Anti-ESG Movement Reveals How Blackrock Pulls-off World’s Largest Ponzi Scheme

Greenwashing Is Increasingly Making ESG Moot. Anti-ESG Movement Reveals How Blackrock Pulls-off World’s Largest Ponzi Scheme

Meanwhile, Charlie Munger, Sam Zell And Elon Musk Speak Out On Blackrock’s ESG Movement

Real-estate investor Sam Zell said to CNBC a few years ago: “I didn’t know Larry Fink had been made God.”

When you’re 98 years old you can say things others can’t, so bravo to Charlie Munger for daring to speak an important but too muffled truth about today’s financial markets. “We have a new bunch of emperors, and they’re the people who vote the shares in the index funds,” Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway partner said Wednesday. “I think the world of Larry Fink, but I’m not sure I want him to be my emperor.” Many CEOs no doubt privately agree.

* Musk Says ESG ‘An Outrageous Scam’!

Greenwashing Is Increasingly Making ESG Moot

Fossil fuel holdings, Russia’s war and revelations about who’s investing there are battering the strategy’s original meaning.

The concept behind ESG keeps getting harder to defend.

For years now, managers of big funds touting their supposed focus on the environment, social issues and corporate governance have been faulted for holding shares of fossil-fuel purveyors (including Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp.), weapons manufacturers (like Raytheon Technologies Corp.) and mining companies (such as Newmont Corp.).

In fact, the largest ESG-focused exchange-traded fund—the $22.9 billion iShares ESG Aware MSCI USA ETF (ESGU)—has almost 3.1 percent of its assets invested in the oil and gas sector, the industry most responsible for the accelerating destruction of the planet’s atmosphere.

Criticisms of the ESG industry’s increasingly feckless profile have only grown louder since Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine almost three weeks ago, killing thousands so far. Since then, it emerged that so-called ESG funds had at least $8.3 billion allocated to Russian government bonds and companies.

While the figure is small compared with the roughly $2.7 trillion devoted to ESG-related funds, the revelation has turbocharged skepticism about the merits of ESG investing.

Putin’s attack even prompted Ukraine’s former finance minister, Natalie Jaresko, to criticize ESG. She wrote in a March 3 column for the Financial Times that the Kremlin’s war raises questions for companies that have “vociferously professed the virtues of environmental, social and governance factors.”

This is “a moment of truth” for ESG, she said. By her read, the phenomenon of greenwashing has now morphed into “ESG-washing.”

“All too frequently, corporations and their executives engage in marketing or obfuscation of what they’re actually doing—what could more accurately be called ‘ESG-washing,’” Jaresko wrote. “Will this prove to be another case of looking the other way?” She called on companies to end their ties to Putin’s regime.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, a mass corporate exodus has accelerated, starting with BP Plc and quickly spreading to dozens of other global brands.

The unwinding has left companies wondering whether they’ll ever return and, more importantly for them, whether they’ll ever recoup the value of their abandoned businesses in a country that has almost overnight become the world’s most-sanctioned nation—and begun to nationalize those foreign assets.

Professors Elizabeth Demers, Jurian Hendrikse, Philip Joos and Baruch Lev (who recently retired from New York University’s Stern School of Business) pulled together a study questioning why companies were able to retain their high ESG scores after investing so heavily in Russia, a country long plagued by corruption.

Among their conclusions was that there is no statistical association between companies’ ESG scores and their response to the Russian invasion.

“If you’re an investor who has been picking stocks based on ESG scores under the assumption that your money is likely to be funding more socially responsible corporate behavior, particularly in periods of extreme crisis such as Russia’s invasion of a sovereign country, you should be very disappointed,” the professors wrote, adding to the chorus of doubters about the usefulness of ESG ratings.

They went on to say that Jaresko is fully justified for calling out companies for “not walking the talk of socially responsible corporate behavior.

Our evidence suggests that Russian-invested European firms that have higher overall ESG scores, and even those with higher ‘social’ scores, aren’t more likely to take meaningful action in response to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.”

