How much pressure are you feeling from your members to send an anti-woke message to Wall Street? We're seeing that at the state level in intense ways. You're going to be in the middle of that at the federal level. My members are intent on sending a message that you can't kowtow to a far-left agenda and still have Republicans fighting the good fight on behalf of free markets and a marketplace that would benefit these companies. This is a complicated factor for sure. I have a variety of members that are deeply engaged in the subject matter, and you'll hear a lot more from them, that's for sure. Isn't ESG on the corporate side a free-market response to what these businesses are seeing on the ground? How should these companies acknowledge or address some very real environmental changes that we're starting to see? On the question of ESG, is it a free-market approach? … It depends. You have shareholder activism, yes. You also have activism among pension firms from blue states in a significant large way pushing a liberal agenda through their economic power — and a liberal social agenda using their economic power. The question of climate and the climate regulations from the Securities and Exchange Commission are a separate basket. The question for securities law fundamentally is materiality. Everything beyond materiality becomes a question of activism for either the right or for the left. When you talk about regulation of these companies through private-sector means — of investors having their voices heard — there's a proper check and balance, yes, but there is also that which slips beyond traditional oversight of these corporations. We have to understand the distinction between all of those things because it is not as simple as saying, 'climate good,' [or] 'climate bad.' We have to have proper oversight of the climate rulemaking from the Securities and Exchange Commission. We also have these participants in the marketplace that have outsize impacts — some traditional and some that are going beyond what is a traditional limitation that we've seen in the marketplace. I believe climate change is real. We have to do something about it. There are smart, measured ways that we can have a broad impact that use innovation and use technology to get a better answer. That puts me in a very different position than this administration that wants to do through regulatory fiat that which I think technology is driving toward in a natural state. Do you think it should be addressed by the National Flood Insurance Program or the Federal Housing Finance Agency — government agencies that have some risk from climate change? We have to take in the proper risk factors for the proper regulators. The largest set of assets that the federal government owns — outside of the Federal Reserve — is our housing portfolio with Fannie and Freddie. We don't have a proper understanding of the risks associated with adverse weather events and the impact of those weather events in a changing climate. It's also important that we understand the risks to the National Flood Insurance Program with the type of storms and the severity to the taxpayer of the cost of these storms. Is that an area where you think there's room for work with the Biden administration? I'm hopeful.
| 
Comments
Post a Comment