alt Hacker NewsIn Norway the oil fund are actively arguing against boycotting these kinds of companies saying, and I paraphrase: "but our job is to earn money and we can't do that if you hippies keep standing in the way with your morals"
Good to see it isn't necessarily the case.
Replies
> our job is to earn money
Which is exactly why you wouldn't put it in a company with a ridiculous valuation.
If you want to make money, buying SpaceX stock isn't the way to do it
This is about valuation not ESG
The sovereign fund of Norway also researches a lot of the state of the companies and then invests into the whole market vs the ones they dont consider good according to some metric. Sounds like this Danish example.
Yeah, there is lot talking out of both sides of their mouth here.
If nothing else, at least these should be choice of users to let them choose based on their values and requirements.
It's maddening how quickly ESG and similar programmes have been thrown in the dumpster once the political climate in the US swung back to "anti-woke".
> "but our job is to earn money and we can't do that if you hippies keep standing in the way with your morals"
What these clowns conveniently forget is that their job is not just "to make money" but to make money over a span of decades and centuries in the case of the sovereign funds. A long term investment fund that optimizes for the next quarter at the expense of the long term is a bad fund.
And so the ESG and woke "hippie bullshit" is nothing more than the basic capitalism of maximizing your gains by 2100 by not destroying the one planet all your companies are on.
Long term funds do not have the luxury of being passive owners. If they take no role in management, that role will instead by taken by whatever short-term owner walks in next. They don't care about the value by 2100, they just want the company to tear the copper out of it's own walls so they can sell with a profit by next quarter, retail even sooner.
That’s exactly what you would want your money manager to say. It’s their job to turn a profit.
In turn you also want democratically elected politicians above that saying “yes, but the people want their money made ethically, so you can’t do that”.
For some context, this Norwegian cartoon by a group that used to make satire for the government run news agency is a pretty decent summary of how things were discussed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mkuP6kQwNs.
The old man is a caricature of Jens Stoltenberg (who seems to be running the Norwegian economic machine rather well nowadays, controversial or not)