ESG makes Peter Thiel angry, 4/10

He hearts Bitcoin

Peter Thiel calls the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investment movement a “hate factory.”

I’m sure many of you have seen the video. My first pointer came from Tyler Cowen.

I share his disgust with ESG. It is bad enough that a company that wants to sell shares to ordinary investors has to subject itself to regulations that are arbitrary and inefficient. (I am sure that I would find some of the regulations to be reasonable and efficient. Thiel says that these days going public is a de facto government takeover.) But ESG adds insult to injury. I picture ESG investing as having a portfolio manager’s choices restricted by some 25-year-old kid hired to be the ESG advisor and whose expertise comes from what he reads on Woke Twitter.

Thiel tells the audience that the way to fight ESG is to buy Bitcoin. He calls Bitcoin skeptics the “financial gerontocracy.” I plead guilty. I prefer to fight ESG, and inflation, by buying commodity funds. And stocks in fertilizer producers, farmland, and real estate.

I remember when I tried America Online in 1993. At the time, I think I had a 14.4k modem. The most popular feature was chat rooms, where, regardless of the topic, the messages people typed in using their cutesy AOL screen names and shorthand acronyms (LOL, of course) were mostly flirtatious.

My reaction was “Nope: too old and too married to feel like I belong here.”

And when it comes to Bitcoin, my reaction is “Nope: too old and too law-abiding to feel like I belong here.”