This Week in ESG and Impact Investing

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) is a law passed by the 117th United States Congress in August 2022. It "includes a first-time provision that would allow the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to negotiate prices of certain prescription drugs in Medicare and Medicaid. Savings would be generated by requiring drug manufacturers to pay a rebate for drugs whose prices increase faster than inflation under Medicare, and would create several reforms in the Medicare drug program, also known as Part D, including a cap on out-of-pocket drug spending for seniors beginning in 2025. It also extends by three years the expanded and enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credit ahead of planned premium increases set to take effect in 2023." We estimate the impact on the African American community to be significant, on the order of 8% of the total. (For a detailed analysis, email info@creativeinvest.com). The law's climate provisions consist of "subsidies for energy that

               Recently, The Economist Magazine  published an article arguing that the effort to increase the Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) performance of corporations and businesses is deeply flawed. The article suggested many reasons ESG is not effective and proposed an alternative they believed would better serve the purpose of improving the environment. However, when analyzing the methods promoted by The Economist , a more effective approach to dealing with these issues is not presented.               The first point that the article makes in arguing against the effort is that ESG is too confusing. The author believes there are too many ESG objectives and that the multiplicity of commercial, business and social goals makes it difficult for firms to know what to do. The article states that ESG provides “no coherent guide” to the trade-offs that businesses must make to comply with these new standards. However, this view is misguided. The fact that ESG stand

The U.S. economy improved in the second quarter of 2022. Real GDP fell by 0.9% in Q2 after falling 1.6% in the first. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE), the value of the goods and services purchased by, or on the behalf of, "persons" who reside in the United States, increased $181.1 billion (1.1 percent). The PCE price index, which measures changes in the prices of goods and services purchased by US persons increased 1.0 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index increased 0.6 percent. Real Personal Consumption increased 0.1 percent.  Despite the negativity in the media, this is a positive indicator. Whether it remains a good sign depends on future economic policy. The Fed may get its "soft landing" after all.

The Federal Reserve’s move to increase interest rates by 75 basis points will not only impose significant costs on the economy, it will do so needlessly. It won't reduce inflation, but it will add to political and social instability. The key skill of a central bank in the current environment is identifying inflation generating sectors and providing targeted, anti-inflationary support to the rest. There are a number of ways to do so, but, given the capture of the Fed by financial institutions, we do not expect them to be familiar with these techniques. (We suggest they review our Maternal Mortality Reparation Facility for Black Women at https://www.prlog.org/12876083-maternal-mortality-reparation-facility-for-black-women.html and our proposal to create a $50 billion-dollar Black Bank financing facility, outlined in Black Enterprise Magazine on October 21, 2019, online at https://www.blackenterprise.com/black-banking-crisis-economist-offers-50-billion-solution/ ). We continue to bel