Well, we think this is important. Not just as a card-carrying member of planet earth, but as an investor. The amount of contradictory “flow” in regard to ESG is breathtaking. We understand what clients are trying to achieve. We also understand the base instinct of Wall Street: sell product and transact. We would simply ask the investing world—“all of us”—to be somewhat cognizant of the messy state of the rest of the world and modify its instinct to code, collate and generalize. Our holiday card quote for 2021?
“It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”
-The late and great Amos Tversky.
Women’s Tennis Has Balls. Does Wall Street?
Cowardice and courage on the question of China.
Bari Weiss
China is ruled by an increasingly totalitarian regime that uses technology to spy on its citizens. It is, at this moment, carrying out a genocide against its Uyghur Muslim population. It regularly vanishes people who dare to dissent. And it wants to control the terms of debate, politics and business worldwide.
Having disappeared doctors and scientists who tried to blow the whistle on Covid-19, the Chinese Communist Party has now targeted Peng Shuai, a tennis star who accused a former top Chinese government official of sexual assault. “Even if it is like an egg hitting a rock, or if I am like a moth drawn to the flame, inviting self-destruction, I will tell the truth about you,” she wrote on the social media platform Weibo. Then her message disappeared. And so did she.
These are facts discoverable to any American with an internet connection, which the hedge fund investor Ray Dalio surely has in his Greenwich, Connecticut, mansion.
Smart guy, one imagines, to be trusted with managing $150 billion of other people’s money, as his company Bridgewater does. But when Dalio was asked yesterday on CNBC about China’s human rights record, and how he thinks about it with regard to his investments, he feigned ignorance.
“I can’t be an expert in those types of things,” he told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. “I really have no idea.” He went on to compare China’s government to that of a strict parent, and offered some mush of moral relativism about how the United States does bad things, too. This from a man who wrote a book called “Principles.”
Read the rest of the story at https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/womens-tennis-has-balls-does-wall?
