The statistic of the day...

Disney, Target, and Anheuser-Busch have lost a combined 42 billion in stock value since their woke controversies...

Disney has lost $16 billion since the beginning of their problems. Target suffered a much more abrupt $10 billion loss. The Bud Light company has bled $16 billion since they promoted an online trans influencer.

This sad part about all of this is that it doesn't really seem to matter to any of these executives making the decisions. It is almost as if they would rather be woke and go broke than to run their business as a business. While there is some explanations involving an increase in the importance of an ESG of course, ESG ratings do not make a product better or a company profitable.

Sure... the Biden Administration is doing their best to introduce ESG into some form of law, they cannot get anything like this through congress and I am guessing that an EO would run into legal issues. That being said I am still convinced that many of these executives are assuming that everyone will eventually want to run a woke business. They live in their own little bubbles where the jet setters love to complain about how the little guy has too large of a carbon footprint and how they are all knights in shining armor about to save the world from itself.

But in reality the whole Silicone Valley banking collapse was due to SVB working with companies that were seen as having a questionable business model, but high ESG ratings to offset the risk. So when these companies started to struggle, they deposited less money in profits and had to pull more money out to keep afloat. Oddly, it turns out that ESG ratings do not make a product better or a company profitable.

ESG proponents should have learned this the hard way with a major banking collapse, but are stubbornly refusing to accept that ESG had any real effect. Rather than focus on why the bank customers (woke businesses) were struggling, the focus is on why the bank itself were not prepared for a this sort of run on capital.

In medical terms, this is called treating the symptoms and not the cause. The question should be why someone doesn't have enough flu medicine, but rather how they could have avoided catching the flu in the first place. SVB could have prevented their own collapse by avoiding a situation where it was almost guaranteed that most of the companies they were investing in would eventually fail and leave them on the hook for the funding. No matter how well they invested their limited capital they had on hand, it would not have prevented any of their clients from losing money or going bankrupt. But blaming a poor executive for not making bad capital investing decisions is more palatable than blaming the bank for making questionable loans based on ESG.