Every morning, we run The Narrative Machine on the past 24 hours worth of financial media to find the most on-narrative (i.e. interconnected and central) stories in financial media. It’s not a list of best articles or articles we think are most interesting … often far from it. But for whatever reason these are articles that are representative of some chord that has been struck in Narrative-world. And whenever we think there’s a story behind the narrative connectivity of an article … we write about it. That’s The Zeitgeist. Our narrative analysis of the day’s financial media in bite-size form.
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We took the title of this Zeitgeist from a tagline we used to lead with on Epsilon Theory. And instead of giving you a single article today, we are going to include each of the top six without exception. I think you will quickly see why – on both counts.
Danish pensions to put $50 billion into green investments [Reuters]
Gender diversity pays off: A new Stanford study finds equitable hiring boosts companies’ stock prices [Business Insider]
Aluminium industry must commit to carbon reductions [Business Insider]
Daughter of Ebony founder resigns from spot on magazine’s board [Chicago Tribune]
At Amazon, workers push climate policy; Bezos sets net-zero carbon emission goals, but employees want more urgent action. [Vox]
General Motors Shares Extend Declines As Nationwide UAW Strike Hits Day Five [The Street]
Recall that the query we use for the daily Zeitgeist is constructed only from news that specifically refers to equity markets and stocks.
We have commented before that ESG specifically tends to follow the fortunes of the market. It usually becomes a cohesive, high attention narrative when times are good and investors feel confident. When markets decline and perceived risk rises, ESG issues tend to fade from investors’ attention. Independent of ESG investing as a topic in itself, however, the politics of climate, inequality and identity that we have shown to be dominant in electoral coverage are becoming similarly prominent in financial markets coverage.
As long-time readers will know, any time coverage of politics and markets intersect so plainly, we strongly recommend taking a step back to ask, “Why am I reading this now?”
ESG today = “Frontier” Markets of past tops/near tops. Love companies falling all over themselves in craven attempts to be labeled ESG for inclusion in such an index. If everything is ESG, nothing is ESG.
Would be an interesting analysis - what’s the fewest ESG funds or indices you’d have to select to end up owning every stock in the S&P 500 anyway?
There’s one headline that seems particularly ridiculous to me (although, gender diversity is fine and good). Oh gawd, am I really going to click on this headline… I click on the headline. I think, “In what kind of lab can you do experiments like that? Oh, the experiments are one dollar bets?”
really? really? one dollar bets like this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjkdynBFHuQ
Randolph!