ESG Investing, Inflation, and Housing Prices

Weekend news drop

• An ESG Reckoning Is Coming The push in recent years for companies to commit to ESG efforts is commendable. But so far, those efforts have yielded scarce results. For companies to be held accountable to these efforts, the authors suggest three accountability mechanisms: 1) Companies should be required to publicly report on their social and environmental impact with clear, standardized, and easy-to-understand metrics; 2) Consumers, employees, and investors all have a role to play in holding companies accountable; and 3) Companies who are serious about becoming more sustainable, inclusive, and socially responsible should consider becoming certified as benefit corporations. (Harvard Business Review)

• The First 'Global Inflationary Depression' Is Very Possible The money flowing from the central banks and governments has created the so-called "pent-up demand" and predictions of 5% or more GDP growth next year. But capacity utilization is down even while trillions of new dollars pour into the system. Inflation expectations are continuing to grow, and the law of diminishing returns is wreaking havoc with the efforts of central banks to control the economy. We are now seeing that large sectors of the economy are broken. (Seeking Alpha)

• Inflation: The Good, The Bad, and The Transitory The Fed’s framework review and forward guidance from this past fall showed an encouraging willingness to focus on labor market outcomes rather than inflation alone. Rather than previous efforts at forward guidance which guaranteed low rates until either inflation or employment rose, the most recent guidance ensures low rates until both inflation and employment rise sufficiently. (Medium)

• The Big Long We’re in year 12 of this phenomenon – 0% interest rates + no cost of capital, save for a short-lived game of chicken between the Fed and the S&P 500. Now we have trillions of dollars, owed with no interest, all chasing investments with the potential for massive capital appreciation – the cost of this money being so low as to render the need for current cash flows completely irrelevant to the global players of this game: Sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, asset managers, index ETFs, mutual and closed-end funds, retirement savers, family offices, day traders, corporate treasuries and teenagers on TikTok. (Reformed Broker)

• 100 Women Making Their Mark in the World of Finance Women have made enormous strides in the past year in the public sector. America elected its first female vice president, Kamala Harris, in November. Janet Yellen now serves as the nation’s first female secretary of the Treasury, and the 117th U.S. Congress includes a record 143 women, or 27% of its total membership. (Barron’s)

• Do Workers Fleeing House Price Growth Take the Boom with Them as They Go? Systematic differences in the degree to which geographic housing markets are affected by common economic shocks can be explained by patterns of migration between US metros. When an economic boom starts in one region and benefits a particular group of workers, it often ends up driving up local house prices. This increase in housing costs then causes other workers to leave that region in pursuit of more affordable housing elsewhere. (Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies / PDF)

Inflation, Vaccines, Tesla, Amazon and Videos of the Week

Friday morning news drop and some banger skate and bike videos

• Financial panic: Inflation isn’t a real danger. But its prophets may hold the economy back. What happens, the inflation hawks ask, if we emerge from the pandemic with an economic boom? If everyone gets back to work and uses that government money, will wages and prices suddenly shoot up? It’s not an outrageous question: Theory holds that goods will cost more and our money will buy less. But that’s not happening yet. And it hasn’t happened in a very long time. (Washington Post)

• We Can’t Curb the Presidency Without Fixing Congress The minoritarian skew of the House and Senate presents an obstacle to democratic reform. (Atlantic)

• The rich vs the very, very rich: the Wentworth golf club rebellion When a Chinese billionaire bought one of Britain’s most prestigious golf clubs in 2015, dentists and estate agents were confronted with the unsentimental force of globalised capital (Guardian)

• Tiny Townhouse Prototype Finds a Home in the Downtown Eastside Proponent hopes to persuade Vancouver councillors and others to consider tiny home villages as an alternative to tents. (Tyee)

• Inside Pfizer’s Fast, Fraught, and Lucrative Vaccine Distribution The company is a hero of the pandemic for its Covid-fighting wonder shot. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t made entire countries angry. The vaccine allocation was the product of a company struggling to apportion doses while demand far exceeded supply, using an opaque process that appears to have involved a mix of order size, position in the queue, production forecasts, calls from world leaders, the potential to advance the science, and of course the desire to make a profit. (Businessweek)

