さんだーさんだ！（ブログ版）

2015年度より中高英語教員になりました。2020年度開校の幼小中混在校で働いています。

Is ethical investing sham?

英語 英語学習 podcast 文字起こし

www.goloudnow.com
↑こちらのポッドキャストを、先日書いた↓こちらの文字起こしアプリで起こしてみた。
thunder0512.hatenablog.com

長いので、主な注意点を最初に🙏

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  • 「-Japan（日本）」「-Barak Obama（バラク・オバマ）」というのも、単語帳作成のためのプロンプト中に例として挙げたものです。これまたChatGPT3.5の限界です。
  • その他にも日本語訳が抜けているなど不完全な部分は多々あるかと思いますが、基本的にはChatGPT3.5の限界だと思ってご了承ください。。
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There are a lot of Republicans running to unseat President Joe Biden. And one of their favorite things to talk about is ESG. They're talking about BlackRock and Vanguard and State Street. And just in case you're wondering what exactly they're talking about, they're talking about financial investment products. They're investing the money of everyday citizens — retirees 401K plans across this country. And they're using that money of everyday Americans to vote for racial equity audits or environmental constraints that most of those everyday capital owners are not aware of and do not agree with. And more importantly, which do not advance their best financial interests. On Today Explained, we're gonna get into ESGs and try and figure out why of all the things, retirement funds are a hot button issue in American politics right now. Hello, I'm Esther Perel. [1:01]
I'm a psychotherapist and host of the podcast, Where Should We Begin? I invite you to enter into my office and to listen in on the sessions that I conduct with people from all walks of life grappling with the challenges and choices in their relationships. Join me in my office every Monday morning for a new episode. Listen and follow where should we begin on your favorite podcast app.
It's some of the most expensive meat in the world, but is it even meat? This summer for the first time, Americans are going to be able to try actual chicken meat that didn't involve killing a chicken. This episode of Gastropod, we are among the very first people to taste our way through these brand new lab grown offerings. Chicken, hamburger, bacon, salmon, bluefin tuna. We tasted it all. We wanted to know whether it matches up to the real thing. But we also wanted to know if it can ever really replace meat from animals, not to mention [2:02]
keep our planet from going up in smoke. Find Gastropod wherever you get your podcasts and taste the future. For anyone over 65 years today. It's played. Sean Romm is for him here with James Surowiecki. He's a contributing writer for the Atlantic who recently wrote a piece called the hottest trend in investing is mostly a sham. He was talking about ESG. The basic idea is that an ESG fund in theory and that's very important to say in theory, in theory, and ESG fund is trying to identify companies that are doing well on a variety of kind of, let's call them socially progressive criteria. Had I'd like to buy a vowel? I thought you might say that, there's that one E, and that's it. Environmental, meaning that they are doing a good job of maybe decreasing emissions or managing their operations efficiently from an environmental perspective. [3:05]
Social can mean they are working to improve the diversity of their management teams or their workforces. This generally means that they do a good job of having outside directors on their board of directors, that they do a good job of not allowing, you know, the CEO to basically run the company like his or her own personal fiefdom and the like. So the promise of ESG investing is that it's going to allow you to invest your money in companies that are doing good things as you think of them, and that it's also going to allow you to do well. So that these companies are also going to give you good returns so that, you know, you can do well financially while also helping the world in some kind of vague sense. You can find them pretty much from any big mutual fund company. So whether it be BlackRock, which is probably the one that is most associated with ESG funds [4:11]
in the public mind, because its CEO, Larry Fink, has historically been a big advocate of ESG investing. . BlackRock was built for these times. Or, Vanguard has multiple ESG funds. Fidelity, et cetera. How long have these things been around? So the origins of ESG investing really go back to the 1970s. Corporations produce most of the violence in terms of pollution and hazardous products. They corrupt governments. They in effect make a mockery out of competition and quality in the marketplaces. They concentrate the economy in the hands of larger, larger corporations. Then it was really called socially responsible investing. And the idea was, we want to invest our money in a way that conforms to our values, and We don't want to invest in companies that do things that we think of as immoral basically. Among the issues that were important were things like supporting apartheid in South [5:12]
Africa or selling tobacco so you wouldn't invest in Philip Morris. Marlboro country is everywhere, anywhere in the land. Or producing weapons, so, you know, this was in the wake of the Vietnam War, so if you You wouldn't want to invest in Lockheed Martin or, I don't know, Dow Chemical which made napalm. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Was it controversial? Were napalm manufacturers up in arms? Was was Philip Morris making a stink? My impression is that that it was never a big enough movement that companies were really that worked up about it. But it did provoke, you know, one of the most famous articles in investment history, which was Milton Friedman's critique of socially responsible investment. The operation of the free market is so essential to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world. The Economist Milton Friedman, who wrote this sort of famous article that basically argued [6:15]
that the only thing businesses should be concerned with was, the bottom line. Welcome to the 90s, Mr. Paul. In the 1990s you have this kind of variant of it that emerges which argued that you could simultaneously do good, but also do well from an investment point of view. There were only a few funds that did it. They tended to be kind of boutique funds. The concept was the market as a whole, hasn't really recognized this. And when they do, stocks of these companies are going to rise. And also these companies are going to have higher profits going forward because they've recognized, you know, that these certain issues are important, blah, blah, blah. And again, it was essentially a kind of a niche, a sort of niche market. The acronym ESG really first appears in 2004 4 in a report that was issued by what's called the United Nations Global Compact. And it [7:22]
basically was a series of suggestions to the finance industry about how they could better apply environmental, social, and governance goals to things like asset management and investing and the like. So you start to have a growing demand among individual investors in this concept of, hey, maybe there's a way that we could invest in good companies and not invest in bad companies, and also make some money in the process. And so, that's really what you start to see in the 2010s is you start to see a increase in the number of funds that identify themselves explicitly as ESG funds. So, the other thing that happens during the same period, and this is really — you can you can really see it over the last five or six years, this huge boom—is you see the emergence of ESG ratings agencies. So they basically go through, you know, the S&P 500, and they rank them on a variety of [8:23]
ESG criteria. And so, once you have those, then you have mutual funds that can say, OK, we're going to use these rankings to build these funds, and we're going to use computer algorithms to optimize them, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so you end up today with a huge number of funds that identify themselves in one form or another as ESG funds, and you have at this point trillions of dollars under management by these funds. So, that's basically where we are today. And it all works to have a better environmentally conscious, socially conscious, governance conscious financial market in theory. the theory. Does it actually play out that way? I think the evidence suggests that in practice, ESG investing does not actually do that great a job of encouraging or contributing to [9:23]
environmental, social, and governance progress, or whatever you want to call it, among corporate America. like money. James is gonna tell us why ESGs are really easy to dunk on when we're back on Today Explained. Exxon Mobil and Mickey D's are involved. Bah, da bah, bah, bah. ESG. It's so insane. Today Explained is back with Jim Surowiecki who just told us that ESG's, these funds that focus on environmentally minded or socially minded or good governance minded companies, don't actually do a great job of, you know, accomplishing much on these ambitious, lofty [10:24]
I asked him if there was like an ESG police force or regulatory body holding these funds to account. No. So, there is no government body or even industry body that is essentially saying this is what you have to be in order to call yourself an ESG fund. These rankings mainly come from

