While the state of Oklahoma kept BlackRock on its list of investment firms banned from handling state pensions and investments because of its ESG policies, things are quickly changing for the New York company.
BlackRock made Oklahoma’s first list of blackballed companies because it targeted the state’s oil and gas industry, and that wasn’t accepted by Oklahoma legislators. But other firms are on the same list.
Read what Fox Business analyst Charlie Gasparino wrote this week in the New York Post.
ESG is on its last legs.
How do I know this? Consider the actions of BlackRock, the big money manager and one of the initial and fiercest advocates of the Environmental, Social, and Governance investing technique. Last week, the firm, its founder and CEO Larry Fink announced something courageous in my view: The company stated emphatically that the ESG movement has gone too far, and BlackRock will be part of the solution to prevent its excesses from destroying the US economy.
As I first reported, BlackRock’s missive against ESG came via an announcement that it has scaled back on its support of environmental and social shareholder demands in the “proxy” process. It voted to approve just 7% of these proposals in the 2023 fiscal year, down from 22% in 2022 and 47% in 2021.
The reason: “So many shareholder proposals were overreaching, lacking economic merit, or simply redundant,” the firm said.
Bravo to common sense.
Click here to read New York Post column
