2015, banks earned more fees arranging green-related bond sales and loans than they did helping fossil-fuel companies raise money in the debt markets.

Looking at oil and gas stocks this year? Think small and Canadian, at least according to the world’s leading energy fund manager.

Sales of U.S. leveraged loans are likely to stay strong for at least the next few months thanks to private equity buyout activity that is showing few signs of abating.

New research confirms that investing with an environmental, social and governance (ESG) mandate does not lead to higher risk-adjusted returns. But investors will reduce exposure to climate-related risks and get the “psychic” benefit of making a positive impact for society.

TikTok is now the most popular website in the world, by one measure, and as such its influence on how young people see and think about themselves is attracting ever more attention. I am an economist, so I would like to focus on a considerably more narrow subject: what TikTok’s videos say about how young people see and think about economics.

Cryptocurrencies had a blockbuster year in 2021 by almost any measure. Bitcoin, Ether and other coins jumped, reaching new highs far beyond their previous peaks.

As Goldman Sachs Group Inc. boss David Solomon chatted at a November dinner for retired partners, he mentioned that the firm will be among the country’s most profitable big public companies this year. But the veteran mergers banker Geoff Boisi was struck by how muted the excitement has been.

Despite a drop in clean-energy stocks and intensifying concerns about widespread greenwashing, the market for investment products sold as being ESG-related had another record year by most yardsticks.

The year 2021 will be remembered as one in which markets tumbled down a rabbit hole and entered financial wonderland: A once-elite undertaking became more populist, tribal, anarchic and often downright bizarre.

Investors in the booming ethical bond market are having to swallow short term losses on the road to improving their green credentials.

The U.S. investment-grade loan market is set to return to normality in 2022 after loans delayed early in the pandemic were shifted into this year, making it among the busiest on record, according to some of the market’s lead deal arrangers.

The best tribute to Vanguard founder John C. Bogle near the end of his long life cannot be repeated without heavy censorship.

New research shows that companies that engender high employee satisfaction are rewarded with higher stock prices and investor returns.

It has been my tradition to informally rate the investment-related books I read in the past year. I have also included some novels and books of general interest. Here is my list of winners and losers.

At the end of every year, I like to look back on my work and see which themes and findings are as striking now as they were months ago. I’ve chosen ten ideas – and the ten charts to go with them...

The biggest owner of stocks in the world tends not to look at the headline numbers provided by ESG ratings firms, and says only by digging into the underlying data does it find the information needed to guide portfolio decisions.

A hasty policy shift by central banks anxious to tame surging inflation is the biggest downside risk for global stocks next year, according to an informal Bloomberg News survey of fund managers.

Celebrated venture capitalist John Doerr’s new book, “Speed and Scale,” offers a solution to the threats posed by climate change. But it is so mired in the swamp of the terms of the discussion that its proposed solutions will go unnoticed and have little impact.

One of cryptocurrency’s spiritual forebears, Timothy C. May, predicted in the 1990s that untraceable digital cash would allow online casinos, bank secrecy and money laundering to flourish. Although laws would be dodged, he said, the individual anonymity and freedom would be worth it — at least, until the inevitable government backlash.

The inflation wave that’s sweeping through the global economy is playing into an investment niche that a small group of people in finance have spent years developing: farmland.

New research on corporate bonds shows that investors driven by ESG mandates have reduced the cost of capital for “green” companies – thereby achieving their goal of addressing concerns around climate change.

Can an investment advisor be a stakeholder company while also discharging its fiduciary obligation to clients?

A sea change is happening in the world of work. In fact, it’s a sea, air and wildlife change.

This Christmas’s unexpected stocking stuffer might be an NFT.

For all the kudos that pension plans and other asset owners get for joining groups that pledge to reduce their carbon footprints, most aren’t directly voting on climate resolutions at annual shareholder meetings.

Wall Street is trying to bottle ESG, but ESG has other ideas.

With the ink hardly dry on a landmark pledge by the finance industry to fight climate change, the world’s biggest banks are making clear they plan to stand by their fossil-fuel clients.

We mix up logic with emotion, data with information, and information with wisdom. Steven Pinker’s new book, Rationality, is a step-by-step guide to unmixing these and using hard-headed logic to arrive at useful conclusions.

While I’m a huge proponent of passive and factor investing, the argument that direct indexing is akin to active management is imprecise.

The most recent earnings season showed no slowdown in spending by banks on new technology. The reality is that much of this investment will not show up as superior profits, but rather as waste unless banks undertake a fundamental change in their approach to implementing new technology.