The S&P/ASX Australian Index Series has played a significant role in characterizing the Australian equity market performance since its inception in April 2000. Since then, the S&P/ASX 200 has served as the foundation for benchmarks and index-based investing strategies from sectors to quality, value, and momentum factor approaches. Following the launch of the S&P 500® Read more […]
Economics used to be Political Economy. Today politics in encouraging economics to look at different ideas such as Modern Monetary Theory. MMT argues that a country which borrows in its own currency will never default: as long as the US sells bonds denominated in US dollars, it won’t matter how big the federal budget deficit Read more […]
One of the key objectives for the recently launched S&P/JPX Carbon Efficient Index is to motivate companies within the baseline index, TOPIX, to increase their level of environmental disclosure. By incorporating a mechanism to adjust constituent weights by their respective environmental data, the S&P/JPX Carbon Efficient Index has been designed to incentivize all companies, regardless Read more […]
It is now three years since the historic events at the UN Climate Conference in Paris in December 2015. At that event, with much relief and emotion, the countries of the world came together to agree that global emissions should be limited. We would collectively seek to contain the temperature rise to within 2 degrees Read more […]
One of the most salient themes in this year’s 29th Annual SRI Conference was intentionality. The topic of intentionality has jumped to prominence in ESG discussions—particularly in regard to ESG ratings for mutual funds—and understanding what it means is important for ESG market participants. In ESG terms, intentionality aims to evaluate whether a given fund Read more […]
This blog post was co-authored with Dr Richard Mattison, Chief Executive Officer, Trucost, part of S&P Global On Sept. 25, 2018, Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF)—the world’s largest pension fund—announced its selection of two new low-carbon indices, the S&P/JPX Carbon Efficient Index and the S&P Global Ex-Japan LargeMid Carbon Efficient Index, with an allocation Read more […]
For the first time, the main S&P DJI indices in Latin America have been analyzed by Trucost to reveal their exposure to a range of different carbon metrics that prudent investors may want to be aware of. A central element of the analysis is the estimated portion of earnings that could be lost if the Read more […]
The landmark Paris Agreement to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy marked a sea change in the global fight against climate change. A swelling tide of carbon-limiting regulations has since emerged, shifting the narrative from a largely ethical debate to a material set of risks and opportunities for the financial markets, today. As the Read more […]
In a previous blog, we highlighted that carbon-efficient firms tended to be high-quality companies. Moreover, integrated quality + carbon-efficiency hypothetical portfolios tended to have higher risk-adjusted returns and were more carbon efficient than the underlying benchmark. In this blog, we look into the risk and return characteristics of those hypothetical portfolios. This exercise helps us Read more […]
India regained its status as the world’s fastest-growing major economy at the end of 2017, posting a growth in GDP of 7.2%. Its population of 1.3 billion is also growing fast, as the country added 15 million people last year. Although welcome in their own right, these growth rates raise significant problems for the natural Read more […]
