The ESG Mirage

Sustainable investing is mostly about sustaining profits. MSCI, the largest ESG rating company, doesn’t even try to measure the impact of a corporation on the Earth and its people

- Cam Simpson, Akshat Rathi, and Saijel Kishan

For more than two decades, MSCI Inc. was a bland Wall Street company that made its money by arranging stocks into indexes for other companies that sell investments. Looking for ways into Asian tech? MSCI has indexes by country, sector, and market capitalization. Thinking about the implications of demographic shifts? Try the Ageing Society Opportunities Index. MSCI’s clients turn these indexes into portfolios or financial products for investors worldwide. BlackRock Inc., the world’s biggest asset manager, with $10 trillion under management, is MSCI’s biggest customer.

Sales have historically been good, but no one was ever going to include MSCI itself in an index of sexy stocks. Then Henry Fernandez, the only chairman and chief executive officer MSCI has ever had, saw it was time for a change. In a presentation in February 2019 for the analysts who rate MSCI’s stock, he said the company’s data products, the source of its profits, were just “a means to an end.” The actual mission of the company, he said, “is to help global investors build better portfolios for a better world.”

Fernandez was borrowing the language from an idealistic movement that originated with a couple of fringe money managers in the 1980s. Yesterday’s heterodoxy is today’s Wall Street sales cliché. Investment firms have been capturing trillions of dollars from retail investors, pension funds, and others with promises that the stocks and bonds of big companies can yield tidy returns while also helping to save the planet or make life better for its people. The sale of these investments is now the fastest-growing segment of the global financial-services industry, thanks to marketing built on dire warnings about the climate crisis, wide-scale social unrest, and the pandemic.