This Week in ESG and Impact Investing

On April 8, 2022, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen discussed digital assets and regulation at American University’s Center for Innovation. She started with the executive order signed by President Biden mandating the creation of a government approach to cryptocurrency. Yellen noted that digital assets have grown from a $14 billion to a $3 trillion market cap in five years. Digital Currency Market Cap In her talk, the Secretary highlighted a number of factors: o  Recognizing the role that technology played, she stated that the broad adoption of the internet paved the way. Smart phones are also one of the reason digital currencies have been able to grow so rapidly. Number of Internet Users o  Disintermediation is a key function of digital assets like cryptocurrency. We have not heard much, at least by banking regulators, concerning the role cryptos play in eliminating middlemen and banks from transactions. o  The role blockchain plays in facilitating peer to peer transactions...

In an interview on Fox Business News , the current Secretary of the Treasury, former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchen, indicated that $1.5 trillion worth of $100 bills recently "disappeared." In explaining how this money vanished, Mnuchen said: "Literally, a lot of these $100 bills are sitting in bank vaults all over the world." This explanation is beside the point and impossible to verify, of course, making it highly unlikely to be true. Mnuchin, you will recall, came to Washington with a firmly established reputation for unethical behaviour . In 2009, he took "over California’s IndyMac bank, shut down amid the 2008 foreclosure crisis by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Bought for $13.9 billion (but only $1.3 billion in actual cash), Mnuchin turned it into a genuine foreclosure machine" and became known as the Foreclosure King. His bank "carried out more than 36,000 foreclosures , tossing former homeowners (including a...