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Climate-related screening of investments gets continued ‘green light’ in new court ruling

Today, half of the articles in investment magazines seem to be about ESG and climate. In our experience, however, very few funds are actually designed with a clear climate goal. We believe this is a missed opportunity.

The recovery from the Covid crisis continues, with global activity now exceeding its pre-pandemic peak. However, this rapid rebound has already run into supply constraints in many sectors and economies, leading to a surge in global inflation. Some of these demand-supply imbalances should ease over the coming quarters, helping to cool price growth. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Covid has permanently damaged the supply side of the global economy, implying a less favourable trade-off between growth and inflation.

The advice market is currently being buoyed by the needs of the wealthiest demographic: the baby boomers, who were born between 1946 and 1964. As boomers age, though, we will start to see a wealth transfer take place. In the UK, we expect £5.5 trillion of assets will be passed down between now and 2050. On a global basis, around $68 trillion is forecast to change hands.

The past few months have delivered a number of unwelcome developments resulting in greater risks to economic growth, higher inflation and more volatile markets.

Ongoing inflationary shocks, the questions around interest rates and the emergence of the new Omicron Covid variant are all making navigating the next twelve months more challenging for investors. Nonetheless, when we look beyond the headlines, there remain some reasons for optimism going into 2022.

The 15 years since the start of the Global Financial Crisis have been a difficult time for Value as illustrated in Fig. 1. We show below that this underperformance has largely been driven by low inflation and government bond yields.

Amanda Young is joined by colleagues to explore what we can expect to see on the sustainability agenda for 2022.