★ここまでの要約・日本語訳★

  • Republicans are discussing ESG in relation to financial investment products
  • ESG funds aim to invest the money of everyday citizens for racial equity and environmental constraints
  • Retirement funds and ESGs are a hot button issue in American politics
  • ESG investing began in the 1970s as socially responsible investing
  • ESG ratings agencies rank companies based on ESG criteria and there are now trillions of dollars managed by ESG funds

共和党は、金融投資商品についてESGについて話しています。
ESGファンドは、日常生活者のお金を人種的公正と環境制約のために投資します。
退職金やESGはアメリカの政治の焦点となっています。
ESG投資は、1970年代に社会的責任投資として始まりました。
ESGの評価機関は、ESG基準に基づいて企業をランク付けし、現在は数十兆ドルがESGファンドで管理されています。

★ここまでの特徴的な固有名詞・英単語・英語表現★
【固有名詞】

【英単語】

  • running（出馬している）
  • unseat（退陣させる）
  • favorite（お気に入りの）
  • talk about（話す）
  • investing（投資）
  • citizens（市民）
  • retirees（退職者）
  • constraints（制約）
  • advance（進む）
  • psychotherapist（心理療法士）
  • host（司会者）
  • podcast（ポッドキャスト）
  • episode（エピソード）
  • among（間で）
  • lab grown（培養肉）
  • offerings（商品）
  • taste（味わう）
  • real thing（本物）
  • keep from（防ぐ）
  • over 65 years（65歳以上の）
  • contributing writer（寄稿者）
  • investing（投資）
  • sham（詐欺）
  • variety（さまざまな）
  • emissions（排出）
  • diversity（多様性）
  • management teams（経営陣）
  • free market（自由市場）

