All Long Term Matters articles – Page 2
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Opinion PiecesLong-term matters: How capitalists can save the Amazon from capitalism
When foundations and wealthy individuals launched their Rapid Response-Able Fund (RRAF) in spring 2020, commentators sneered at the “save the world” motivation while others said it would distract attention from the political changes that were needed.
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Opinion PiecesGreenwish: wishful thinking in the ESG world
Every so often I come across a paper which I think is a ‘must read’ and Duncan Austin’s ‘Greenwish: the wishful thinking undermining the ambition of sustainable business’* is one.
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Opinion PiecesAnimal welfare: Probing the global meat complex
Everyone knows about ‘big oil’ and how much influence the global agribusiness sector has. But there is less awareness about the negative impacts of meat producers – the ‘global meat complex’.
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Opinion PiecesLong-term matters: Exxon’s AGM – can investors learn from the slave trade?
English evangelical protestants allied with the Quakers initiated the campaign to abolish the UK slave trade in the early nineteenth century. Two centuries later, the Vatican has said that climate change is a “moral and religious imperative for humanity”. Will the fate of fossil fuel companies be defined by public, sovereign and religious investors? And can other investors watch from the sidelines?
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Opinion PiecesDon’t panic (yet) about populism
When I called for investor engagement with Facebook and the social media giants, I did not expect to see a sovereign wealth fund leading such an initiative just three months later
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Opinion PiecesLong-term matters: Lessons for Climate Action 100+
Fund management is a pretty opaque profession, and no aspect more so than the way investors hold the management of investee companies accountable
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Opinion PiecesLong Term Matters: BlackRock – time to pull your finger out!
Donald Trump is not the only US leader to ignore the climate emergency. BlackRock’s 2019 letter to companies, timed to coincide with Davos, it was equally silent on the crisis
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Opinion PiecesLong Term Matters: What do Facebook’s investors care?
Mark Zuckerberg “is a bigger threat to American democracy than Donald Trump”, says David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University
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Opinion Pieces
Long Term Matters: What should investors do about authoritarian governments?
In October, I wrote that investors would soon have to choose between backing social justice or going along with authoritarian- ism. I was not expecting that the choice would come so quickly
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Opinion PiecesLong-Term Matters: Disruptive change is coming – which side will you choose?
Paying good pensions is a noble purpose but much less so if investors, inadvertently or otherwise, help create a world that is not worth living in
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Opinion Pieces
Long-Term Matters: What world are we creating by saving the world?
The focus of ESG investment has been moving towards the environmental over several years. Topics like green bonds, carbon indices, green ETFs, portfolio carbon footprinting and decarbonisation are making headway
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Opinion Pieces
Long-term Matters: An apocryphal tale for wannabe climate-aware investors
It is impossible to know how today’s CIOs will look back on their actions in the 2010s. But, we still have time to avert the worst of runaway climate change
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Opinion PiecesLong-term Matters: Who decides which engagement is fit for purpose?
Private responses to my recent article about investors who do ‘BS’ stewardship have raised two key questions
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Opinion PiecesLong Term Matters: Getting behind the stewardship bullshit on Carillion
Every so often things go so wrong that players are forced to come clean. Which is what has started to happen with Carillion. And it’s not a pretty sight
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Opinion Pieces
Long Term Matters: What my illness is teaching me about investment
When diagnosed with life-threatening conditions, we can be devastated, run from the diagnosis or embrace it and adapt. No prizes for guessing the smarter choice. The same goes for investment decision-makers today
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Opinion Pieces
Long Term Matters: Investment can be a true profession
Carillion, the UK construction company that collapsed recently, reminds us, once again, that investment is yet far from being a credible profession
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Opinion Pieces
Long Term Matters: Time to pay heed to political risk
Speaking plainly but respectfully gets results more often than our ‘inner fence-sitter’ likes to acknowledge
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Opinion Pieces
Climate risk: Action on demand
We are winning the war against tobacco, at least in the developed world. Yet, we are losing the war to keep global warming to less than 2°C
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Opinion Pieces
Long-Term Matters: Elephants in the sustainability room
Decent folk in the investment world are beginning to ask why our sector is so slow to change. Why can’t it function as a fit for purpose enabler of human prosperity?
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Opinion Pieces
Long Term Matters: An Achilles’ heel for buybacks?
Investors are salivating over possible US corporate tax cuts. But evidence suggests this excitement is misplaced, at least from the perspective of the end beneficiaries
