Someone tell me what I'm missing here. For pretty much forever it seems there have been ESG investment options at various firms and brokerages. Back in the day like 30 years ago I had to go seek my own version of this out with a Catholic company that probably did not exactly match my values but at least helped avoid investing money in certain things I didn't want.
Then you get older and you have jobs and the jobs give you some options for different kinds of funds you can put your company retirement money in, and for me one of these has always been a socially responsible type mutual fund. So I have some 30% or something lodged in that fund. I really don't pay any attention to whether it earns more or less than any of the other funds because they all go up and down in different ways and I have a few of them and that's good enough for me. The retirement account seems pretty solid despite my ESG investment inclusion. If you want to see wild insanity you should check out my Roth IRA, which seems to be operated by some kind of unhinged bandit. The bandit is me.
I had a vague awareness that Trump did something fussy to try to interfere with ESG investments under certain rules. Yet this did not make sense to me at the time because I didn't know which groups were affected by his rule. It didn't seem to affect any of my investments. Seemed kind of petty and designed to put a few coins in the pocket of some of his donors or whatever.
Fast forward to today, and Biden has turned over the previous Trump rule, and Republicans are all hopping mad about it and Congress voted to overturn the Biden overturning, but then Biden vetoed the overturning of his overturning. And now apparently it means that everyone's investments are being sacrificed on the pagan commie altar of wokeness. I mean the word pagan did not come into it but communist and wokeness definitely are words being repeated by otherwise legitimately elected holders of leadership authority, hand in hand with the idea that somehow woke investments are being forced on my retirement account. I'm pretty f****** sure that's not the case but no one in the news media seems to be able to explain this. So I have no idea what's going on. I just don't want to invest in stuff like exxon mobil.
I thought we were supposed to be all mad about wanting our freedoms and mad at anybody who wanted to take our freedoms but it seems they want to take my freedom to put my retirement into a woke investment? Honestly don't know.
ESG
Re: ESG
Knowing that someone else is going to just say Google it, but trying to have a conversation. What is an ESG?
Re: ESG
Not knowing what it means but trying to just make jokes,
ESG is an American rock band formed in the South Bronx in 1978. ESG has been influential across a wide range of musical genres, including hip hop, and dance-punk. The band's track "UFO" is one of the most sampled songs in history. The band originally consisted of the Scroggins sisters, Renee (vocals), Valerie (drums), Deborah (bass) and Marie (congas, vocals) and friend Tito Libran (congas, vocals). The band's name stands for emerald, sapphire, and gold.
Re: ESG
I think it stands for Environmental, Social, and (corporate) Governance.
The idea is that fund managers might create a portfolio including only companies that meet whatever standards in these areas, and then use that to promote investment in the fund.
So for example, I have a fund that focuses on women-owned companies that meet other sorts of criteria. The number one objective of that fund is not total gains or mitigating risk, but is the select companies that meet the desired criteria for the investor. Likewise I have another one that involves "socially responsible choice" and also excludes things like hospitals and drug companies.
From what I can tell, a combined group of stupids and liars is trying to pretend that the only factor that can ever be used to fulfill one's fiduciary duty as a fund manager is to maximize total return on investment over some undefined period of time. But that's b******* because that's not how investment funds ever work. They just don't want people to invest more and more of their money in socially responsible investment vehicles because companies like ExxonMobil and tobacco companies or whatever are missing out on that sweet sweet cash.
It appears to me that the Liberty interest is preserved when investors can make whatever choices they feel like making. When my employer tells me that I can have a choice of two Vanguard index funds I don't really feel like my liberty interest is being preserved even if they justify it on the grounds that this is the best expense ratio and overall return they can find.
Re: ESG
The rule just says employers CAN offer ESG funds, not that they HAVE to. But the GOP (and 2 DEM senators, including our good friend Manchin) think that's "pushing a woke agenda" and don't want it to happen. I'm with you: let it be an option for the people who care about it and it doesn't affect anyone else's freedom to invest in what they want.
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Right? I'm glad there aren't enough senators to overrule the veto. Oils always gonna oil, that's what I've come away with...