• Tesla Needs to Crack Europe’s $360 Billion Corporate Car Market The EV maker’s smaller servicing network and refusal to offer discounts on bulk purchases make it harder to compete with established brands. (Bloomberg)

• As Online Shopping Surged, Amazon Planned Its New York Takeover The e-commerce giant added at least nine new warehouses in the city over the past year as 2.4 million packages a day strained the nation’s largest urban delivery system. (New York Times)

• A Timeline of Supercar Innovations Over the Decades Supercars have always been on the cutting-edge frontier—that’s why they appeal to our imagination. Features that are ho-hum today first began as futuristic ideas in exotic environs. (Bloomberg)

Manu Peret's "Double Ghetto" Video A full cast of Israeli talent makes waves across Europe, putting down serious moves Macba before a ruthless hammer section closes the show.

GT BMX: Tate Roskelley – Wait, What? Another masterpiece of creativity from Tate Roskelley.

Odyssey BMX - Tommy Dugan and The Grandstand Oh hell yeah. Tom Dugan going wild with stripy trousers and a stripy kicker to promote the V2 of his signature Grandstand Pedals from Odyssey. This is BMX!

Finn Iles Full Speed Enduro Showdown in the Rain on Vancouver Island The sounds of a perfectly dialled mountain bike slashing through sticky berms, slippery roots & muddy puddles in Duncan BC.

House Hunt, Canadian Housing Crisis, Pension Sustainability, and Fish Farming

Thursday morning news drop

• Scenes from Canada’s Housing Crisis As cities across the country failed their unhoused populations, one Indigenous-led camp in Edmonton offered support (Walrus)

• Pathways to Sustainability Canadian Defined Benefit Pension Survey 2021 RBC Investor & Treasury Services’ fourth annual survey of Canadian defined benefit pension plans, conducted in November of 2020, reflects the perspectives of 122 pension plans from across the country. (RBC)

• The Stock Market Is Usually Right Things got worse while stocks were recovering. They got so much worse. But the market saw that things would eventually get better. The stock market always sees things before we do. And the stock market is usually right. at least most of the time. (Irrelevant Investor)

• BUZZ & The Portnoy Problem If Portnoy is one of the most influential voices on Stock-Social-Media, how can he also be economically involved with an index that is supposed to track the very thing he personally influences, and quite dramatically at that? (ETF Trends)

• The path to a recovery for all: The risk of an uneven recovery far exceeds the risk of uncontrollable inflation. Data and research show that the inflation hawks are wrong again. Congress must do more. (Stay At Home Macro)

• The Truthtellers: Censorship in China China created a story of the pandemic. These people revealed details Beijing left out (CNN)

• Fish Farming Is Feeding the Globe. What’s the Cost for Locals? In the small coastal country, an exploding industry has led to big economic promises, and a steep environmental price. (New Yorker)

• Dee Brown and the Flight of the Reebok Pump An iconic shoe, a dunk contest champion with Bird’s Celtics and a run-in with Michael Jordan that created a “shoe war.” This is the story of the Reebok Pump. (Sports Illustrated)

Rob Pace's "Strider" Part Powering through Sydney’s sketchiest rails, Rob emerges as one of the gnarliest rippers from Down Under—and that’s saying something.

Housing Market, Investment Bubbles, Electric Vehicles, and BC’s Overdose Crisis

Wednesday morning news drop

• B.C. real estate industry braces for postpandemic immigration boom Metro Vancouver housing builders and the real estate industry are bracing for a big surge of immigrants to wash into the region once travel is allowed again, with some possible extra pushes coming from Hong Kong, India, the Philippines and even Indonesia. (Globe and Mail)

• Housing, We Have a Problem There are three main stories in the housing market. People are moving out of apartments and into houses. People who are already in houses are staying put. People who haven’t already bought a house are getting priced out. Interwoven into all three of these are demographics. The largest segment of the U.S. population is people in their late 20s and early 30s. These are the people most likely to be first-time home buyers. Here’s what I would say to people in this situation. If it’s the right house, buy it. If it’s a house you can see yourself raising kids in, then buy it. If you end up overpaying, well, there are greater tragedies in life. (Irrelevant Investor)

