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Regulation Asia: When Elon Musk tweeted in May that Tesla would no longer accept vehicle payments made using Bitcoin due to the “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions”, the debate around the environmental sustainability of cryptocurrencies reignited.
Nasdaq: French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said in a statement that he has asked Amundi's AMUN.PA Chief Executive Officer Yves Perrier to head a coordination commission for the financial industry's climate change efforts.
Institutional Asset Manager: The world’s 100 largest asset owners (AO100) grew by 15.7 per cent last year to reach USD23.5 trillion, according to new research from the Thinking Ahead Institute (TAI).
BNN Bloomberg: Investors looking for ESG strategies have been handed a new group of indexes promising to focus on biodiversity by excluding companies that are found to pose a threat to nature.
Hedge Week: The BlueBay Total Return Diversified Credit ESG Fund enables fixed income investors to gain an exposure to the firms ‘best ideas’ through an ESG lens across global high yield, bank loans, financial capital bonds, structured credit, Convertible bonds, emerging markets and developed market investment grade.
Investor Daily: For all the wrangling over targets and commitments at COP26 in Glasgow this month, one thing is clear: the transition to a net-zero economy will require vast investment over the next few decades – and the asset management industry will be responsible for much of it.
BNN Bloomberg: Europe will likely delay a vital plank of its anti-greenwashing regulation for fund managers, as authorities overseeing the process get slowed down by the sheer complexity of the task, according to a person familiar with the process.
Institutional Asset Manager: Global institutional investors have significantly raised their ambitions to implement net zero commitments across portfolios over the last 12 months, whilst being increasingly aware of the challenges in meeting these targets, according to the latest edition of the Aviva Investors Real Assets Study.
BNN Bloomberg: The European Central Bank has warned that most lenders it oversees have yet to produce concrete plans showing how they will change their business strategies to account for climate change.
BNN Bloomberg: Sovereign wealth funds are starting to take environmental, social and corporate governance issues a lot more seriously, in a sign that some of the world’s most influential investors may be ready to reallocate their vast fortunes in more planet-friendly ways.
Institutional Asset Manager: Asset owners are implementing initiatives that will shape equity and equality across the asset management industry, employing measures that track asset managers’ articulated mission and culture toward diversity and inclusion (D&I).
BNN Bloomberg: Morgan Stanley is introducing an initiative to draw more young people from diverse backgrounds to the finance industry, furthering its outreach efforts a week after appointing to the bank’s board its first woman of color.
Yahoo Finance: Citigroup Inc. won a municipal-bond deal in Texas, marking its potential re-entry into a booming corner of the municipal-debt market after a new Republican state law sought to punish Wall Street banks for their gun policies.
U.S. News: Coal and oil-fired power generation projects will find it difficult to secure investments, BlackRock Inc. Managing Director Eduard Ruijs said.
BNN Bloomberg: At this month’s climate talks in Scotland, a lot of time was spent condemning the shortage of money available to fight global warming.
Proactive Investors: The number of smaller companies issuing economic, social, and governance (ESG) and sustainability reports is expected to grow in the coming years, according to its research by MBH Corporation PLC (OTCQX:MBHCF, ETR:M8H).
Hedge Week: Credit and equity managers are leading the charge in regard to the consideration of diversity metrics when researching potential investments, Redington research has found.
Institutional Investor: A recent survey of a “wide swath” of asset owners shows that pressure from their respective boards is the primary reason they’re working to incorporate environmental, social, and governance measures into the investment process.
Money Management: In a global study of 369 asset managers, 95% of those in Australia and New Zealand said they integrated ESG factors into their investment, only two percentage points behind the UK and Europe.
U.S. News: European private equity firm Cinven said on Thursday it had mandated an external adviser to undertake a carbon footprint review of its operations and portfolio emissions as part of efforts to set a net zero target in 2022.
Hedge Week: Fund managers and investors remain split over how they integrate environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into their risk and investment processes, with industry participants citing a lack of clarity over data reliability, comparability and standardisation as the main challenge.
Institutional Investor: While most women in asset management would like the hybrid work model to continue, not everyone thinks it will have a positive impact on their career — unless firms address some of the challenges, including helping to foster connections with colleagues and clients.
Business Wire: Asset managers are placing greater emphasis on active ownership of their investments and increasingly engaging on ESG issues with the underlying companies in their portfolios, according to a newly released survey conducted by Russell Investments. Ninety percent of respondents said they cover ESG in meetings with the senior management of companies that they invest in, up from 80% in the 2018 survey. Overall, 35% of respondents report they always cover ESG in their meetings, up from 21% in 2018.
