Bloomberg’s Business Nanny. The Sustainability Accounting board is a stalking horse for progressive politics.

Wall Street Journal ^ | February 17, 2020 | WSJ Editorial Board

[karpov]

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink recently made a splash by threatening to vote against corporate managers who don’t disclose an array of non-financial information as directed by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board. But what is SASB, and where is this all going?

Michael Bloomberg founded SASB in 2011 as a shadow regulator for his policy agenda. SASB claims to be modelled on the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), a nonprofit with the imprimatur of the Securities and Exchange Commission that regulates how corporations account for and disclose financial information.

SASB’s nine-member standards board issues guidelines for what kinds of sustainability information corporations should report to investors. Yet while financial accounting is more or less uniform for all businesses, SASB standards vary across 77 industries. Tracking the minutia will provide a lifetime job guarantee for corporate auditors.

Consumer banks have to disclose how many “no-cost retail checking accounts” they provide “to previously unbanked or underbanked customers.” Investment houses must document loans that incorporate “environmental, social and governance” factors. Casinos have to report the share of employees who work where smoking is allowed.

SASB requires businesses in most high-paying industries to disclose workforce diversity. “Hiring foreign nationals to compensate for shortages in local talent can create risks related to perceived social implications,” SASB says. That’s interesting because Mr. Bloomberg’s private media company, Bloomberg LP, reports 17% of its U.S. workers are foreign nationals while 10% are black or Latino. Under SASB this means Bloomberg needs to “improve employee engagement and work-life balance” to recruit more minorities and women.

...

All of this is supposedly voluntary, at least for now. But as Mr. Fink’s orders to CEOs show, the goal is to shame and bully businesses to comply with SASB’s social and political agenda. It’s the business version of Bloomberg’s Big Gulp soda ban

[FreedomPoster]

This looks like a formalization of the sort of Leftist policy that led us directly to banks making tons of bad loans in the run up to the ‘07-‘08 financial crash.

[cdcdawg]

Sustainability Accounting Standards Board

That sounds very much like Britain ... or Oceania.

[glorgau]

It’s a contrary indicator. The woker they are, the broker they’ll go.

[aquila48]

Any organization with the word “sustainability” in it should be immediately suspect.

[Bon mots]

We need to prepare our memes for the upcoming meme war & 2020 Election!

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

I’m going to sell my Blackrock stock. Don’t want any leftist shit running a company that I own stock in. Going to buy more shares of a very productive and useful medicine discoverer company that pays a good dividend. I depend on dividends to help cover medical costs and utilities.