Global ETF News Older than One Year
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
Upward-scaling tipping cascades to meet climate goals: plausible grounds for hope
January 10, 2021--ABSTRACT
Limiting global warming to well below 2 °C requires a dramatic acceleration of decarbonization to reduce net anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to zero around mid-century. In complex systems-including human societies-tipping points can occur, in which a small perturbation transforms a system.
Crucially, activating one tipping point can increase the likelihood of triggering another at a larger scale, and so on. Here, we show how such upward-scaling tipping cascades could accelerate progress in tackling climate change.
We focus on two sectors-light road transport and power- where tipping points have already been triggered by policy interventions at individual nation scales. We show how positive-sum cooperation, between small coalitions of jurisdictions and their policymakers, could lead to global changes in the economy and emissions. The aim of activating tipping points and tipping cascades is a particular application of systems thinking. It represents a different starting point for policy to the theory of welfare economics, one that can be useful when the priority is to achieve dynamic rather than allocative efficiency.
Source: tandfonline.com
BetaShares-Market Trends: January 2021 Interest rates-gradual lift likely
January 6, 2021--Long-term bond yields continued to creep gradually higher in December as the prospect of further significant near-term monetary stimulus eased in line with an improving global economic outlook.
U.S. 10-year government bond yields ended the month at 0.92%, and Australian 10-year rates at 0.97%- implying a small positive spread for local rates of 0.05%.
This compared with a daily low for U.S. 10-year yields of 0.5% on August 4, and 0.62% for local yields on 9 March. U.S. rates have lifted modestly more than local rates in recent months, with the bond spread contracting from a month-end peak of 0.29% at end-July.
Source: betashares.com.au
F&D: The Jobs of Tomorrow
January 5, 2021--Some jobs will disappear and others will emerge as the world faces a dual disruption
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2020 comes at a crucial juncture for the world of work. The report, now in its third edition, maps the jobs and skills of the future, tracking the pace of change based on surveys of business leaders and human resource strategists from around the world.
This year, we aim to shed light on the effect of pandemic-related disruptions placed in the broader context of longer-term technology trends. Here are the five things you need to know from our findings.
1. The workforce is automating faster than expected, displacing 85 million jobs in the next five years. Automation, in tandem with the COVID-19 recession, is creating a "double-disruption" scenario for workers. Companies' adoption of technology will transform tasks, jobs, and skills by 2025. Some 43 percent of businesses surveyed indicate that they are set to reduce their workforce because of technology integration, 41 percent plan to expand their use of contractors for task-specialized work, and 34 percent plan to expand their workforce as a result of technology integration.
Source: Saadia Zahidi,World Economic Forum and IMF