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I don't know how to assign a percentage of blame to the media for giving us the Trump presidency but it's a pretty juicy percentage. The same thing is happening again now because of the failure of reporting across the board, and I'm so sick of it. It's imperative that we get a smarter group of people / critical thinkers in our media. We have stupids reporting on the actions of more stupids, and the collective effect of it over a long period inevitably has some influence on the electorate. It's dangerous and scary.
In the last day or two, three major examples of egregious failure on the part of media outlets to report sensibly and honestly on what is happening in Reality:
1. SVB bank. The very idea that headlines about the wokeness of the bank are being published and the idea is seriously entertained in articles is beyond... Beyond. SVB did not collapse because it was a woke bank you f****** morons. People saying this should be forced to rescind their investments until we figure out what's going on.
Likewise, DeSantis is not pushing back against Biden's ESG agenda because he doesn't have a f****** ESG agenda! There is no such thing, fools! Instead what we have is Biden doing the drill baby drill thing in Alaska, which is about the direct opposite of ESG. And if there were some hidden agenda to be Ethical, DeSantis isn't doing a damn thing about it, nor will he. All he wants is for dumbs in the media to report exactly this, as if this made up fantasy makes him look more sensible about money matters. All it proves is that he's a stupid and everybody who picks the story up is a stupid. Living amongst such stupidity is making me weary. We've all been doing it for years so you know what I'm talking about, but I swear it's getting worse and worse. Major bank collapse and the analysis of the situation is being given to us through the frame of wokeness?! And ESG investing is another possible cause? Good God. I don't think I would trust these people to be able to go to the store and buy milk properly. How do they function on the loose with a credit card? We hear so much about how the high schools need to teach financial literacy like balancing a checkbook... The problem seems to go way deeper.
The last example of this media insanity is the frenzy about the whistleblower at the transgender clinic in St Louis. A woman who worked there decided she had questions about what the qualified clinicians were deciding to do with patients. She's not an expert but okay, she has every right to become a whistleblower if she thinks that's important. There's a procedure for turning over information and requesting an investigation. Sounds like she didn't do any of this properly. Instead, her methods have resulted in the private and personal information of minor children being spread all over the internet, and the number of people seeking treatment in this one place over a short period of time is not large! Because we're in the center of some bizarre outburst of desire to regulate and eliminate transgender people, or at least for politicians to pretend that they've worked hard on this, reporters ate this up with a spoon. They credulously defended wacko claims, including that children who identified as attack helicopters were being immediately given hormones without proper procedure. Any sane person reads this and knows something else is going on here, so people pushed back on the story. The transphobic journalists were outraged: If this angelic whistleblower woman says that they were giving hormones out to the helicopter children, then by golly who are we to doubt it? People doubled and tripled and quintupled down on this story to the extent of releasing even more private information that never should have seen the light of day and has not one thing to do with ethical whistleblowing. Turns out one of the teenagers treated at the clinic had joked about being a gay communist attack helicopter or something along those lines, and the whistleblower woman was scandalized that such an obviously unstable and confused child would be treated with medicine! People who have read this now know all kinds of personal details about this poor child! But the upshot is that the transphobic journalists involved have been shown up as the idiots they always were. The Justice in the universe apparently is that a kid making a wry joke in therapy has turned out to be the downfall of wretchedly bad journalists. But this is the level of nonsense we are dealing with now as normal.
People have been reading the crap stories peddled by these so-called journalists for years now, and sometimes citing them in the legislative battles that are attempting to harm transgender people. Because the editors and powers that be let this kind of shoddy work go on, we're in an even bigger mess now.
In the last day or two, three major examples of egregious failure on the part of media outlets to report sensibly and honestly on what is happening in Reality:
1. SVB bank. The very idea that headlines about the wokeness of the bank are being published and the idea is seriously entertained in articles is beyond... Beyond. SVB did not collapse because it was a woke bank you f****** morons. People saying this should be forced to rescind their investments until we figure out what's going on.