Yahoo Finance: From up high in the eastern Himalayas, Bhutan is one of the only countries that can say it’s doing more to cool the planet than warm it. But the nation of fewer than 1 million people, dotted with lush mountains that absorb heat-trapping carbon dioxide, isn’t rewarded for its low emissions or shielded from the devastating effects of climate change.
Funds Europe: Climate-aware equity strategies are growing in number and in the approaches they employ. Sarita Gosrani, director of ESG at bfinance, talks about this evolution and some of the complexities for investors when evaluating one strategy against another.
BNN Bloomberg: Larry Fink is among Wall Street’s most outspoken leaders when it comes to climate change. He also just placed a bid on a major fossil-fuel asset.
Funds Europe: North American individual investors lead Europeans at ESG investment, according to research from Natixis Investment Management that revealed 28% of North American investors held ESG investments compared to 22% of European investors.
BNN Bloomberg: Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England and the co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, said there’s no reason investors pursuing low-carbon strategies should have to make do with lower returns.
Institutional Asset Manager: The FCA has therefore, outlined a revamped ESG strategy which will develop clear standards for sustainability, diversity and net-zero targets, build high quality information for market participants and financial services firms to rely on, and create a well-functioning ecosystem that ensures firms take ESG seriously, deliver on promises and avoid ‘Greenwashing’.
Yahoo Finance: Pershing Square Capital Management’s founder Bill Ackman has thrown his hat into the inflation debate that has been simmering on social media amongst influential newsmakers including Cathie Wood and Elon Musk.
Management Training News: Analysis of more than 4,300 hedge fund changes between July 1, 2020 and the 30% of hedge fund employees at all levels and in all functions in the US were male, compared with 74% in Europe / UK and 69% in Asia.
Institutional Investor: Against the backdrop of COP26, the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, a number of institutional investors — including prominent endowments at universities such as BU, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Loyola Chicago, UC Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota — have begun to divest from carbon-intensive assets.
Hedge Week: The Marshall Impact Accelerator – which is being unveiled on finance day at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow and is scheduled to launch in spring next year – will provide philanthropic capital for innovative social ventures spanning environment, health, social inequality, public policy and developmental economics challenges.
CNBC: While much of the world has been focused on environmental, social, and governance issues over the past few years, more recently, cracks are starting to show in the way companies are working to solve ESG challenges.
EY: A burgeoning number of institutional investors around the world are placing greater emphasis on ESG performance in their decision-making and 74% are now more likely to divest from companies with poor ESG track records. However, concrete action is still lacking, and there is an urgent need for better quality disclosure from companies, according to the 2021 EY Global Institutional Investor Survey (pdf).
U.S. News: BlackRock Inc told Reuters it has raised a target-beating $673 million for an infrastructure fund with backing from the French, German and Japanese governments to invest in climate-focused projects such as renewable energy in emerging markets.
Financial Post: Research from the Swiss Finance Institute argues stocks highly rated on environmental, social and governance metrics have outperformed in recent years all thanks to the trillions of dollars flooding the sector. The fundamentals of socially responsible investing have played no role in driving these returns.
Institutional Asset Manager: The inaugural ‘Responsible Capitalism’ survey, conducted in September 2021, found that for most institutional investors (88 per cent), ESG factors play a central role when making long-term investment decisions and are seen as more important than traditional financial metrics.
PwC: Environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors increasingly drive investment strategies, and new research from PwC finds ESG has now become a make-or-break consideration for leading investors globally.
Hedge Week: Just over half – 53 per cent – of fund managers surveyed by Hedge Fund Research said they incorporate ESG factors or risks into their investment process – a total of 687 managers – while 47 per cent, or 609 fund managers, said they did not.
CNBC: Facebook has been aware of real-world harms propagated by its platforms and ignored warnings from employees about those dangers, according to the Facebook Papers, a series of articles published by 17 U.S. news outlets.
Yahoo News: Blackstone Inc. had trouble recruiting women until it asked why the prospect of joining the firm was turning them away, co-founder Stephen Schwarzman said at Saudi Arabia’s flagship investment conference.
The Guardian: One of the world’s largest pension funds, ABP, is selling its €15bn-worth of holdings in fossil fuel companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, claiming it had been unable to persuade the sector to transition quickly enough towards decarbonisation.
Institutional Investor: In October, Hughes was appointed to her current role, a new position that Schroders added as a part of a firm-wide effort to expand its sustainability investment team. Her appointment coincided with several other senior hires and promotions, including the appointments of Margot Von Aesch to head of sustainable investment management and Kimberley Lewis to head of active ownership, according to a press release.
BNN Bloomberg: As executives from JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG and other lenders prepare for the most important UN climate summit in six years, their companies continue to help provide almost as much money for fossil fuels as for green projects.
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