So where does that leave ESG? It’s not clear that all this skepticism is having any impact as money keeps pouring into the sector. Last week, ESG-focused ETFs attracted $1.8 billion, the most since early February, even as the S&P 500 index dropped about 3%.

Proponents of ESG say that skeptics don’t understand how ESG is used in the investing process. It’s not about doing good with your money, per se: They contend it’s essentially a tool to help measure a company’s resilience to financially material ESG-related risks.

MSCI Inc., the leading provider of ESG scores, says on its website that the ratings aren’t “a general measure of corporate ‘goodness.’”

Updated: 4-6-2022

Conservative Group Wants To Stop State Pensions From Pursuing ESG Initiatives

A proposed model bill from the influential right-leaning group ALEC would bar state pension funds from looking beyond returns in their investment decisions.

State pension funds should be barred from considering social and environmental factors in their investment decisions, a conservative association said in a push for new state legislation that would clash with the financial industry’s efforts to focus on greener investments.

American Legislative Exchange Council, an association of state legislators, on Wednesday put forward model legislation that provides states a template for laws to keep pension funds from following so-called environmental, social and governance trends.

“Politically motivated investing, by definition, takes rates of return off the table,” Jonathan Williams, the chief economist at ALEC, said.

ALEC’s move comes amid an ideological row between proponents of incorporating ESG considerations into business, including some in the financial industry, and some politicians who argue that banks should stick to making money.

ALEC drafts model laws that state legislatures can easily adapt and adopt, complete with references to “[state name]” ready to be filled in. The organization has about 2,000 legislators in its ranks and about 300 additional private sector members.

Its record of seeing its model laws ultimately passed by legislatures has led to complaints from some left-leaning critics that it is effectively drafting laws in secret, though the organization says it operates transparently.

The legislative template that ALEC put forward doesn’t mention ESG outright, though, according to ALEC, countering ESG motivations in state pension fund decision-making is a driving factor behind its proposal.

The template would mandate that investment advisers haven’t “sacrificed investment return…to promote goals unrelated to those pecuniary interests” of state pension fund beneficiaries.

State pension funds are among the largest institutional investors in the U.S. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the nation’s largest public pension fund, reported holding about $477 billion in assets at the end of February, while Teacher Retirement System of Texas, which provides retirement benefits for the state’s public school, college and university employees, held about $201 billion in assets as of September 2021.

Leaders of the funds have begun to split on how—and whether it is appropriate—to use their heft to drive change related to ESG issues in the business sphere.

In 2020, the New York State Common Retirement Fund, which provides retirement benefits to the state’s employees, said it would pursue a plan to have a net-zero portfolio in terms of carbon emissions.

Maine legislators in June passed an act that required the Maine Public Employees Retirement System to divest itself of fossil-fuel assets, and three New York City public retirement funds in December said they had sold off $3 billion in energy company stocks because of environmental risks.

Texas has aligned itself with the opposite camp. Comptroller Glenn Hegar in March sent letters to 19 major financial companies in an investigation launched under Texas’ Senate Bill 13, which would bar state agencies from working with investment firms that boycott the energy sector.

Mr. Williams said he didn’t know what states might take up the model policy, but that he was hopeful it would be broadly considered across the country. ALEC, though, bills itself as a proponent of “limited government” and “free markets,” and its model policies historically tend to have more traction with right-leaning state governments.

ALEC isn’t concerned with what retail investors decide to do with their money, but that retiree funds should be invested for maximum returns, a system already in place under current federal rules for private workers’ pension funds, Mr. Williams said.

“The minute that they put the hard earned dollars of state employees, and others within state pension systems and use that ESG- or social- or politically-based investing motivation, they’re foisting their political views on the individual retiree,” Mr. Williams said.

Updated: 4-21-2022

Billionaire Carl Icahn Calls Out Wall Street ESG ‘Hypocrisy’ In McDonald’s Fight

* Billionaire Investor Says ‘ESG Status Quo’ Needs To Change
* Icahn Is Proposing Two Directors To Serve On Mcdonald’s Board

Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn said Wall Street’s ESG efforts may be the “biggest hypocrisy of our time” with firms cashing in on the investing strategy without concern for actual societal impacts.

