"Even seasoned investors make mistakes at times.
But when you start investing, you're prone to letting your emotions take over.
Wall Street is green-washing the financial world, making sustainable investing merely PR, which is a distraction from the problem of climate change.
The financial services industry is duping the American public with its pro-environment, sustainable investing practices.
This multitrillion dollar arena of socially conscious investing is being presented as something it's not. In essence, Wall Street is greenwashing the economic system and, in the process, creating a deadly distraction.
I should know; I was at the heart of it.
As the former chief investment officer of Sustainable Investing at BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world with $8.7 trillion in assets, I led the charge to incorporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) into our global investments.
... our messaging helped mainstream the concept that pursuing social good was also good for the bottom line.
Sadly, that's all it is, a hopeful idea.
In truth, sustainable investing boils down to little more than marketing hype, PR spin and disingenuous promises from the investment community.
In many instances across the industry, existing mutual funds are cynically rebranded as “green” — with no discernible change to the fund itself or its underlying strategies — simply for the sake of appearances and marketing purposes.
In other cases, ESG products contain irresponsible companies such as petroleum majors and other large polluters like “fast fashion” manufacturing to boost the fund's performance.
There are even portfolio managers who actively mine ESG data to bet against environmentally responsible companies in the name of profit, a short-selling strategy.
... Last year alone, ESG mutual funds and exchange-traded funds nearly doubled.
The ... cheers were only for fund managers and their bottom lines.
No matter what they tout as green investing, portfolio managers are legally bound (as well as financially incentivized) to do nothing that compromises profits.
To advance real change in the environment simply doesn't yield the same return.
In early March ... the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which announced it was creating a Climate and ESG Task Force to “proactively identify ESG-related misconduct” such as inaccurate or incomplete disclosures by funds and companies — an unprecedented move that suggests there might be abuses that have gone unaddressed.
... motivation for why the industry continues to greenwash is all too obvious."
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Sunday, March 21, 2021
"Financial world green-washing the public with deadly distraction in sustainable investing practices"
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