We have arrived at a watershed moment in US history, when the principles and practices of sustainable, responsible, and impact investing are finally becoming mainstream. The biennial report on U.S. Sustainable, Responsible, and Impact Investing Trends 2018 (the Trends Report), published by US SIF Foundation, reveals a 38% increase over two years in the assets under professional management that integrate environmental and social corporate governance (ESG) criteria. This means that currently, one in every four dollars under professional management in this country, or $12 trillion, is invested using ethical or socially responsible criteria.
Twenty years ago, SRI assets tallied just over $600 billion. The new data shows that assets have increased 18-fold since 1995—an astounding annual growth rate of nearly 14%.
One year ago, in January 2018, three citizens locked themselves to the front entrance of a downtown Wells Fargo bank branch in the city where I live and work, Duluth, MN. The protesters prevented business from being conducted at the branch for three hours. The reason for their actions were simple and well-articulated: they were protesting Wells Fargo Bank’s financing of Enbridge Corporation Line 3, an oil pipeline that runs 1,097 miles from the tar sands of Edmonton, Alberta, to the Enbridge oil storage facility that sits about a mile from the south shore of Lake Superior, just a few miles away from the site of the protest. Environmentalists have deep concerns about the climate impacts of the tar sands, as well as the threat the pipeline poses to local waterways and Indigenous land rights. The police eventually came to the branch to remove the locks and arrested the protesters. All three were charged with misdemeanor trespass, disorderly conduct, and obstruction of justice.
On Christmas, I opened a beautiful makeup gift set from an upscale department store, and my heart sank after reading the ingredients. I wouldn’t be able to use it. For years I had struggled with eczema; however, it wasn’t until reading an article about a form of eczema as a delayed allergic reaction to chemicals in the environment that I was able to get it under control. The real kicker was learning that when my dermatologists recommended moisturizing daily to manage my skin disorder, regular lotions (even hypoallergenic ones) actually perpetuated my symptoms instead of alleviating them. Once I switched everything, from my laundry detergent to my lipstick, to more natural options, the itchy rashes I suffered for seven years virtually disappeared.
Many Americans assume the U.S. has stringent product-safety regulations in place to protect them from potential injury.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP): who isn’t used to hearing about the ups and downs of this metric, commonly understood as the most important indicator of economic health? This statistic—the monetary value of finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders over a specific period—and the pursuit of its growth is embedded at the center of mainstream economic theory. But the question of whether GDP is still a meaningful metric in a world of persistent income inequality, intractable environmental challenges, and human exploitation is at the heart of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Despite the title, this book offers a thoughtful, practical advice that any concerned citizen can use.
Excerpted and adapted from The Resilient Investor.
In Local Dollars, Local Sense, a thorough survey of the local investment movement, Michael Shuman makes a compelling case that small businesses comprise about half the GDP of the United States, but most investors are completely missing out. Overinvesting in Wall Street and under investing in Main Street (and other Close to Home Strategies) is a diversification problem that this book, and especially this Strategy, intends to help you overcome. As we mentioned earlier, while this type of financial investment has been difficult at best for most of us, there are encouraging developments underway.
While everyone is involved with at least some, and usually many, “close to home” activities, there are two groups for whom this has become the main focus of their resilient investing practice.
The final quarter of 2018 hit with a dramatic downturn for the stock market, while bond investments generally performed well. Large U.S. company stocks were down 13.5% over the quarter and down 4.4% for 2018. Small company stocks were down 20.2% this quarter and 11% on the year. Bonds were 1.6% higher for the quarter, though they were flat for the year.
The fourth quarter setback for stocks was abrupt and vexing. Large company stocks had recently risen 10.5% by the end of the third quarter. But by the year’s end, they were down 4.4% in a sharp reversal. Analysts have been reminding investors for years that a notable sell-off could arrive unexpectedly as the rising market endured longer and longer.
I have learned firsthand from my participation in social justice movements that privileged people in isolation cannot end wealth inequality or the close the racial wealth divide. As a wealthy white person in this country, however, that wasn’t what I was taught. When I was a student at Princeton University, I was told that poverty and climate change were problems that we, as intelligent individuals, could solve with technical innovation and social entrepreneurship. What I learned outside the classroom is that poor people are the experts on poverty; black activists are the experts on anti-black racism; and any attempt to solve a social problem must be shaped and guided by those who are most impacted.
When I first met Tiffany Brown in 2013, she was working with Resource Generation, an organization that organizes wealthy young people to become leaders in the movement for a more equitable distribution of wealth, land, and power.
Few stories dominated headlines this summer like the unfolding of the family separation debacle happening at the U.S.-Mexico border. As civil and political unrest worsened in some Latin American countries, the border saw a dramatic increase of families seeking asylum. Over the spring and early summer, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forcibly separated more than 3,000 children from their parents, per the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration, and imprisoned them in detention centers across the country; in combination with the surge in unaccompanied children crossing the border, the number of children in U.S. detention centers has now ballooned to more than 13,000.
News reports revealed images of solitary children, huddled under thin aluminum blankets and wailing in the cages of detention centers run by two private companies: GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (referred to as “CoreCivic”); both manage private prisons as well as ICE detention centers. Immigrant children held in facilities run by these two companies have complained about
Stock markets were generally higher over the waning months of summer, with stocks of large US companies for the quarter up by 7.7%, small U.S. companies up 3.6%, and foreign stocks up 1.4%. Bonds, broadly measured, were flat for the quarter, though down 1.6% so far this year.
Trade tensions have remained front and center in economic news as the administration has continued to press for additional tariffs, as announced during the quarter. However, vigorous growth of the U.S. economy,
