Socially Responsible and ESG Investing!

Posted on March 27, 2023 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

S.R.I.

[By Rick Kahler CFP®]

The concept of socially responsible investing is far from new; the first SRI fund appeared in 1952. Since then, these funds have used social and ethical screens to exclude companies selling products like tobacco, alcohol, or firearms.

You may not have heard of the next generation of SRI funds, called ESG funds, which means environmental, social and governance funds. Social responsibility is just one-third of the expanded focus of these funds, which also look to include companies that are sensitive to the environment and have more holistic corporate governance.

Updates

In recent years, ESG investing has exploded. According to a July 11, 2018, article in Forbes, The Remarkable Rise of ESG, by Georg Kell, over $20 trillion is invested in ESG funds. This accounts for 25% of all the professionally managed assets in the world. There are currently 275 ESG mutual funds and ETF’s from which to choose.

Yet one facet of investing in ESG funds is widely misunderstood. While ESG investing may help you feel better about yourself, it does not actually impact or hamper the companies you choose not to own.

This may come as a surprise to many ESG investors, who commonly believe that by not owning the shares of an offensive company they are restricting the flow of capital to that company, thereby imperiling its existence. For the most part, that isn’t the case.

The offenders

Listed among the worst offending companies by several ESG organizations are Philip Morris, WalMart, Tyson Foods, Pepsi Corporation, Coca-Cola, and Chevron. No dedicated ESG investors would have these companies in their portfolios. None of these companies would care or be hurt in the least if you didn’t own any of their shares.

Why?

The only time a company benefits from a sale of stock is when the company initially goes public (called an initial public offering, or IPO) or issues additional new shares to raise capital. These are actually fairly rare events.

Most stocks are bought and sold in the “secondary” market through exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange. These platforms facilitate transactions between individuals or institutions wanting to buy or sell shares in a company. The money moves between the buyer and the seller; none of the money goes to the company.

Another way companies receive funding to support their ventures is to borrow money from investors. This is called issuing a bond and is similar to an IPO, only the investor receives a promise from the company to pay them back at some future date and receives interest on the loan in the meantime.

Just like stocks, bonds are only issued by a company once. From then on, buying and selling bonds is done on the open market, and none of the money paid or received goes to the company.

So if you want to punish a company, don’t buy stocks or bonds it issues directly. Otherwise, excluding its shares from your portfolio has no effect on the company’s profits or cash flow.

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Assessment

But if no one bought a company’s shares on the secondary market, wouldn’t that have an impact? Yes, it most certainly would. If the demand for the shares of a company dried up, the company’s stock price would plummet.

The problem is the demand for the shares of these companies isn’t going away as long as they remain profitable. If 25% of investors purchase ESG funds,  that leaves 75% of the market willing to buy these companies. This includes the 20% of stocks owned by passive index funds, which own the entire market.

CONCLUSION

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ESG Investing: Not So Hot … Anymore?

Posted on March 27, 2023 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

By Staff Reporters

Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance

Florida is pulling $2 billion from BlackRock in the largest divestment ever made as part of the growing vendetta against Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing practices. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other Republican leaders claim that by taking ESG standards into account when making investment decisions, the firm isn’t prioritizing the bottom line. But, for a few years, things were good. In 2020 and 2021, ESG funds outperformed the market by ~4.3%.

https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2022/03/27/on-socially-responsible-investing-2/

DEFINITION: According to Wikipedia, ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance) data reflect the externalities (costs to others) an organization is generating with respect to the environment, to society and to corporate governance. ESG data can be used by investors to assess the material risk the organization is taking and by the organization itself as metrics for strategic and managerial purposes. Investors may also use ESG data beyond assessing material risks to the organization in their evaluation of enterprise value, specifically by designing models based on assumptions that the identification, assessment and management of sustainability-related risks and opportunities in respect to all organizational stakeholders leads to higher long-term risk-adjusted return. Organizational stakeholders include but not limited to customers, suppliers, employees, leadership, and the environment.

CITE: https://www.r2library.com/Resource/Title/082610254

Since 2020, there has been accelerating interest in overlaying ESG data with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), developed based on work by United Nations beginning in the 1980s.

LINK: http://www.ESG.org

The term ESG was popularly used first in a 2004 report titled “Who Cares Wins”, which was a joint initiative of financial institutions at the invitation of UN. In less than 20 years, the ESG movement has grown from a corporate social responsibility initiative launched by the United Nations into a global phenomenon representing more than US$30 trillion in assets under management. In the year 2019 alone, capital totaling US$17.67 billion flowed into ESG-linked products, an almost 525 percent increase from 2015, according to Morningstar, Inc.. Critics claim ESG linked-products have not had and are unlikely to have the intended impact of raising the cost of capital for polluting firms, and have accused the movement of greenwashing.

PODCAST: https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2022/10/10/podcast-what-is-financial-green-washing/

Now All Mad

DeSantis ran his most recent campaign on fighting the “woke ideology” he believes is infiltrating the state. As part of the fight, Florida passed a resolution in August that said ESG standards should be ignored when investing state funds.

And he’s not the only one:

  • Other Republican-controlled states, including Missouri and Louisiana, have moved almost $1.3 billion away from BlackRock for similar reasons.
  • Texas flagged BlackRock as a financial firm that boycotts the state’s energy industry (something BlackRock has denied).

Meanwhile, Democrats aren’t happy either…they criticize BlackRock and ESG investing in general for not going far enough (and for using lax standards that let oil giants onto lists of ESG investments).

Bottom line: According to the Morning Brew, BlackRock and Florida are now cursed to yell “How could you prioritize politics over returns?” back and forth for eternity, and the debate over ESG investing is far from over. Republicans are poised to take over the House—after a campaign season that BlackRock poured record cash into—so we’re likely to see more drama play out at the federal level soon.

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