Oikocredit USA Profiles Trillium's Community Impact Investing Portfolio
Oikocredit USA, the United States arm of Oikocredit, a worldwide financial institution that promotes global justice by empowering disadvantaged people with credit, recently ran a profile of Trillium’s Community Impact Investing portfolio. “’All we’ve ever done is environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing,’ says Randy Rice of Trillium Asset Management. ‘In our community impact investing portfolio we are focused on helping our clients achieve a high social return combined with a modest financial return.’ To achieve that goal, he helps clients invest in domestic and international loan funds, and Oikocredit has been in the portfolio for a long time. In …
Keeping the SRI in ESG
Big changes are underway in the world of socially responsible investing (SRI). In just the past five or so years, mainstream Wall Street has reversed course from its longstanding claim that SRI can only hurt financial returns, to embrace the idea that environmental and social issues can have a direct impact on financial performance. The Wall Street shops are defining their approach as “sustainability” or “ESG” (environment, social and governance) investing. Goldman Sachs recently launched GS Sustain, as “a unique global equity strategy that brings together ESG criteria, broad industry analysis and return on capital to identify long-term investment opportunities.” Mercer, one of …
What Goes Up Doesn’t Always Go Up
The latest disaster in the financial markets has once again shown that some of the biggest risks investors face derive from the excesses of free markets themselves. This time it was unregulated lending, leverage and speculation. In 2000 it was over-optimistic and at times corrupt Wall Street analysts, gobbling up creative corporate accounting that massaged income statements to show profits where there were none. Some of the other systemic risks embedded in financial markets are barely on the radar screen of most investors. These range from unregulated pollution causing global warming, to the worrisome increase in nuclear proliferation during the …
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