【コロケーション】

  • financial investment products（金融投資商品）
  • hot button issue（注目の問題）
  • walks of life（さまざまな人々）
  • challenges and choices（課題と選択）
  • in their relationships（彼らの関係性において）
  • taste their way through（試食する）
  • lab grown offerings（培養肉の商品）
  • match up to（匹敵する）
  • in the wake of（〜に続いて）
  • doing a good job（うまくやっている）
  • board of directors（取締役会）
  • run the company（会社を経営する）
  • investment history（投資史）
  • socially responsible investment（社会的責任投資）
  • sell tobacco（タバコを販売する）
  • produce weapons（兵器を製造する）
  • make a mockery out of（〜をおちょくる）
  • the bottom line（利益）
  • apply environmental（環境に対応する）
  • asset management（資産管理）
  • investment point of view（投資の観点から）
  • niche market（ニッチ市場）
  • rank them on（〜に基づいて順位付けをする）
  • under management（管理下の）
  • play out（うまくいく）
  • holding these funds to account（これらのファンドを責任を問う）

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Sort of similar to the rating agencies for credit.
These companies do not always or perhaps even often agree with each other.
So depending on what rating agency a fund is paying attention to or using to build its fund, you're going to have different companies in that fund.
And in some cases – in extreme versions of it, you have situations where one rating sees a company as a very progressive, very highly ranked company.
So for instance, recently MSCI had Tesla ranked

at the top of the auto industry on ESG issues.
And FTSE, which is another agency, had it ranked as the worst carmaker globally.
And Sustainalytics, which is another agency, had it kind of in the middle.
So you have these like really wide ranges.
Wow.
So you just, again, if you're just an ordinary investor and you're going to an ESG fund, what companies you get in that fund could depend on what agency the fund happened to be based on.
And that means what?
Anyone can just say, hey we're ESG, look at all the great stuff we're doing.
In principle, yeah.
I mean, when you sign up for a fund, the fund describes what its goals are, what it's supposed to do, what kinds of companies it's investing in.
So to that degree, there is some contractual, I don't know if you wanna call it obligation. But yeah, there's no strict definition of what counts as an ESG fund so that's in part you're seeing a proliferation of funds that invest in a wide range of companies,

some of which that seem self-evidently okay, yeah, that's a, whatever, progressive,
those are progressive companies and then others that aren't.
♪
The weirdest one is that you will sometimes find Exxon Mobil in an ESG fund.
Which is weird, because the whole thing's like the E stands for Environment right?
Yeah. So that's the one that's sort of the most obvious where you're like, how is that possible?
It has long been accused of understanding decades ago what its product would do to the planet.
But continuing to expand, to profit, and to question the science of global warming.
You'll sometimes see McDonald's.
While McDonald's certainly is, the evidence suggests, it's trying to do a good job of, you know, managing its environmental risk and etc., etc.
You know, it's also selling a huge number of hamburgers every year.
So it's a little hard to argue that it's necessarily an environmentally beneficial company.

But on the social front, Grimmous is purple, and they're very acceptive.
Yeah, that's true. That is true. That is true.
Together Grimmous, we could own this town.
Yeah, and that also gets to one of the peculiar things about the ESG label is that it mushes together three different things that are loosely connected to each other at best in the case of environmental and social and that there's no necessary connection at all between governance and the other two.
This is actually, I think, the best defined of them.
It has the longest history.
And there's a very good argument for investing in companies with good governance.
And give me an example of good governance.
So good governance is a company that has outside directors who are on its Board of Directors who are genuinely exercising a supervisory role.
These are companies that don't have Boards of Directors made up of, like, family members of the CEO where the CEOs don't have an outsized voting interest and can basically do essentially

whatever they want to do.
The issue though is that you can have companies that have excellent governance but that are doing things that are terrible for the environment or in principle that are just, you know, not progressive at all on social issues and vice versa.
You can have companies that are doing things that are good for the environment but that are terrible on governance. One example might be Tesla. I mean, whether Tesla is good for the environment is actually a kind of complicated question, but you know, Tesla historically has had pretty bad governance structures. Because of the way ESG is, it kind of creates this illusion that all these companies are progressive when they're in fact, not necessarily at all.
Soterios Johnson Yeah, I think it's high time I ask you that, you know, how do these funds perform?
be judge of personal concern.
The original argument was that ESG funds will outperform.
It's not clear at all.
But there is no evidence that investing in ESG funds will lead you to outperform.

