The Government Wants ESG Out of Pensions
Also vol blowups, copays and interest on taxes.
Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow, back on Monday.
My maximalist theory of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing goes like this. There is a government of the U.S., consisting of a president and Congress and and so forth, chosen through more-or-less democratic processes, and it makes big collective decisions for society. There is another government, in the world, consisting of a handful of gigantic institutional asset managers—BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, etc.—who own (on behalf of their customers) most of the stocks of most of the public companies, and can, in some loose sense, tell those companies how to behave. They are not chosen democratically, exactly, but they are representative; millions of people give their money to those institutions and trust them to make decisions for them.