“Business leaders today face a choice: We can reform capitalism, or we can let capitalism be reformed for us, through political measures and the pressures of an angry public.”
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WHEB Commentary
Read commentary and opinion pieces on the environmental, social themes and wider issues relating to the topic of sustainability investing.
If you haven’t yet come across the comedian David Mitchell’s short ‘SoapBox’ on climate change then I recommend you take a look. But behind the humour lies some serious points. Much of the environmental challenges that we face “aren’t much fun”, as he puts it, and mean that we can’t enjoy “fossil fuel burning big fast metal things” as much as we might like. The other point that he makes is that policies addressing climate change are often championed by people who seem “at least a little bit pleased by it” as an opportunity to wag their fingers and say ‘I told you so’.
Traditionally Asset Allocation has meant choosing between a rigid set of definitions of different Asset Classes for investments: Equities, Bonds, Property, Cash, or geographic allocation between different currency blocks. The determinants of allocation between these categories often boil down to little more than interest rate expectations. At WHEB we believe there is likely to be so much change to the landscape for the economy and wider society over the coming decades, that there is a need for another dimension to the allocation decision – namely to understand which part of the economy an investment portfolio should be exposed to.
Book Review: “Slow Finance” by Gervais Williams (Bloomsbury 2011)