Anti-ESG – Bloomberg

… If you call your fund “ESG,” that will make some people more likely to buy it and other people less likely to buy it, and if you are a giant institutional investor like BlackRock Inc. you will do a lot of vague balancing to try to appeal to everyone.

But this is also a huge marketing opportunity for other, smaller investment managers to try to capture anti-ESG market share from BlackRock by leaning into being Not ESG. Like if you just run a regular mutual fund, the incentive six months ago was to rebrand it as an ESG fund and say “ooh, we think about climate change, whatever” to capture ESG dollars. Now, if you run a regular mutual fund, there is an incentive to rebrand it as an anti-ESG fund and say “we absolutely never think about climate change at all” to capture state pension money from Republican-controlled states. Or start a new fund company, why not….

Source: The Trump SPAC Needs More Time – Bloomberg