Global ETF News Older than One Year
Supply Chains Decarbonization Offers Game-Changing Opportunity for Companies to Fight Climate Change
January 21, 2021--Decarbonizing supply chains is an opportunity for corporate climate action-emissions created along the supply chains of most consumer-facing industries can far outweigh emissions created in their own operations
Eight supply chains account for more than 50% of global emissions and fully decarbonizing these would add just 1%-4% to end-consumer costs for many everyday items.
It is possible to reduce a large proportion of supply chain emissions with technologies that are readily available and can be deployed at low costs
There are nine major actions that every CEO can take to engage suppliers and decarbonize their end-to-end supply chain-many leading companies are already taking these steps
The commitment to tackling climate change is accelerating in all sectors of society, with net-zero pledges from companies, cities, states, and regions doubling in the past year. Decarbonizing supply chains is a major opportunity for companies to put these commitments into practice.
New research published today by the World Economic Forum and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) shows how tackling supply chain emissions can be a game changer in the global fight against climate change. Net-Zero Challenge: The Supply Chain Opportunity analyzes the top eight global supply chains that account for more than 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions and finds that end-to-end decarbonization of these supply chains would add as little as 1% to 4% to end-consumer costs in the medium term.
view the report Net-Zero Challenge: The Supply Chain Opportunity
Source: World Economic Forum
Majority of EM bonds remain off limits to passive investors
January 19, 2020--Only 13% of emerging market bonds are included in flagship indices tracked by ETFs
Source: FT.com
These are the top risks for business in the post-COVID world
January 19, 2021--The business landscape will face greater uncertainty in the post-COVID period.
Businesses need to watch three drivers of risk: political, technological and societal.
The pandemic has shown the importance of public-private collaboration.
Over the past year, the business landscape has become much more precarious due to protracted uncertainty and confusion in pandemic response approaches, the challenges of vaccine rollouts and emerging virus variants- and spillover effects into other risks.
Businesses have had to manage dual economic and health crises, which have driven new employee and customer engagement protocols, remote working on an unprecedented scale, the re-engineering of supply chains, and numerous bankruptcies, consolidations and creative partnerships.
Source: World Economic Forum
Sustainable ETF assets jump but most funds fall short on UN goals
January 18, 2021--New tool developed with Unctad aims to counter practice of 'green washing'
Assets in exchange traded funds that claim to invest according to environmental, social and governance principles recorded exponential growth in 2020, but only a fraction of those ETFs were aligned with sustainable development goals developed by the UN, research shows.
Assets under management in ESG ETFs jumped three-fold from just under $59bn at the end of 2019 to just over $174bn at the close of 2020, a rise of nearly 200 per cent, according to data from TrackInsight, the Financial Times' data partner for the ETF Hub.
Source: FT.com
IMF-Legally Speaking, is Digital Money Really Money?
January 14, 2021--Countries are moving fast toward creating digital currencies. Or, so we hear from various surveys showing an increasing number of central banks making substantial progress towards having an official digital currency.
But, in fact, close to 80 percent of the world's central banks are either not allowed to issue a digital currency under their existing laws, or the legal framework is not clear.
Not just a legal technicality
Any money issuance is a form of debt for the central bank, so it must have a solid basis to avoid legal, financial and reputational risks for the institutions. Ultimately, it is about ensuring that a significant and potentially contentious innovation is in line with a central bank's mandate. Otherwise, the door is opened to potential political and legal challenges.
Source: IMF
ETFGI reports assets invested in ETFs and ETPs listed globally reach a new milestone of US$7.99 trillion at the end of December 2020
January 14, 2021-ETFGI, a leading independent research and consultancy firm covering trends in the global ETFs and ETPs ecosystem, reported today that assets invested in the global ETFs and ETPs industry have increased by 25.6% from US$6.36 trillion to a new milestone of US$7.99 trillion at the end of December 2020.
ETFs and ETPs listed globally gathered net inflows of US$92.30 billion during December, bringing year-to-date net inflows to a record US$762.87 billion which is higher than the US$568.98 billion gathered during 2019 and higher than the prior full year record of US$653.26 billion set in 2017, according to ETFGI's December 2020 Global ETFs and ETPs industry landscape insights report, the monthly report which is part of an annual paid-for research subscription service. (All dollar values in USD unless otherwise noted.)
Highlights
Assets invested in ETFs and ETPs listed globally reached a new milestone of $7.99 trillion at the end of December.
Assets increased by 25.6% in 2020.
Year-to-date net inflows are a record $762.87 billion which is higher than prior full year record of $653.26 billion set in 2017
Source: ETFGI
Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future
January 13, 2021--We report three major and confronting environmental issues that have received little attention and require urgent action. First, we review the evidence that future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms-including humanity-is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts. Second, we ask what political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action.
Third, this dire situation places an extraordinary responsibility on scientists to speak out candidly and accurately when engaging with government, business, and the public.
Source: frontiersin.org
Vanguard's assets hit record $7tn
January 13, 2021--World's second largest asset manager gathered net inflows of $186bn during 2020's volatile market conditions.
Source: FT.com
E-commerce in the pandemic and beyond
January 12, 2021--Key takeaways
E-commerce has ramped up during the pandemic around the world. The growth has differed across sectors and over different stages of the pandemic. Novel data sources can help to follow these trends.
The growth of e-commerce has been higher in countries where there were more stringent containment measures and where e-commerce was initially less developed.
Some changes in consumers' shopping habits and payment behaviour may be longer-lasting. This may have implications for structural change and the growth of the digital economy.
Source: BIS.org
Trade sentiment and the stock market: new evidence based on big data textual analysis of Chinese media
January 12, 2021--Abstract
Trade tensions between China and US have played an important role in swinging global stock markets but effects are difficult to quantify. We develop a novel trade sentiment index (TSI) based on textual analysis and machine learning applied on a big data pool that assesses the positive or negative tone of the Chinese media coverage, and evaluates its capacity to explain the behaviour of 60 global equity markets.
We find the TSI to contribute around 10% of model capacity to explain the stock price variability from January 2018 to June 2019 in countries that are more exposed to the China-US value chain. Most of the contribution is given by the tone extracted from social media (9%), while that obtained from traditional media explains only a modest part of stock price variability (1%). No equity market benefits from the China-US trade war, and Asian markets tend to be more negatively affected. In particular, we find that sectors most affected by tariffs such as information technology related ones are particularly sensitive to the tone in trade tension.
Source: bis.org