The world’s largest money managers, their bankers and lawyers “seem to be engaged in a cover-up to downplay their ESG-related economic incentives and promote their purported social impact,” Icahn said Thursday in a letter to McDonald’s Corp. shareholders. “Clearly, the ESG status quo on Wall Street needs to change.”

Icahn criticized asset managers for “subjectively selecting” which environmental, social and governance issues are important. If ESG is to be more than marketing and way to raise money, investors must “back up their words with actions,” he said.

ESG has ballooned into an industry embraced by the investing and financial world, with the label now slapped on everything from loans to exchange-traded funds as fund managers and bankers generate hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. The global market adds up to about $40 trillion of assets, according to estimates from Bloomberg Intelligence.

That growth has prompted some current and former sustainability executives and academics to criticize ESG for having limited impact in tackling systemic societal issues. Even the man who led a group that coined the acronym has said the finance industry has “sprinkled ESG fairy dust” on products and that there will be an industry shakeout in the next five years.

Icahn said that while ESG covers a range of issues, it’s both “unacceptable and irresponsible” that large asset managers have put little emphasis on animal welfare in their stewardship and proxy-voting guidelines.

Icahn has proposed adding new directors to the boards of McDonald’s and Kroger Co., saying the companies are mistreating pigs in their supply chains by sticking pregnant sows in tight crates.

He told McDonald’s shareholders in his letter that backing his two directors — including one that runs a sustainable-investment firm — would send a message to management teams across the U.S. and the world.

“As climate change and other natural resource challenges continue to threaten our world, animal welfare is an increasingly pivotal societal issue,” Icahn said.

Updated: 5-10-2022

Pence Rips Socially Minded Investing, Wants To ‘Rein In’ ESG

* Former Vice President Giving Energy Policy Speech In Houston
* Pence Is Citing Investor Securing Three Seats On Exxon Board

Former Vice President Mike Pence criticized investor-activist campaigns to force companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. to follow socially conscious investing principles, saying they elevate “left-wing” goals over the interests of businesses and their employees.

Pence, a potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate, delivered an energy policy speech on Tuesday in Houston and called for states such as Texas to “rein in” the push for employee pension funds to use environmental, social and governance principles in investing.

The former vice president cited activist investor Engine No. 1, which was backed by firms including BlackRock Inc. last year as it mounted a successful proxy campaign that led to the replacement of three directors on Exxon’s board. “Those three are now working to undermine the company from the inside,” Pence said.

ESG investing – the use of environmental, social and governance factors in decision making – has become one of the hottest areas in finance in recent years, with the global market adding as much as $40 trillion in assets, according to estimates from Bloomberg Intelligence.

Yet the strategy has drawn the ire of lawmakers in some states. Officials in Utah and West Virginia have pressed S&P Global Ratings to scrap a system that scores US states based on their ESG-related credentials. In Texas, officials are asking finance firms to disclose their climate policies, including whether they’re limiting business with energy companies.

Finance was always meant to facilitate investment and spur economic growth that benefits the entire US, Pence said. But President Joe Biden and government regulators are “weaponizing the financial system to do the exact opposite,” including through “capricious new ESG regulations that allow left-wing radicals to destroy American energy producers from within.”

Similar accusations have been circulating in Texas for some time, but Pence’s comments are among the most aggressive yet. The growth of ESG investing has pushed some of Wall Street’s biggest investors to become much more active in proxy campaigns.

But the notion that such campaigns hurt companies is unproven, especially in Exxon’s case. Engine No. 1’s success came from persuading large shareholders that an improved climate strategy would also help the oil giant’s financial returns.

After the vote, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods quickly made peace with the three new directors, and announced a series of green measures including eliminating emissions from its operations by mid-century and locking in lower spending on fossil fuels. Buoyed by higher oil prices, Exxon’s stock is up 36% in the past year.

