The world’s second largest asset management firm, Vanguard, with $8 trillion AUM, has pulled out of the ESG madness.
This is massive.
I recently pondered the question, ‘Is it possible that we are winning?’ and hailed Novak Djokovic’s Australian Open win as an omen of a turning of the tide in the war against globalism and Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset.
But I also remarked on other more tangible signs of the faltering program of global homogenisation that would see national sovereignty surrendered to world government, and individual freedom sacrificed to the greater good of ‘climate justice’ and ‘DEI’ (diversity, equity, and inclusion) – signs such as Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover (ostensibly to restore free speech to the platform), the fall of Jacinda Ardern (significant, but not to be overstated), the rise of the Freedom Caucus in the US House of Representatives, and the rather lacklustre showing by global elites at this year’s annual World Economic Forum junket in Davos.
These signs and many more suggest that people are waking up to the social engineering, and they don’t like it.
Paul Joseph Watson this week discussed a recent UK poll that showed nearly half of the British public believe LGBTQ+ people and ethnic minorities are over-represented on television (which they are, both in the UK and throughout the West). What’s striking about this is that a previous poll showed British people believed 20 per cent of the UK population was black (it’s actually only 3 per cent) and that 30 per cent was LGBTQ+ (it’s only 3 per cent). This new YouGov poll suggests a recalibration in public perception has occurred.
It now seems people are catching on to the ESG scam too.
ESG (environment, social and corporate governance) is a credit score system for corporations dreamed up at the UN and WEF and enforced by the world’s asset management behemoths such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity, just to name the top three. The ESG matrix attempts, by withholding investment capital, to force companies into adopting ‘sustainable’ business practices which benefit not only shareholders, but ‘stakeholders’ also (for stakeholder read: any class of professional victim the establishment wishes to use as a political pawn). These ‘sustainable’ practices include things like carbon offsetting, hiring of ‘minorities’, and enforcing an equal gender split in senior management and on boards of directors.
This is all part of Klaus Schwab’s concept of ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’, which is really just communism rebranded and refitted to benefit those who are already super rich, and it has gained pre-eminence in the past decade. All those TV ads you see that bang-on about ‘sustainability’; those puff pieces in the corporate media about LGBTQ+ Pride; the weird focus on gender, race, and sexual identity in your workplace; the sudden politicisation of your favourite sport … it all comes from ESG.
ESG is what underpins the new religion of Wokeness – it is a centralised, top-down program designed to reorganise the global economy and permanently transform society. Even the credulous sceptics in the culture war, who laugh at me and the rest of the ‘tinfoil hat brigade’, ought to be wary of ESG and the impact it is having on their retirement funds.
ESG has completely dominated almost every aspect of our lives for at least five years. Most people have been largely unaware of its very existence, instead putting the recent tidal wave of identity politics and climate hysteria down to natural grassroots political upheaval; for more on this check out my article The Mistake Everyone Makes About Wokeness.
People are waking up though.
As Terrence Keeley recently reported in the Wall Street Journal, Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley ‘knows that Vanguard can’t promise to be a fiduciary to its clients while also committing to align its assets with the 2050 Net Zero target. Signatories to such initiatives effectively commit to reducing their volume of investments in companies not aligned to the Paris Agreement without ever knowing how much of the global economy will be compliant or investable’.
Finally, some common sense from the financial sector! Buckley’s withdrawal from the $59 trillion Net Zero Asset Managers initiative suggests he’s done with the ESG program as a whole and is an overdue breath of fresh air not only for regular working folk whose life savings and retirements are under threat from this absurd fusion of Marxism and capitalism, but for the world at large for, as noted above, ESG is in everything now.
Delightful though it is to witness the humiliation of the sanctimonious commissars of globalism, we can take small comfort from such news for, as Investment renegade Tom Luongo concedes, it represents nothing more than gang warfare of the most rarefied kind. But as he also points out, the lesser of two evils is always preferable, and I for one would be much more comfortable continuing to live under the yoke of the devil we know, than overhauling the entire system in the image of Klaus Schwab’s glorious Reset.
With Vanguard now joining this interesting alliance, the cracks in the edifice are really beginning to show. Like Jamie Dimon, we must not conflate Buckley’s reticence with some latent form of heroic populism or love for the little man. Vanguard is apparently jumping ship for selfish reasons, but I believe it is not without regard for popular sentiment.
Consider Buckley’s stated reasons for getting out of ESG: ‘Our research indicates that ESG investing does not have any advantage over broad-based investing.’ He’s saying that he can’t fulfil his fiduciary responsibilities within this framework. Well, Tim, that should have been perfectly obvious to you from the start.
When I first heard about ESG, I knew immediately that the ludicrous ideological tenets it espoused would have virtually zero correlation with profitability. If I, a lowly copywriter and aspiring novelist knew this, then surely the CEO of the world’s second largest asset manager knew it.
By all means, Tim Buckley is getting his company out of ESG for practical, fiduciary reasons – get Woke, go broke – but why has it taken this long? I suspect there’s another reason he’s pulling out. I suspect he’s seen the writing on the wall. I suspect that the rising tide of public consciousness around ESG and all its offshoots is making him nervous.
Much like we’re now seeing major institutions distance themselves from the lockdowns and the masks and the vaccine mandates as the truth begins to seep out, the big financial fish are starting to question the wisdom of going all in on this radical new agenda.
I suspect Tim Buckley wants to take a step back and see which way the wind blows for the next couple of years. Because the fact is, people are waking up. The word is out, thanks in no small part to people like US Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (he breaks the issue down succinctly in these two short clips from Timcast IRL: here and here) and, as always, the oddball Boomers who run the world have underestimated the power of the internet – it’s small wonder, most of them probably still think we get our news from CNBC like they do.
Just this last week I received my annual client satisfaction survey from my asset management company (the New Zealand government forces us to save for retirement but does not allow us to manage our own funds, as is possible here in Australia, so I still have a portion of my retirement savings under institutional management back home).
One of the questions was: ‘Did you know that we consider ESG when investing your money?’
I had been anticipating this question, as they asked it last year as well, only back then I was less impassioned about the whole thing and merely told them I thought ESG was corporate communism. This time I let them have it with both barrels.
‘You are mismanaging my money,’ I told them. ‘You are in dereliction of your fiduciary responsibility and when this whole sorry scam is finally exposed, you will be held accountable.’
I wonder, has Tim Buckley been receiving similar feedback from Vanguard’s customer satisfaction surveys?
Source – https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/get-woke-go-broke-vanguard-ditches-esg-investing/