[SRI-Extra in 60secs > Snow falls on LDN and attracts some sustainability media thinking. Sort of. FA launches FAGreen in the US. Davos is WEF annual skiing vacation for politicos and financiers. Davos had better snow, and more hot air, but some pointed comments by Tutu and Putin. SA's Maasdorp covered impacts on Africa. Investment News suggests ESG is fast gaining acceptance in the US. Xshares launches Airshares. IFC-funded Who Cares Wins project closed with a summary report from OnValues, which included four recommendations for EM. IFC funded the project, and is active in ESG in investment in EM. Credit Agricole and Societe Generale merged asset management divisions. Obama says bank bonuses at this time are "shameful". MIT posts links to sustainability on campus, and at the B-school, MIT Sloan. GS]
Snow in London
Snow is dusting London and Paris this morning. It is enough snow to look beautiful, the sugar coating offering postcard photographers a once in decades opportunity. Fun at last for all those with Land Rovers. In Pennsylvania it's groundhog day [39% historical accuracy, 2009 predicts six more weeks of winter]. Funnily enough, a CNBC reporter jumped to make a climate change connection, CNBC Africa feed from Germany this morning's Business AM connecting a report on Lufthansa [Deutsche Lufthansa AG (ADR) (Public, OTC:DLAKY)] to the importance of sustainability in investment. I know aviation is a critical component, but that seems a bit of a reporter stretch, no? Maybe she could have connected to the Japan Airlines non-food biofuel-powered flight, that would have helped the segue a little [Japan Airlines Corporation (Public, TYO:9205)]. Here's hoping we will have smarter sustainability coverage from business journalists going forward, including a new on-line publication from Financial Advisor magazine, FA Green, launched by online editor Dorothy Hinchcliff. FA Green is targeted mostly at investment advisors in the US [see article on AirShares EU Carbon Allowances Fund (ASO) by Xshares, which rang the opening bell on 28 January]. The white snow will at least give our mates in the bleak City of London financial district something to look forward to, like building snowmen or a decent Calvin and Hobbes-quality snowball fight!
Lost in Davos
The snowfall may even help the bankers feel like they were part of the Davos circle for a few hours. Davos is the name of the town of Davos-Klosters in Switzerland and the abbreviated title for the annual World Economic Forum [WEF] gathering of politics and business. In 2009 SA's Maria Ramos was co-chair. It is a fun ride if you like schmoozing and skiing, and attracts attention of discontents. Davos is organized by the World Economic Forum, a Geneva-based organization set up by a millionaire Swiss businessman in the 1970's, with a fantastic view of Lac Leman over the UN Palais across to the Jura mountains in France. Davos offers much content at low cost for the major media, especially business media, so it received much coverage. As was widely reported, the role of finance and investment was supplanted by politicians. It is something of a lost year. Obama had no economic heavyweights there. Archbishop Emeritus Tutu [photo above] offered an interesting session on dignity as only he could, BBC reported Tutu said:
"we worshipped in the temple of cutthroat competition, and so some cooked the books, because the treasure is so great"Bankers were no doubt an endangered species, with not a sorry in sight [see AP writer Brad Klapper report, note Forbes's comment and Schwarzman's pitch for less regulation]. The Bloomberg interview of Putin on 25 January by the female Bloomberg TV Moscow correspondent, Ellen Pinchuk, was gripping TV. Putin's slap down of Michael Dell was legendary. Bloomberg reported:
In the question-and-answer session after Putin’s speech, Dell Inc. Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell said he was surprised by the prime minister’s warning about excessive state interference and asked Putin how Dell could help Russia develop its information-technology industry. “You know, the trick is that we don’t need help,” Putin said. “We’re not handicapped. The people who really need help are the poor, the disabled, pensioners, developing countries.”The ruble dropped 3.5% after Prime Minister Putin's comments. Soon we will see the movie adaptation of the play Frost/Nixon, so maybe I am a little more attuned to the challenges of being the astute interviewer face-to-face with a powerful person in a powerful emerging market country. She did well to discover his favourite "guilty pleasure" is ice cream, ever since Prime Minister Putin was a kid. Lots of it, apparently, but no mention of Ben & Jerry's. So if I ever meet him in person, we have at least one thing in common! Of all the river of Davos reporting, I enjoyed the note in Business Times in South Africa by WEF Young Global Leader, Leslie Maasdorp, vice chair of Barclays Capital and ABSA Capital, who spoke on the impact of the global financial crisis on Africa. His comments on the importance of a multi-polar world was expected, and he makes the good point that no new architecture or scope has been sharply defined for a "new world order". January 2009 is the worst ever January on record for the Dow, and the "January barometer" [if January is down, the year is down] suggests this year will be pear-shaped. Financials are down 25% in the US for the year [that's just January, folks!]. While many may wish for a "fairer economy" just keeping economies going may overwhelm all other priorities. Questions about the limits of corporate governance still lurk, including this morning's FTfm. Investment News overstates the US paradigm, "Investing according to strict environmental, social and governance principles is fast gaining acceptance among U.S. investors" BUT the positive trend maps our experience and forecasts.
Who Cares Wins Signs Off
Most useful for sustainable finance was the 2008 report summarizing the work of "Who Cares Wins", which unfortunately we could not contribute to because of prior commitments. The series of WCW papers since 2004 funded by the IFC, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and hooked to the UN Global Compact, have been useful in raising the profile of sustainability. Some papers have been better than others but the wrapping of the WCW project with an explicit conclusion is excellent project management, and good governance in this sector. On the eve of Davos fellow ESG consulting shop OnValues, based in Zurich, published the report as "a significant component of the Initiative's sponsors' media strategy during and following the WEF Annual Meeting 2009 in Davos this week." See the IFC PR.
