when Joe Biden landed back in the USA last night back from the climate summit in Glasgow, the situation for the US president had changed drastically. Eleven months after taking office, he has to reorient himself. On the one hand, the US Federal Reserve is initiating a turnaround in monetary policy – with the announcement at the end of November that it will curb bond purchases, especially of government bonds, in order to curb $ 15 billion a month. If it continued like this, open market policy would end in June 2022 – and interest rates could rise from zero for the first time in autumn.
The second turning point in 78-year-old Biden’s White House life concerns the shame of his Democrats in Virginia. There, his own husband Terry McAuliffe lost in the gubernatorial election against the Republican Glenn Youngkin. It is a clear wake-up call before the 2022 congress elections. Heinrich Heine is encouraging: “The stars of our happiness lie in ourselves.”
Yesterday in Glasgow: The heads of banks, asset managers and insurers came to the “Finance Day”. The parade of money was vaulted by the “Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero”: 450 of the world’s largest financial companies want to use 130 trillion dollars of their managed capital in an increasingly climate-neutral way. Sounds awesome. But what does that mean if it is not clearly defined what “sustainable” means?
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If the political standards and the uniform reporting system for ESG investments are missing, the debate darkens. The acronym ESG – environmental, social, governance – summarizes everything that stands for ecological, social and ethical corporate management. But the dispute over “greenwashing” at the Deutsche Bank fund subsidiary DWS has shown how fragile the structure of “green finance” is. Currently, the financial institution, which allegedly wants to get out of the coal economy by 2025, is apparently doing everything it can to help the Australian mine operator Whitehaven with the placement of bonds.
A comparison of numbers is also astonishing. In 2021, for example, major banks provided $ 459 billion in bonds and credit for the oil, gas, and coal sectors alone – and green bonds and credits made up little more by comparison, $ 463 billion to be precise.
Our title complex shows the many loopholes and loopholes in the ESG rules – but also how new products and services are created in “Green Finance”. Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank (ECB), even muses out loud about lax capital requirements for green credit exposures.
Conclusion: “Without money, honor is just a disease,” said the French writer Jean Baptiste Racine.
(Photo: Bernd Roselieb for Handelsblatt)
The financial sector and the green restructuring – what is really going on? The banks would have to do a lot more, explains Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz in the Handelsblatt dispute. The chief economist of the major Swiss bank UBS, Paul Donovan, holds against it.
- Stiglitz thinks that the banks are moving in the right direction: “It’s about where the capital flows.” But the speed is not enough: “We are running out of time.” stuck the coal industry.
- The risk is that projects are financed with a short half-life – up to “stranded assets”. It is not fitting that Europe wants to be climate neutral by 2050, but a half-built coal-fired power plant has a lifespan of 30 or 40 years. Stiglitz: “I really want to appeal to the financial sector to think much, much more long-term and not short-term business.” And he says that a central bank governor has “a mandate for risks and climate risks are part of that.”
- UBS economist Donovan, on the other hand, believes the banks are “really serious” about investments according to the ESG criteria. Customers, and above all the younger generation who take over large family fortunes, would demand that more and more – as well as their own employees.
- Donovan believes that it is not enough to stop giving money to companies that extract coal and oil. Then they would get funding from someone else. It just takes time for business models to be adapted. The real dilemma is that the industry urgently needs ESG regulation.
US economist Stiglitz also believes that Europe has an advantage when it comes to environmental protection: “In the US we have a big problem, and that is the Republican Party. There are simply too many people in their ranks who deny climate change to this day. “
The proof: you can even become president like this.
The conditions at Volkswagen are ideal for one of these sometimes thriller-like Netflix documentaries. Just wait a while, then the cleaver will swing, and then the next power struggle will come.
There are currently traces of blood again. Last Wednesday, the representatives of the employee side demanded the head of CEO Herbert Diess in the preliminary talk to the regular supervisory board meeting – and spoke to the manager, who wants to rebuild VW with reference to Tesla, the vote of no confidence. That is the sharpest blade, that’s how demissions usually begin in Wolfsburg.
In the meeting itself, Supervisory Board Stephan Weil (SPD), representative of the shareholder Lower Saxony, distanced himself angrily from the CEO. Is this still the right “change agent” in the car company? A mediation committee is now active, describe my colleagues – with the chairman of the supervisory board Hans Dieter Pötsch (representative of the Porsche / Piëch family), prime minister Weil, IG Metall boss Jörg Hofmann and works council chief Daniela Cavallo. While nothing is staying the same in the auto industry at the moment, Volkswagen is blocking itself.
The NSO Group from Israel has made it known worldwide with its military surveillance software “Pegasus”. Signs of usage can often be found on the smartphones of journalists and human rights activists. The US has now blacklisted the company, along with Candiru from Tel Aviv and two other companies.
This means that US companies are only allowed to supply these four incriminated with technology to a limited extent. Incidentally, Candiru has uncovered and used weaknesses in products from Google and Microsoft – which led to the accounts of more than 100 unpopular people being hacked around the world.
(Photo: imago images / Jörg Schüler)
And then there is the winemaker and restaurateur Fritz Keller, 64, with whom you could talk passionately about football in his Michelin restaurant in the Kaiserstuhl. Currently he is sprinkling the contents of all available barrels of salt into the wounds of the German Football Association (DFB), of which he was president for 598 days. Keller is particularly keen on co-interim president Rainer Koch. The Bavarian functionary is missing “any moral compass,” it says.
For years he has been forging intrigues and putting people with his clusters “under massive pressure”. Koch was responsible for “power games” and “dirty campaigns” against him and his predecessors, according to Keller in “Sport Bild”. They tried to “block any change, transparency and professionalization at the DFB”. The problem is people who see the association as a “self-service shop”. Six months after his resignation from the DFB, Keller cooks according to a very old recipe: Vengeance is a dish that is cooked hot and eaten cold.
I wish you an enjoyable day, perhaps with a glass of Baden wine.
I warmly greet you
you
Hans-Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor
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