Not soon after the general election, and within two weeks of each other, two major financial institutions have left a United Nations Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA).
This is after they joined three years ago, pledging to require environmental social governance standards (ESG) across their platforms, products and systems.
Read More
The federal government overestimated the number of jobs in the U.S. economy by 818,000 between April 2023 and March 2024, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Wednesday, stoking fears of a slowdown in the U.S. economy.
Economists at Goldman Sachs (GS) and Wells Fargo anticipated the government had overestimated job growth by at least 600,000 in that span, while economists at JPMorgan Chase had predicted a lesser decline of 360,000, according to Bloomberg. The downward revision follows a trend of the BLS overestimating the number of nonfarm payroll jobs added, with the cumulative number of new jobs reported in 2023 roughly 1.3 million less than previously thought as of February 2024.
Read More
Six major American financial institutions struggled to accurately assess the extent of their exposure to climate change and related risks, according to the Federal Reserve.
Read More
The national average cost of a gallon of gas at the pump jumped by 20 cents over the past month, according to AAA.
Currently, Americans are paying about $3.55 per gallon on average, up from about $3.35 a month ago, according to AAA’s data. Goldman Sachs, one of the largest financial institutions in the U.S., has recently cautioned that prices could surge above $4 per gallon by May, according to Yahoo Finance.
Read More
Trust in banks has plummeted. From 2019-2022, the percentage of people who believe banks and financial institutions have a positive effect on the country fell among Republicans (from 63 to 38 percent) and Independents (by nine points). The problem grows every time a right-of-center group is debanked. Recognizing the problem, “rebuilding trust” is the theme of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The path to rebuild trust in finance is simple—keep politics out of banking.
In spite of an alleged priority of building trust, the largest banks are aligning themselves with radical United Nations (UN) climate initiatives linked to radical efforts to reduce Africa’s population and destroy Sri Lankan agriculture.
Read More
The last few months have been interesting. We have started to see some very public disagreements among the world’s ruling classes. The gathering of elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has long fascinated observers and become a lightning rod for criticism, becoming a bogeyman of the right, as well as the hardcore, anticapitalist left. It is a front-row seat to the thinking and priorities of the world’s most powerful people.
In Davos, the world’s media, academic, political, and financial elites spend a few days in luxurious surroundings, praising themselves and forming a consensus on solutions to what they deem to be the problems of the world. This includes everything from facilitating mass migration, tackling global warming by moving away from fossil fuel energy, and the need for economic redistribution to the poor and the third world, all through the corporatist idea of “stakeholder capitalism.”
Read More