Likewise, DeSantis is not pushing back against Biden's ESG agenda because he doesn't have a f****** ESG agenda! There is no such thing, fools! Instead what we have is Biden doing the drill baby drill thing in Alaska, which is about the direct opposite of ESG. And if there were some hidden agenda to be Ethical, DeSantis isn't doing a damn thing about it, nor will he. All he wants is for dumbs in the media to report exactly this, as if this made up fantasy makes him look more sensible about money matters. All it proves is that he's a stupid and everybody who picks the story up is a stupid. Living amongst such stupidity is making me weary. We've all been doing it for years so you know what I'm talking about, but I swear it's getting worse and worse. Major bank collapse and the analysis of the situation is being given to us through the frame of wokeness?! And ESG investing is another possible cause? Good God. I don't think I would trust these people to be able to go to the store and buy milk properly. How do they function on the loose with a credit card? We hear so much about how the high schools need to teach financial literacy like balancing a checkbook... The problem seems to go way deeper.
The last example of this media insanity is the frenzy about the whistleblower at the transgender clinic in St Louis. A woman who worked there decided she had questions about what the qualified clinicians were deciding to do with patients. She's not an expert but okay, she has every right to become a whistleblower if she thinks that's important. There's a procedure for turning over information and requesting an investigation. Sounds like she didn't do any of this properly. Instead, her methods have resulted in the private and personal information of minor children being spread all over the internet, and the number of people seeking treatment in this one place over a short period of time is not large! Because we're in the center of some bizarre outburst of desire to regulate and eliminate transgender people, or at least for politicians to pretend that they've worked hard on this, reporters ate this up with a spoon. They credulously defended wacko claims, including that children who identified as attack helicopters were being immediately given hormones without proper procedure. Any sane person reads this and knows something else is going on here, so people pushed back on the story. The transphobic journalists were outraged: If this angelic whistleblower woman says that they were giving hormones out to the helicopter children, then by golly who are we to doubt it? People doubled and tripled and quintupled down on this story to the extent of releasing even more private information that never should have seen the light of day and has not one thing to do with ethical whistleblowing. Turns out one of the teenagers treated at the clinic had joked about being a gay communist attack helicopter or something along those lines, and the whistleblower woman was scandalized that such an obviously unstable and confused child would be treated with medicine! People who have read this now know all kinds of personal details about this poor child! But the upshot is that the transphobic journalists involved have been shown up as the idiots they always were. The Justice in the universe apparently is that a kid making a wry joke in therapy has turned out to be the downfall of wretchedly bad journalists. But this is the level of nonsense we are dealing with now as normal.
People have been reading the crap stories peddled by these so-called journalists for years now, and sometimes citing them in the legislative battles that are attempting to harm transgender people. Because the editors and powers that be let this kind of shoddy work go on, we're in an even bigger mess now.
Re: ESG
Nor did SVB bank fail because it was too generous in its pandemic remote-work policies. Seriously, the articles about this in mainstream media are something you'd forgive from a high school newspaper but they'd still need a talking to about how to reason and examine information. It amazes me. Guaranteed the people writing this nonsense make more money than I do. Show some responsibility maybe. It's a bank that failed because of what it was doing with its *money*. How is that difficult?
It boils down to "I don't understand this and the facts yielding understanding are boring, so we will sell more clicks by weaving in some BS about the pandemic or wokeness."
It boils down to "I don't understand this and the facts yielding understanding are boring, so we will sell more clicks by weaving in some BS about the pandemic or wokeness."
Re: ESG
The concern (for me) is that the funds are insured to 250K, but if account holders had 10M in them they are going to be bailed out.
Add to that Janet Yellen stating that we should not expect our local small banks to receive such treatment is quite maddening.
250K is the limit...unless you are "somebody"
...but, I could be wrong.
Add to that Janet Yellen stating that we should not expect our local small banks to receive such treatment is quite maddening.
250K is the limit...unless you are "somebody"
...but, I could be wrong.
"Yay! I'm for the other team."
Re: ESG
Totally agree with you about this. Inconsistency in the response is a problem. I don't know what they've actually agreed to do, and it's right to make depositors closer to whole before investors, but they have to be consistent when dealing with different institutions.