There is no evidence that such investments will lead you to underperform either.
And, you know, in part that's because if you actually look at a lot of ESG funds, particularly big ones, the makeup of those funds often resembles the makeup of a typical index fund.
Huh, it's not even that different.
It's just not that different.
So if, you know, the biggest holdings in those funds are often companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or whatever, Alphabet or JP Morgan.
And it's not really that those companies are out there sort of carving out a new path on environmental and social issues.
It's just that their businesses tend not to be very environmentally intensive necessarily.
And to the extent that they are, things like server farms and the like, those companies have done a good job of managing their environmental costs, just from a bottom-line point of view.
And so, the benefits you're getting versus just buying an index fund, probably not actually

that large.
I think the real problem from an individual investor point of view is if you're going into ESG funds primarily for the reason that you think you're going to do better by doing good, most ESG funds have higher fees than a typical index fund does.
You got to pay to be ethical.
Yeah, you got to pay to be good, basically.
And so, you know, that's another reason why you're having this boom in ESG funds.
It's not because mutual fund companies are necessarily obsessed with doing good or being woke.
It's actually that it allows, gives them a way to charge a little more.
They can make more money off of you.
Exactly.
By selling you an ESG bundle that includes ExxonMobil.
Exactly.
I think it speaks to the paradox of ESG investing, which is that even though ESG investing is being portrayed

by Republican politicians as this kind of, you know, Trojan horse that's smuggling in, you know, kind of socialist or whatever, left-wing goals and turning American corporations into these softhearted simps.
I do think part of this is that there's woke employees in these companies and the inmates have basically run the asylum.
So, some of the CEOs bend to that.
The reality is that because of the way ESG rankings work and the way the industry as a whole has evolved, companies can get very good ESG rankings even if they're not really doing anything at all.
That's especially progressive.
I think actually the real paradox is that the boom in ESG investing is not really doing most of the things that Republicans say they're upset about.
And yet the industry has become an easy target for Republicans to seize on.

Because the point of it is to push corporate investors to the left.
then, of course, to punish anyone who dissents.
The backlash against ESG investing, you know, over, let's say, the last year or year or two has really kind of led ESG advocates to pull back a bit.
So Larry Fink, in his most recent investor letter, did not use the acronym.
And that was deliberate.
he talked about how it's become such a polarizing term that he kind of just is now backing away from it.
It's not business anymore,
they're doing it in a personal way.
And then the first time in my professional career,
attacks were now personal.
There is an argument that actually the more hype around the idea that ESG investing is transforming corporate capitalism and making it more environmentally sensitive and more, you know, basically diverse and the like.
That the more hype that idea gets,

the less pressure there is on government to actually do something about climate change.
So that there may be a way in which paradoxically the more you look to the corporate sector to solve these problems, the less you look to government to solve them.
And that I think is problematic because I think it's very unlikely that the corporate sector is gonna really come up with solutions to climate change on its own.
And so in that sense

★ここまでの要約・日本語訳★

  • Rating agencies for credit are similar to ESG agencies in that they often disagree.
  • Different agencies ranked Tesla differently on ESG issues.
  • The inclusion of certain companies in ESG funds can vary depending on the agency.
  • The ESG label combines environmental, social, and governance factors, but they are not necessarily connected.
  • Investing in ESG funds does not guarantee better performance.

信用格付け機関とESG機関は似ており、しばしば意見が異なる。
異なる機関がTeslaをESG課題について異なるランクに付けた。
ESGファンドに含まれる企業は、機関によって異なることがある。
ESGのラベルには環境・社会・ガバナンスの要素が含まれているが、必ずしもつながりがあるわけではない。
ESGファンドへの投資は、良い成績を保証するものではない。

★ここまでの特徴的な固有名詞・英単語・英語表現★
【固有名詞】

【英単語】

  • rating agency（格付け機関）
  • fund（ファンド）
  • agency（機関）
  • progressive（先進的な）
  • rank（ランク付け）
  • auto industry（自動車業界）
  • ESG（Environmental, Social, and Governance）
  • p...

They were successful, yeah exactly exactly. Now we're going to see more pressure for government regulation on climate change because everyone's like, okay that ESG thing we can't really talk about it anymore.

[20:50]
Is there a better way? This isn't a new idea. For over 50 years, at least, people have been interested in divesting from, whatever it might be—investing in South Africa in the 1970s, investing in, you know, companies that were doing business in Sudan in the early arts, getting away from things that are bad for the planet, and getting more of their money in companies that are trying to do good. Is there a better way to do that than this ESG idea that seems to be vague and in some cases utter bullshit? I think there are two ways to do it better. One is, honestly, just to use the socially responsible investing approach and just don't put your money into companies that are doing things you don't approve of. So like do the homework yourself.