Though the current turbulence in financial markets may tempt investors and companies to think of ESG issues as ‘tomorrow’s problem’, we believe that urgent and wholehearted action is warranted not in spite of, but precisely because of the market dynamics observed in the past months. ESG integration is about investors and companies taking a longer-term view, acknowledging the full spectrum of future risks and opportunities, and allocating capital as if they themselves were the beneficial owner.The concluding paper offered some useful thinking for work in Africa and other emerging markets regions. The authors posit that in order to improve ESG integration in emerging markets investment, which was a special focus area of the WCW Initiative based on the direction of the IFC which has an EM ESG team [see IFC EM ESG projects] in Washington DC, four recommendations are important:
- Include ESG issues in regular company meetings and engagement activities
- Perform a systematic review of the ESG exposure of investments in emerging markets
- Consider collaborating with other investors in requiring minimum ESG disclosure standards from local legislators and exchanges
- Consider the potential for small allocations to frontier markets not only to deliver attractive returns but also to establish basic investability conditions (such as custody, efficient settlement services, etc.) and management awareness of material ESG issues.
In discussions through February I hope for some reaction from colleagues in EM in the sustainability + investment space to the request for better information. There is much to reflect upon. Moving changes in institutional investment are reflected by Société Générale and Crédit Agricole merging their asset management businesses to form Europe’s fourth largest operator with EUR638bn [USD837bn] under management. CA Cheuvreux had some solid ESG research [see 22/12/2008 The Green Road Out of Red], as did SocGen. One hopes their research capabilities are strengthened, not seen as overhead to cut. The consortium of funders behind WCW reflects the costs involved in some of these initiatives, especially where they are global. WCW was more useful because it tapped into thinking on emerging markets [EM] although mainly from the perspective of investors into EM from Zurich, London or Paris than actual investors in EM. A good exception was having Investec's Hendrik du Toit covering frontier markets at the July 2007 event in Geneva at the Credit Suisse private bank, Rue de Lausanne 17. All these projects must be funded, in cash or in-kind. One often forgets that the multitude of organizations and initiatives around the world are competing for influence, for money to support their efforts, and private and public sector institutions to collaborate with them. It is competitive. But it is also much harder to figure out on a consistent basis which organizations are achieving what. There is no "marketplace" or "stock exchange" valuing the work of international organizations and NGOs.
Pay for Performance
Scoreboards may be tough to read. Scores change in seconds, like market prices. We struggled to watch from 1am central African time [CAT] this morning the biggest one day sports event in the world, the NFL Superbowl in the US. A great game, but none of the famous Superbowl TV adverts. Wrong zone. Markets are like sports fans in that they like clarity, like knowing which is the champion. The increase in fantasy leagues, the recruiting of traders using poker games, and HSBC sponsoring the Lions rugby tour to South Africa in 2009, are just some of the examples of the metaphor and parallels. Boston-based online paper CSMonitor had a good item connecting pay-for-performance of businessmen and the NFL athletes, many of whom are superbly overpaid. All market players are not rational however: all the money in the world could not buy superstar Brazilian footballer Kaka from Intern Milan to Manchester City [GBP107m, USD147m - yes, million!]. The efficient market hypothesisticans must have been spinning...
Pay guidelines are a key request of pitches to the Obama administration as they reconfigure the rules of the financial game for Wall St. Apparently President Obama was pretty pissed about the bonuses, calling them "shameful" on this Huffington Post video. I wonder what President Obama may achieve if he were to invite to a frank airing of views behind closed [oak] doors a bunch of bankers pulling bonuses while firing employees.
In closing, an anecdote from another fine dinner in CPT on Friday. An architect was speaking about how climate impact is 70% caused by the built environment, and that developers will only look at economic cost/benefit-positive sustainability items. Apparently developers do not even care about longer term trade-offs, just the math until the sale to the property owner/manager. More reality from the frontlines on the challenges of getting longer term thinking into investment decisions. Seems like the Green Building Council has many yards to go in the industry. The conversation had me reflecting on my last lecture at MIT Sloan, their business school, back in December 2008 as well as meeting with a cross-disciplinary team at MIT focused on making sustainability happen on campus in Cambridge MA. Even when the thinking is advanced, and smart people are moving, putting basics together across different silos is a change management challenge of note. But MIT is making some good progress. See multimedia links were made available this week including Sustainability: Greening MIT's Campus and Beyond and the Professor heading up the B-school's efforts, Prof Sarah Slaughter, who has an engineering background, here speaking on sustainability. MIT Sloan are moving forward with some case studies for teaching sustainability + investment with Sinclair & Company in 2009. The title of Prof Sterman's lecture on the Sloan Review is about right: A Sober Optimist's Guide to Sustainability.
SRIX.GS
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Who Cares Wins [WCW] events and milestones include reports for download at http://www.ifc.org/ifcext/enviro.nsf/Content/Publications_SustFinance:
- 2004 Annual Event; 'Who Cares Wins: Connecting Financial Markets to a Changing World'
- 2005 Annual Event; 'Investing for Long-Term Value'
- 2006 Annual Event; 'Communicating ESG Value Drivers at the Company-Investor Interface'
- 2007 Annual Event; 'New Frontiers in Emerging Markets Investment'
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