(Financial Times) As the clean energy industry takes off – ushering in a new boom for the mining sector that serves it – it’s vital that human rights are not sidelined in the push for low-carbon power. That’s the logic behind a new collaborative initiative announced yesterday at the annual Principles for Responsible Investment conference.…

(Harvard Business Review) There’s a big, poorly kept secret in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) industry: the actual efficacy of an uncomfortably large proportion of our “flagship” services, talking points, and interventions — unconscious bias training, racial sensitivity workshops, the “business case for diversity,” resume anonymization, and the like — is lower than many…

(Financial Times) It’s been a lousy month for the reputation of professional investing. The collapse of FTX revealed that everyone from racy hedge funds to staid pension and sovereign wealth funds had been throwing money at a cryptocurrency exchange with weaker financial controls than Enron. Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison for…

(Vice) The order was a response to a petition filed by Gerald Bryson, a former Amazon employee who in 2020 was fired for protesting the company’s lack of safety protocols regarding COVID-19. Bryson worked at JFK8, the company’s Staten Island warehouse which has since become famous as the first Amazon facility to successfully unionize, earlier…

(Bloomberg) For more than a decade, Credit Suisse Group AG has claimed to be “carbon neutral” in its operations. Every gleaming office tower, every flight by an executive — all the emissions generated directly by a global banking giant are supposedly counterbalanced. A closer look at the Swiss bank’s sustainability reports tells a different story:…

(Bloomberg) In one sense, investors and regulators should be grateful to Sam Bankman-Fried, the erstwhile head of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. The spectacular flameout of his virtual empire has evolved from a cautionary tale into a master class on everything that’s wrong with crypto markets. As customers and creditors sort through what remains of the…

(Bloomberg) The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement penalties surged to a record in the government’s fiscal 2022, the agency said on Tuesday. The SEC’s enforcement actions resulted in $6.4 billion in fines and money ordered to be reimbursed to investors, up from just $3.9 billion in 2021, according to an annual report. “We don’t expect…

(Harvard Business Review) Over the last five years, the corporate world has focused increasingly on implementing stakeholder capitalism through Environmental, Social and Governance principles (ESG). However, is ESG a distraction to cash-strapped talent and time constrained startups? Should founders build their business first and worry about ESG later? Quite the contrary: start-ups have an advantage over larger companies whose “installed base” of assets,…

(The New York Times) On Friday, FTX, facing a cash shortfall of $8 billion and scrambling to drum up money, filed for bankruptcy. Mr. Bankman-Fried resigned as chief executive. The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are examining whether FTX improperly used customer funds to prop up a separate trading firm, Alameda Research,…

(Fortune) The specter of political gridlock looms over the U.S. this morning, as the Republicans seem to have taken back the House while the Democrats may hold on to the Senate. But if that quagmire doesn’t set America back, irresponsible innovation may, warns a group of four dozen tech companies and investment firms. Read more…