In 2022 Newsweek ranked the “World’s Most Socially Responsible Banks”
---- the banks most likely to say “Hey money doesn’t matter let’s do politics instead.”
Below are the US Banks that made their list.
The number to the left indicates each bank’s world ranking
5 Citigroup
11 PNC Financial Services Group
19 JP Morgan Chase & Co
27 American Express
60 Regions
61 KeyCorp
78 BNY Mellon
79 State Street
81 Huntington
90 Fifth Third Bank
102 Community Trust Bank
121 Ameris Bancorp
126 Comerica
134 US Bancorp
151 Morgan Stanley
The neat thing about ESG rankings is any unelected unaccountable group of whacky liberals can set their own criteria.
IOW one group can say “You need at least 4 trans people on your board” and another can say “No two is enough but you must end all your employees to racial sensitivity training at my friend’s training company.”
Anyway Wells Fargo did not make Newsweek’s list, but it DOES make someone else’s list. Here are world rankings from an unelected group calling itself “ESG Provider.”
I bank with PNC just because they took over my old bank and its easy just to stay with them.
Sure with my 401k investment I do a cursory job of ensuring my money is not invested in areas I personally have issues with but I am not naïve enough to think there is not some cross over at some point.
And yes I love my tech and understand there is a certain amount of exploitation that goes with it but at some point you just have to live your life and do your best to minimize your part in other peoples suffering.
LOL
Not only did the ESG funds make less money,
the underlying companies were NOT actually more ESG compliant. From the article
"Researchers at Columbia University and London School of Economics compared the ESG record of U.S. companies in 147 ESG fund portfolios and that of U.S. companies in 2,428 non-ESG portfolios. They found that the companies in the ESG portfolios had worse compliance record for both labor and environmental rules.
It reminds me of an old University scam about sweatshop labor. Students protest and held sit-ins etc. to get their universities to be
“anti-sweatshop compliant.”
To become “anti-sweatshop” compliant a Universities had to do two things
Promise their hoodies and other merchandise were not made in sweatshops
Pay a large annual fee to a group that did very little except collect large annual fees and send out press releases.
If a fund wants to advertise they follow ESG principles and put those principles ahead of providing the best return on your money, that is truth in advertising and I am fine with that. I wouldn’t put my money in such a fund but I am fine with it.
Next question.
If a bank decided NOT to pursue financial stability,
but instead chose to make tawdry political statements how much bail-in money should it get?
Because and group, from moderate to super-trans super-marxist can issue their own standards a garden-variety suburbanite who “loves the environment” might be shocked to find out what agenda is being pushed.
In 1997 when I was choosing my first mutual fund Vanguard offered an early predecessor to ESG. It was designed to “meet the criteria” of certain lefty university groups who had asked for it.
If you data-mined the details you found out that among those criteria was that the fund would not invest in any company doing business in Ireland (I think because abortion was outlawed there.) Yet it had o specific provision against doing business with Iran, N Korea etc… (smh)
