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What The Retirement Crisis And Climate Change Have In Common, According To A BlackRock Money Manager

TedTed
edited July 2019 in Fund Discussions
FYI: To still believe in active management is quite something, especially when you work at BlackRock (ticker: BLK), the world’s largest asset manager and a giant in the world of index investing. Yet Mark Wiseman, 49, believes it’s a critical component in long-term investing that will provide the returns that people need for retirement.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.barrons.com/articles/blackrock-talks-solutions-to-short-termism-and-the-retirement-crisis-51562370565?mod=past_editions

Comments

  • Every time I see one of these Wall Street guys bemoan "climate change" -- which itself is a marketing "rebranding" of "global warming", I am going to make a point :

    The Wall Street types, the 1%-ers, and the Western MNCs have relentlessly offshored production from the North America and Europe, usually to lands across vast oceans. They did this to greedily confiscate profit margins from their local workforce.

    Now these same cosmopolitan elites are pushing "climate change". And yet the export/import model which they created bears an enormous and wasteful carbon footprint: Each day, thousands of cargo containers filled to the brim depart East Asia for ports in the developed world. In doing so, the maritime vessels consume enormous sums of petroleum product releasing carbon into the atmosphere. The containers arrive at the periphery (i.e. harbors) of these vast develop markets, and thus enormous additional carbon will be unleashed to rail the containers across entire continents.

    But then, the empty containers will again be loaded onto the maritime vessels and hauled across the oceans, AGAIN releasing more carbon -- in order to deliver air (and the containers which surround them) back to Asia.

    And as so much of this production in East Asia is done with little/no enforceable pollution controls, the environmental devastation for producing in Asia for American/European consumption.

    The refusal of Blackrock and other climate-change virtue-signaling investment firms to address the inherent contradictions/hypocrisy of refusing to highlight the climate costs of the export/import model and the offshoring of production, all the while speaking platitudes about "sustainability", unmasks them as nothing less than opportunistic liars.
  • edited July 2019
    @Edmond What I find ridiculous about arguments like the one you're making--basically that the elites are hypocrites about climate change--is that the earth's rapidly changing climate doesn't care one way or the other whether you're a liberal or conservative. So even if they're hypocrites, that still can mean it behooves everyone to try to reduce carbon emissions as best they can. Al Gore may fly around in a private jet and China may cheat on emission standards, and the climate still doesn't care one way or the other. It is an amoral force of nature that is getting worse for most life forms because of human behavior. Let's say someone told you cyanide was bad and then proceeded to take cyanide themselves. Somehow I don't think you would take the cyanide just because the person sounding the warning is a hypocrite. And the truth is everyone is a hypocrite to a certain degree. There's an old saying: Though my guru stumbles out of the tavern, still I will wash his feet. I assume many Catholics still believe abortion is wrong even though it was recently revealed priests were sexually abusing, impregnating and getting abortions for nuns:
    https://nytimes.com/2019/02/05/world/europe/pope-nuns-sexual-abuse.html
    Hypocrisy is everywhere in human endeavor. But science--the forces of nature--don't care. And what I find so hyprocritical or just plain lousy about the rightwing argument against reducing carbon emissions to reduce climate change is that they used to argue against the science itself. Almost no one who isn't a paid petrol industry shill does that anymore because the science is known to be rock solid and has existed in some fashion now for over a hundred years. Now that conservatives lost that battle against scientific facts, there is an attempt to behave like a child in the school yard saying "Well he started it or he does it too." Meanwhile coastal Florida will almost certainly disappear in our lifetime. Say goodbye to the Keys.
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