by Abbie Llewellyn-Waters, Fund Manager, Global Sustainable Equities, Jupiter Asset Management
Accountability will be a key theme in 2020. That means greater corporate accountability, with companies seeing more pressure to match their actions to their words, and market accountability, with ESG-related issues being reflected in asset prices.
This is because markets are at a major inflection point where the basic premise of fiduciary duty is being re-evaluated. This can already be seen through numerous supervisory channels; including regulations as well as the incoming mandatory Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) reporting.
But fiduciary duty is also being reinterpreted voluntarily by corporations. Of particular note were the events in August this year when the Business Roundtable, a powerful US pro-commerce lobby group founded in 1972, presented a new ‘Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation’ signed by 200 CEOs of the most successful companies in the market, including JP Morgan, General Motors, Apple, Amazon, and Johnson & Johnson. For the first time in US capital markets history, they declared that shareholder return should be put on an equal footing with the environment and society.
Read more here
Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay
Image courtesy of Jill Wellington from Pixabay
by Abbie Llewellyn-Waters, Fund Manager, Global Sustainable Equities, Jupiter Asset Management
Accountability will be a key theme in 2020. That means greater corporate accountability, with companies seeing more pressure to match their actions to their words, and market accountability, with ESG-related issues being reflected in asset prices.
This is because markets are at a major inflection point where the basic premise of fiduciary duty is being re-evaluated. This can already be seen through numerous supervisory channels; including regulations as well as the incoming mandatory Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) reporting.
But fiduciary duty is also being reinterpreted voluntarily by corporations. Of particular note were the events in August this year when the Business Roundtable, a powerful US pro-commerce lobby group founded in 1972, presented a new ‘Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation’ signed by 200 CEOs of the most successful companies in the market, including JP Morgan, General Motors, Apple, Amazon, and Johnson & Johnson. For the first time in US capital markets history, they declared that shareholder return should be put on an equal footing with the environment and society.
Read more here
Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay
Image courtesy of Jill Wellington from Pixabay
