The Difficult Truth about ESG Investing with Aswath Damodaran

This is spot on. Pretty much all the ESG funds are closing down

The ESG score itself is the primary risk

listening while cooking, haven't hear so much common sense minute by minute in a long time. Great talk Aswath, God bless you.

True, ESG is a gravy train mainly profited by consultants who charges companies millions.

Genuine assessment! It takes guts to spell out the hard truth 👏👏👏👏

Annhauser Busch, Target and Nike. Real proof of this analysis.

ESG will prove to have been a mistake for all but a privileged few. “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”

Aswanth is the GOAT

This is why I respect Aswath honesty

Doing research for my doctoral dissertation proposal -- this lecture is pure gold! Thank you.

This lecture is pure magic! I really love the arguments. I'm currently putting together my PhD proposal and this is helping me in a GREAT way 🎉

The world needs to see this lecture. This man is the canary in the coal mine. Ignore him at your peril. We must decouple the aggregation of ESG and focus on quantitative measures.

As someone who works an hourly position for an very ESG corporation and now being in my fifties i find it to be extremely dystopian. I withdrew from management because of the culture and what i see still disgusts me. Top down management by MBA'S and possible AI algorithms and hands on managers occupied by foolish exasperating things. I have to question the end goal, weather we should be drawing assumptions of its relationship to post nationalism and the WEF. I understand most of the investor class doesn't care but many of them have kids and or would choose to become a prepper or move to puerto rico or some such thing as a necessity. People can talk about supply chains as a topic of inconvenience but eventually hard descions will need to be made, like paying the true costs for avodaos as a bizarre anicdote but which is very relevant and i'm not refering to a carbon tax.

ESG has become just another universal metric that can and will be gamed, just like any other metric or regulation, with the attendant consulting business and a layer of bureaucracy.

Did anyone ever send him all the ESG scores for all companies not covered by sustainalytics?

Woah

There is a difference between ESG ratings and plain ESG. There are genuine usable environmental metrics, and they are further improving. Those are absolutely usable, just as people like I'm sure Mr. Damodaran uses any other data points. He is even talking about carbon footprints. He could be using carbon footprint as data points, and they are today even rather well covered. Using black box ESG ratings as something that impacts your investment decisions is stupid. Using things such as emissions data to calculate how much fossil fuel risk a company or a fund has? Absolutely usable, and something that people should (and some are) doing. But Mr. Damodaran is from the old world and is clearly not familiar with these metrics. He ought to educate himself on what is really out there. Start with EU's CSRD, ESRS, SFDR, the soon-to-be CSDDD... this alphabet soup is really not that complex once you take your time to read up on what is out there. These are not perfect, not by any means. But they are actual data points that you can use. McKinsey and other companies are at fault, but Mr. Damodaran is one of the guys (teachers) that should be telling about ACTUAL data points that you can use for your cash flow analysis etc.

It's regulatory capture at a global scale on steroids

From the sound of the girls voice 30 minutes in I knew she would be on some BS. Then she hits him with “Have you read them?” … “Doesn’t seem like you have.” Plain disrespect there. Not a good look for Baruch.

CSO = religious cleric