GOP lawmakers and powerful industry groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have opposed increased activity by financial watchdogs on ESG issues during the Biden administration, even as the White House has called for increased oil and gas production to help reduce fuel prices.

Biden has also made fighting climate change a centerpiece of his presidency, and last year ordered regulators to develop stronger plans for measuring and mitigating the risks climate change poses to the financial system.

One proposal by the Securities and Exchange Commission would require businesses to reveal the risks a warming planet poses to their operations when they file regulatory statements.

Updated: 5-18-2022

Musk Says ESG ‘An Outrageous Scam’ After Tesla Index Exclusion

Tesla CEO Elon Musk called ESG “an outrageous scam” after the electric vehicle maker lost its spot on an S&P Global index that tracks companies on their environmental, social and governance standards.

Expressing his displeasure in a series of tweets, Musk said the index compiler had “lost their integrity” and said “political attacks” on him would “escalate dramatically in coming months.”

S&P Dow Jones Indices cited concerns related to working conditions at Tesla among its reasons for removing the automaker from its S&P 500 ESG Index.

Updated: 5-19-2022

The Tricky Politics of Anti-ESG Investing

A new asset-management company backed by Peter Thiel claims to be pushing back against an “ideological cartel.” That’s a leap.

Recently, it may feel as if your 401K is just a mathematical distillation of every wrong decision you’ve ever made. Even worse, though, what if your investments are nothing less than the means by which a shallow and divisive agenda is foisted on millions of unsuspecting Americans by an “ideological cartel”?

That choice phrase comes from Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotech executive, author and now cofounder of a new investment firm seeded by, among others, the billionaire Peter Thiel.

Strive Asset Management seeks to take on the Big Three — BlackRock Inc., State Street Corp. and Vanguard Group Inc. — accusing them of coordinating a campaign to push political objectives that are at odds with their clients’ best interests.

In essence, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink et al. decide that they want to prioritize tackling climate change or systemic racism or whatnot and then use the trillions of passive dollars they invest to force companies to prioritize that, too.

Strive will do the opposite, pushing instead “excellence capitalism” — that is, nudging companies to ditch the political stuff and focus on delivering good products and services.

Ramaswamy laid out his anti-ESG thesis in a book published last year titled “Woke, Inc.” As much as it contains useful observations, its thesis is overwrought. It may nonetheless be useful for the ESG — environmental, social and governance — movement to grapple with it.

Ramaswamy’s core argument is a warning about the growing power of passive money managers. This has merit. The Big Three own, on their clients’ behalf, about one-fifth of each S&P 500 member, on average, with potentially negative implications for governance and competition. There is already lively debate and a body of academic literature about this.

Still, it remains a leap to conclude that there now exists a cartel — a loaded term — that effectively forces certain political stances on US companies and Americans in general.

It is far from clear that corporations set the pace on social issues rather than take their cues from below. For example, plenty of people — indeed, a majority in the US — are concerned about climate change, and that didn’t require the imprimatur of any corporate executive.

Indeed, while Strive cites a survey by Brunswick Group that it says demonstrates that “most American consumers, voters and shareholders overwhelmingly agree” with its approach, the conclusions of that survey are more nuanced. It does show that only 36% of respondents “unequivocally” think companies should speak out on social issues.

However, another 44% think companies should do so but only if the issues are directly related to their core business. Only 20% give a blanket “no.”

The takeaway is not that companies should avoid taking any positions on such issues but that they should choose their battles carefully and, crucially, pay more than lip service if they do speak out.

The Brunswick survey does reinforce another of Ramaswamy’s criticisms, namely corporate hypocrisy. In his book, he does a good job recounting examples of companies posturing about this or that, often to distract from a more mercenary or scandalous story. Undoubtedly correct, this is hardly a revelation.

About 60% of survey respondents said companies speak out on social issues in order to look better to consumers. Such common skepticism rather undercuts the idea that top-down social conditioning via fiduciary fiat and corporate campaigning is actually effective.

