Podcast: Ben Yeoh, CFA Institute on ESG, investing, future of capitalism.
Matt Orsagh talks with me. We discuss ESG integration, ESG education, demographics, Economist Thomas Malthus, and the future of capitalism:ESG regulation, and art.
Matt Orsagh talks with me. We discuss ESG integration, ESG education, demographics, Economist Thomas Malthus, and the future of capitalism. We also talk about current and impending regulation and policy around ESG disclosure as well as the intersection of art and ESG. Lightly edited Transcript available on my site here.
One section:
You are someone in 1650, do you think we would ever not have slaves? I'm guessing 99% of people would say, "You'd be crazy. We've had slaves for 4,000 years. Our whole economy would disappear. Why would that be possible?" Yet it was. So fast forward to the 1950s. You had a lot of movements, from faith based and other investors thinking about a kind of ethical or value based judgment about how they would want to invest. They just wanted their investments to reflect their mission and values.
Then you fast forward kind of into the 1980s, 1990s where you had thinkers like Milton Friedman come along thinking about markets and capitalism in that respect. And then 1990s, you started thinking about triple bottom line, a lot of talk about people, planet, profits; all three going together. Then you had the birth of what we're calling environment social governance; ESG. So that kind of takes us to where I started where actually ESG wasn't yet a term in terms of where we started. But we started thinking about how these extra financial matters could affect long term value. I guess this is where you had the initial bifurcation between what we might call value and values. So you had a lot of people who were still thinking about it from an ethical lens, but you started to think about a lot of people who thought, "Well, actually there might be a lot of circumstances where if you do good by your customers, if you do good by your employers or employees, if you don't have environmental spillages, if you had good relationships for your regulators you would create long term value."
So a lot of people today can talk about stakeholder capitalism or enlighten shareholder value. You don't even have to produce the ESG terms. You just go, "Well, I'm looking about where long term value is." By serving my customers and by not having a good relationship with regulators you're going to get a lot of value. So a lot of the debate today now is around that. What is material to long term value creation? What might be value and what might be values? I think there's a lot of debate around that. I think I did want to pick up on two or three other things which have changed and this is in the nature of fund management itself. So again, if you go back 50 years ago, you did not have what we would call passive index funds, or rules based tilted funds, or quantitative funds. So that has changed the nature of stewardship voting and what we would call active ownership; so how to use your vote. But this idea of stewardship or active ownership actually goes back hundreds of years.