Tag: passive investment

(Updated) New Hong Kong Watch report finds that MSCI investors are at risk of passively funding crimes against humanity in Xinjiang

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.hongkongwatch.org/all-posts/2022/12/5/updated-new-hkw-report-finds-that-msci-investors-are-at-risk-of-passively-funding-crimes-against-humanity-in-xinjiang

Report PDF: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58ecfa82e3df284d3a13dd41/t/638e318e6697c029da8e5c38/1670263209080/EDITED+REPORT+5+DEC.pdf

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Excerpt:

A new report by Hong Kong Watch have found that a number of pension funds may be passively invested in at least 13 China based companies where there is credible evidence of involvement in Uyghur forced labour programs and construction of internment camps in Xinjiang.

 As part of the report, Hong Kong Watch found that major asset managers are exposed passively to these companies as a result of their inclusion on Morgan Stanley Capital International’s Emerging Markets Index, China Index and All World Index ex-USA.  

….

Commenting on the release of the report, Johnny Patterson, co-founder and a research fellow at Hong Kong Watch, said:

“13 companies on MSCI’s emerging markets index are either known to have directly used forced labour through China’s forcible transfer of Uyghurs, or been involved in the construction of camps. Given this Index is the most widely tracked Emerging Markets index in the world, it raises serious questions about how seriously international financial institutions take their international human rights obligations or the ‘S’ in ESG.

Our view is that firms known to use modern slavery or known to be complicit in crimes against humanity should be classed alongside tobacco as ‘sin stocks’, or stocks which investors do not touch. Governments have a duty to signal which firms are unacceptable, but international financial institutions must also be doing their full due diligence. It is unacceptable that enormous amounts of the money of ordinary pensioners and retail investors is being passively channelled into firms that are known to use forced labour.” 

Publication Date: 5 Dec 2022

Publication Site: Hong Kong Watch

I Finance The Current Thing

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://allenfarrington.medium.com/i-finance-the-current-thing-7ea204230315

Excerpt:

Passive investing is most often celebrated as a marvel of risk/reward packaging for the retail investor, who surely doesn’t have the time or energy to do the job of a professional capital allocator. It’s a fair assumption that they have their own job doing something productive in the real economy. Is this arrangement worth sacrificing? Would sacrificing it be ESG-friendly? Yes, absolutely it would, but we will return to this further down.

Passive investing relies on the notion of an index, or, a numerical weighting of every publicly listed company in a given geography, above a certain size, etc. which is determined by relative size and expressed as a percentage of the whole. If the value of all shares outstanding multiplied by their current market price (or, “market capitalization”) of Company A is 1% of the total of all the companies in an index, then it makes up 1% of that index, and its shares are 1% of those held by a passive investment instrument.

The existence of indices is the bane of the lived experience of investment professionals who take Schumpeter a little more seriously and do not allocate by algorithm but by analysis of business fundamentals. “Performance” is measured relative to an index, on the understandable but perverse realization that index investing, which relies only on an algorithm, is much cheaper for the client. If your non-passive (or “active”) manager returned you 50%, you might think that is fantastic, but if the index went up 60% then you paid for nothing. In fact, technically they underperformed by 10%. No performance fees — even on 50%! — and probably also fired.

….

When SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce voiced the lone dissent against the inclusion of “climate risks” in company prospectuses recently, her argument was basically my own above: these are risks. Although the concept is incredibly technically involved, real investors know how to deal with risks and do not need to be condescended to about which deserve their attention more than others. “We are not the securities and environment commission,” Peirce warned, adding, “at least not yet.” Quite right. I would hope not ever if the rule of law is to be taken seriously, and exactly this kind of regulatory capture via backdoor-compliance enforcement of virtue signaling is to stop.

But could we probe deeper still? ESG is an attack vector, but what is the attack surface? Without intending to be flippant, I think it is centralization. Capital markets are centralized institutions and they are being attacked. So far, so bleak. Can we do anything about it? And what was that Thiel talk actually about, again?

Author(s): Allen Farrington

Publication Date: 21 April 2022

Publication Site: Medium