Companies clearly can get out over their skis. Walt Disney Co., for example, in its spat with Florida’s governor, looks to have been bounced into taking a stand before it was sure of its ground. But this is a gray area. It might not be obvious why, say, a software developer would want to take a stand on voting access or transgender rights.

But one rationale may be considerations for the morale of younger workers amid a high quits rate. Would that be “wokeness,” managing the risks around the “S” in ESG, or just a way to retain staff without offering raises? Even hypocrisy can have useful outcomes.

Strive also cites Exxon Mobil Corp. as an example. Last year, Exxon famously lost a proxy battle to an upstart ESG fund, Engine No. 1 LLC.

Ramaswamy says he would have voted against the three dissident directors elected to the board and that the subsequent oil-price spike shows that Exxon would have been better off ignoring the green stuff and drilling more wells. Yet, as Engine No. 1’s own campaign showed, the environmental part was inextricably linked with the governance part.

Exxon’s lagging financial results (and stock) were plausibly blamed on financial indiscipline under a board that looked underqualified to oversee a traditional oil major, let alone one facing the novel challenges of climate change.

The relative restraint on drilling shown by Exxon, among others, in the face of triple-digit oil prices is precisely what has persuaded ambivalent investors to buy back into the sector.

The Exxon example gets at possibly the biggest problem with Strive’s approach — though also with the investment philosophy that Strive sets itself against.

Google articles about Strive and you will find terms like “ESG,” “SRI” — socially responsible investing — and stakeholder capitalism used interchangeably. Similarly, Ramaswamy’s book uses the catch-all term “woke”:

Basically, being woke means obsessing about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Maybe climate change too. That’s the best definition I can give.

If you say so. Dismissing climate change as just another activist obsession speaks to the logical disconnect of exhorting Exxon to focus on delivering a high-quality product without acknowledging that said product carries an inherent, climate-related flaw that requires a strategic response. One person’s liberal hobby horse is another’s systemic risk.

The blurring of lines between ESG, SRI and all the rest of it has done a disservice to sustainable investing, in part by creating space for blanket dismissal.

As my colleague Nir Kaissar has written, some of the blame for this lies with seeming champions such as Fink himself, who mixes calls for companies to adopt pragmatic ESG risk management with very different SRI proposals to exit investments in sectors deemed unsustainable. This sows confusion and invites derision.

In that sense, Strive’s broadside offers a useful wake-up call for ESG to hone its messaging and methodology. ESG’s great strength is its use of objective criteria rather than subjective beliefs to reduce financial risk or enhance financial performance.

It also allows for more nuance; one could, for example, invest ESG-style in a coal-heavy utility today in order to help along (and benefit from) its future renewables projects.

The fuzziness of the investment movement that anti-woke asset management sets itself against is a doubled-edged sword. Most passive investors prize the low costs that come with scale, and “excellence capitalism” seems too vague a pitch to disrupt that. Nevertheless, Strive’s timing is impeccable, effectively taking the opposite side of what has become a crowded trade.

That timing also makes it suspect. Strive launches amid a gathering Republican campaign against companies taking positions that oppose the party line on wedge issues.

The day after Strive’s announcement, former Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech in Texas attacking ESG and socially minded investing, making a wild claim that Exxon’s new directors were “now working to undermine the company from the inside.”

As much as Strive touts itself as “depoliticizing corporate America,” I’m afraid you don’t get to do that credibly while also boasting about seed money from Thiel.

If Tesla Isn’t Good Enough For An ESG Index, Then Who Is?

The carmaker’s removal from the S&P 500 ESG Index places in stark relief the broader market’s conflation of the label with sustainability.

Tesla Inc.’s removal this week from an industry benchmark index is raising new questions about what ESG actually means to investors.

The strategy, widely seen as favoring industries ostensibly interested in sustainability (of the environmental, social and governance sort), started about two decades ago as a way to protect investors from risks tied to things like global warming, labor violations and discrimination.