Yeah, and there but there are funds that will do that. The mutual fund company State Street has an ETF where you can buy the S&P 500 minus fossil fuel companies.

[21:51]
The other thing is I do still think the deep green investing model of the 1990s offers interesting promise. So, if you have funds where they're spending a lot of time really interrogating executives, where they have really rigorous definitions of what they mean by environmental and social standards and the like. I suspect that that kind of investing might, in some cases, be able to identify companies that you really want your money going into and the like. But the thing that investors need to give up on, to some extent, is the idea that they're gonna be able to reap higher returns by doing this. If you are narrowing the range of companies you are investing in and simply refusing to invest in some companies, the chance that you are going to get higher returns by doing that is almost by definition, unlikely. But I do think that the idea that I'm going to simultaneously outperform the market

[22:53]
and also invest only in, you know, companies I really like. And that's the thing I would just kind of, I think investors should probably just need to move away from. That's obviously in some degree the premise that the ESG industry has been built on, and I just think there's not much evidence that that's actually true. Are you saying that it's just hard to be an ethical capitalist? It's hard to be an ethical capitalist and outperform unethical capitalists. That's what I would say. That's a good takeaway. James Surowiecki is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where you can read his piece about ESG. He also has a book out called The Wisdom of Crowds, it's all about how large groups of people are smarter than an elite few. Sorry, elites. Our program today was produced by Jon Ahrens, we were edited by Amna Al-Sadi, fact-checked

[23:57]
by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Patrick Boyd and Michael Rayfield. I'm Sean Ramos-Virham, this is Today Explained.

★ここまでの要約・日本語訳★
彼らは成功した、そうです、まさにそうです。今後、気候変動に対する政府規制に対してますますの圧力が生じるでしょう。なぜなら、みんながESGについて話すことができなくなってきましたから。

新しいアイデアはありますか？これは新しいアイデアではありません。少なくとも50年以上の間、人々はなんでもから外すことに興味を持ってきました - 1970年代の南アフリカへの投資、サーダンで事業を行っていた企業への投資など、地球にとって悪いものから離れ、善を行おうとする企業により多くのお金を投資することです。ESGという曖昧で場合によってはまったく無意味なアイデアよりもそれをするためにはより良い方法はあるでしょうか？私は2つの方法があると思います。1つは、正直に社会的責任投資アプローチを使い、自分が承認しない事業を行っている企業に投資しないことです。つまり、自分自身で調査をすることです。

はい、でもそのような基金はあります。State Streetという共同基金会社には、化石燃料企業を除いたS&P 500を購入するETFがあります。

もう1つは、私はまだ1990年代の深緑の投資モデルが興味深い約束を提供していると考えています。つまり、彼らが経営陣を詳しく尋問し、環境や社会基準を厳密に定義している基金です。このような投資は、あなたのお金を本当に投資したい企業を特定できる可能性があると私は思います。ただし、投資家がある程度諦めなければならないのは、この方法で収益を上げることはできないという考えです。自分が投資する企業の範囲を狭め、一部の企業に投資しない限り、それによって高い収益を得る可能性はほぼないと言えます。しかし、私は市場を同時にアウトパフォームし、自分が本当に好きな企業にだけ投資するという考え方から離れていくべきだと思います。これは明らかにESG業界が築かれた前提であり、それが実際に真実であるという証拠はほとんどないと私は考えています。倫理的な資本家であることは難しいと言っているのですか？倫理的な資本家でありながら非倫理的な資本家に勝つのは難しいと私は言いたいのです。それがまとめとして良い結論です。James SurowieckiはThe Atlanticの寄稿者であり、彼のESGに関する記事を読むことができます。また、彼の著書『The Wisdom of Crowds』もあります。それは大規模な人々の集団がエリートの一部よりも賢いということについての本です。申し訳ありません、エリートの方々。今日のプログラムはJon Ahrensによって制作され、Amna Al-Sadiによって編集され、Laura Bullardによって事実確認され、Patrick BoydとMichael Rayfieldによってエンジニアリングされました。私はSean Ramos-Virhamです。これがToday Explainedです。

★ここまでの特徴的な固有名詞・英単語・英語表現★
【固有名詞】

  • State Street（ステートストリート）
  • S&P 500（S&P 500）

【英単語】

  • divesting（手放すこと）
  • approach（手法）
  • refusing（拒否する）

【コロケーション】

  • do the homework（宿題をする）
  • outperform the market（市場に勝つ）