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ESG author and critic predicts “pushback against the pushback against ESG" (2023)
| Environmental, social, and corporate governance |
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Stephen Soukup, a market analyst, a critic of ESG, and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, has argued that 2023 will be the year that “The Empire Strikes Back,” meaning that it will be marked in part by the “pushback against the pushback against ESG.”
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The intellectual collapse of ESG, coupled with the market collapse – in which ESG funds trailed the broader markets badly this year – should, by all rights, mean that 2023 is the year that ESG dies and we are freed from its ideologically animated clutches. By our timeline, 2019 was the year that Big Business let the mask slip and showed its political face to the masses; 2020 was the year that the lonely fight against ESG and shareholder activism was joined by many longtime market observers (ourselves included); 2021 was the year that the details of the fight were brought to the masses by assorted observers (ourselves included); 2022 was the year that the widespread pushback began in earnest and ESG “fell to earth;” and 2023 should be the year it all ends. But it won’t be. As we begin the year and plot our forecasts for the next several months, we’ve concluded that 2023 will be the year of ESG institutionalization, that is to say that this is the year that institutions mostly external to the capital markets will keep the ESG dream/nightmare alive. The first and most obvious institutional culprit will, of course, be “government,” specifically the federal government….[T] the Labor Department recently released its final rule on what it calls removing “Barriers to Environmental, Social, Governance Factors in Plan Investments.” What this means is that ERISA plan fiduciaries can now consider ESG factors/investments in their management of retirement accounts. The final rule is, fortunately, considerably less radical than was the initial proposed rule – in that it dropped wording that made it appear that ESG consideration was, more or less, mandatory – but it will still likely be a boon to ESG providers…. [T]he world still awaits the Securities and Exchange Commission’s final rule on mandatory climate risk disclosures. Many analysts have assumed that the Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v EPA would dissuade the SEC from being too aggressive in its final rule, but we remain guarded. For one thing, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler wants desperately to be the next Treasury Secretary and may be tempted to do whatever it takes to burnish his liberal/environmental bona fides. And speaking of the Treasury Secretary, in addition to Gensler, a name that is frequently mentioned as wanting the position post-Yellen is that of Larry Fink, who, as you know, is the king of ESG. Additionally, the Federal Reserve poses risks to free markets with its own brand of ESG enforcement. Opponents of ESG scored a HUGE victory when they helped defeat the nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin to be Vice Chairman of Supervision, but that doesn’t mean that the environmental risks emanating from the Fed have been eliminated. Quite the opposite, in fact… A second source of institutional support for the otherwise obsolete ESG rubric will be the nation’s institutions of higher education and especially its business schools. This should come as a surprise to no one, of course, as higher education has long been the incubator of many of society’s pathogens. Even so, the fervor with which some of the best-known and most important business schools have committed themselves to perpetuating the failure of ESG is discomfiting. For example, over at RealClear Investigations today, Ben Weingarten has an excellent account of the ESG/woke-ification of the Wharton School and the impact it may have on business education broadly. Both Wharton’s denial of reality and Weingarten’s takedown of its plans and schemes are brutal.[1] |
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See also
- Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG)
- Economy and Society: Ballotpedia's ESG newsletter
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
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