Since then, it’s morphed into a $35 trillion industry that’s allowed millions of investors to feel as though they’re “doing good.” And now people are confused about what ESG is really supposed to achieve.

“The market continues to conflate ESG with sustainability, and you’re certainly seeing that play out here,” said Rob Du Boff, senior ESG analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “Our ETF team likes to note Tesla is the ultimate Rorschach test for ESG investors.”

While many would agree few automakers have done more than Elon Musk’s company in the global shift away from fossil fuels, Tesla’s management and workplace issues have been at times problematic.

So much so that S&P Dow Jones Indices, while acknowledging Tesla’s environmental prowess, nevertheless decided to remove the electric vehicle maker from the S&P 500 ESG Index over safety and labor issues.

“How can a company whose self-declared mission is to ‘accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy’ not make the cut in an ESG index?” wrote Margaret Dorn, senior director and head of ESG indexes for S&P Dow Jones in North America, in a blog post. Answering her own question, she said “there are many reasons,” including that Tesla “has fallen behind its peers when examined through a wider ESG lens.”

Dorn focused on social and governance factors at the company, which had a negative impact on its overall ESG score. She singled out two events centered around allegations of racial discrimination and poor working conditions at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, as well as its handling of a U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation after multiple deaths and injuries were linked to its “autopilot” function.

Academics like Todd Cort of Yale University agree with Dorn. The S&P methodology focuses on corporate performance, and Tesla’s “management systems and controls are still pretty undeveloped” relative to industry leaders, he said.

But investors including Cathie Wood of ARK Investment Management have strenuously disagreed. In a post on Twitter, she called S&P’s decision “ridiculous.” It’s “not worthy of any other response.”

Paul Watchman, an industry consultant who wrote a seminal report in the mid-2000s that helped spur ESG investing, said Tesla should be part of ESG indexes. “Not all breaches of ESG are equal, and this assessment shows just how warped the S&P assessment is,” he said.

Tesla does have multiple problems related to corporate governance and health and safety, but Watchman said they should be viewed in context. “However relevant these failures and shortcomings may be, they aren’t nearly as bad other companies.” Fossil fuel giants being one example, he said.

MSCI Inc., the leading provider of ESG ratings, still includes Tesla (as well as Exxon Mobil Corp.) in its more widely tracked ESG-focused indexes, adding to the confusion about what ESG actually is. (The methodologies MSCI and S&P use for their ESG indexes are very similar.)

MSCI said its ESG-focused indexes are designed to “maximize their exposure to positive ESG factors” while “exhibiting risk and return characteristics” similar to the overall market. Companies with links to the tobacco, “controversial” weapons, civilian firearms, oil sands and thermal coal are excluded from the indexes.

S&P Dow Jones Indices said its S&P 500 ESG Index is “a broad-based, market-cap-weighted index that’s designed to measure the performance of securities meeting sustainability criteria, while maintaining similar overall industry weights as the S&P 500.” The index also excludes companies engaged in the thermal coal, tobacco and controversial weapons industries.

Still, widespread confusion over the metrics and measurements that go into ESG has become more controversial over time. But from a market standpoint, ESG indexes matter because investors have poured $410 billion into passively run ESG-labeled funds, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence.

Tesla has made the world a greener place with their innovative electric vehicles, and investors have been rewarded as a result, BI’s Du Boff said. Shareholders also have been stung by Musk’s tussles with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and his recent takeover approach to Twitter Inc., he said.

“Turns out investors should have been paying closer attention to signs of poor corporate governance,” Du Boff said.

And that brings the conversation back to trying to define ESG. Hours after it emerged that S&P Dow Jones had expelled Tesla, Shaheen Contractor and Eric Balchunas from BI published a note with this headline: “Is Tesla ESG? Many Funds Think So Even as S&P ESG Index Drops It.”

Contractor and Balchunas said their analysis ranks Tesla 46th in the S&P 500 for inclusion in ESG-focused funds. “The automaker’s ESG status remains among the most debated for any stock,” they wrote.

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