29. marts 2024
* BANK OF AMERICA CORPORATION (XNYS:BAC) *

When more than 600 institutional investors gathered for a Bank of America conference in December to talk about environmental, social and governance (ESG) themes, one topic rarely discussed among Wall Street elites was very much part of the conversation: divestment.

Seen historically as a pressure tactic reserved for students and religious investors, divestment has become an issue that the world’s biggest asset managers can no longer ignore.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, announced a year ago that it would eliminate from its active investment portfolios any companies that generate a quarter of their revenues from thermal coal production. At about the same time, BNP Paribas asset management said it would exclude companies that derive 10 per cent of their revenues from coal production. The company said it would also exclude high-carbon-emitting power companies.

But divestment comes at a cost. Investors might lose out on juicy returns in legal and profitable — albeit controversial — companies. They also lose their voice as partial owners of a company when they sell their stakes.

Whether investors should divest or engage — or execute a combined strategy — was a key question for the Bank of America gathering and has rippled throughout the financial industry.

“We expect this will be a hotly debated issue in 2021,” says State Street Global Advisers, which has $3.2tn of assets under management, in an ESG outlook report for the new year.

As far back as the late 1970s, investors have been using divestment as a way to achieve social goals. Opponents of apartheid in South Africa used stock holdings to pressure companies to reduce or eliminate their business operations there. Students urged trustees of university endowments to sell stakes in reluctant companies.

But a different strategy has gained traction as investors have started to worry about global warming. In 2014, Norway’s $1tn Government Pension Fund Global studied divestment as a way to combat climate change, and decided against automatically exiting coal and oil companies. Climate change risk, it concluded, was best managed by active engagement with these businesses. Similarly, Japan’s $1.36tn Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), the world’s largest pension programme, has called on its managers to engage with companies on climate change rather than divest.

But pension funds have taken a range of approaches, including a mix of divestment and engagement. In 2016, Waltham Forest, a London borough, became the first local government in the UK to announce that it would jettison all fossil fuel investments in its pension scheme. In the US, New York state’s pension fund said in December that it would sell energy companies that do not have a plan to cut emissions and transition away from fossil fuels.

Read more www.ft.com

About Post Editor