• Wall Street stocks slip as ‘bubble’ fears mount US and Asian bourses retreat after China regulator warns of inflated valuations (Financial Times)

• Forget GameStop. If You Want Real Risk, Invest in Supercars If you were prescient enough to buy a seminal 1954 300SL new for its $7,000 sticker price, lock it in a garage, and take good care of it, the machine would fetch roughly $1.4 million today, an annualized return of about 8%, not accounting for inflation, storage, and maintenance. You’d have been much better off in the Dow Jones index, which requires zero oil filters. (Bloomberg)

• European companies set to dominate psychedelics market European companies like Compass Pathways, Beckley Psytech and Atai Life Sciences are leading the race to dominate the new psychedelic market. (Sifted)

• How Green Are Electric Vehicles? In short: Very green. But plug-in cars still have environmental effects. Here’s a guide to the main issues and how they might be addressed. (New York Times)

• Volvo says it will be ‘fully electric’ by 2030 and move car sales online Henrik Green, Volvo Cars’ chief technology officer, says there’s “no long-term future for cars with an internal combustion engine.” Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Tuesday morning, CEO Håkan Samuelsson offers more detail about “online only” sales model. (CNBC)

• New GST/HST rules for digital sales: What you should know Foreign companies selling goods and services online in Canada will soon need to contend with new GST/HST rules for e-commerce transactions. Find out about the federal government’s proposals and CPA Canada’s suggestions for improving them. (CPA Canada)

• Does Your Company Lurch From Crisis to Crisis? Many organizations find themselves in a perpetual state of crisis and rely on company “heroes” to put out the fires. While many people love the feeling of saving the day, it shouldn’t be a way of life. If you’ve wondered why your organization performs well in a crisis but struggles otherwise, it may be time to pause and ask why. Your heroes may actually be revealing that you have a deeper problem. The author offers four ways to move away from a culture of perpetual crisis. First, understand that heroism is not a sign of commitment, but rather that it’s time to make changes in your organization. Second, make sure the way you’re allocating resources is realistic. Third, get better at cross-functional coordination. And finally, reward teams, not just individuals. (Harvard Business Review)

• The Companies Where Employees Most Often Get Payday Loans Payday loans are used by people who need money fast, who often have no other way of borrowing money to cover an unexpected expense. The benefit of these kinds of loans is they enable you to meet your immediate financial obligations. The risk, however, is you are taking on debt and incurring future obligations that require future income to fulfill. Currently Walmart, the largest employer in the United States, is the number employer of payday loan recipients (Pricenomics)

• As BC’s Overdose Crisis Deepens, Province Defends Efforts Drugs becoming ‘even deadlier, underscoring urgent need for supervised consumption, safe supply and treatment,’ says coroner. (Tyee)

Victoria Housing Market, Staff Recruitment, Canadian Economy, Investing and Great Lake Surfing

Tuesday morning news drop

• Reengineering the Recruitment Process - Hire for potential, not experience The Covid-19 pandemic has upended many traditional business practices. When it comes to recruiting, the crisis has not so much disrupted as accelerated shifts in the talent landscape that were already under way, leaving many companies poorly served by their current hiring practices. In a period of steep unemployment, it might seem that companies looking to add workers would be in the driver’s seat. But job openings have also been rising in recent months, meaning that competition for top talent remains keen—and in uncertain times, bringing on the right people is more important than ever. (Harvard Business Review)

• Canadian economy contracted 5.4% in 2020, worst year on record Total economic activity in December was about 3% below the pre-pandemic level in February 2020 (Investment Executive)

• Maximum Victoria Housing Market Hotness If there’s one good bit of news for house hunters in the February statistics, it’s that the market didn’t get much hotter than it already was in January. The 863 sales are up 53% from the 563 sales last February, while new listings are roughly unchanged from a year ago and inventory is down 38%. Sales have more or less been topped out at an average of 21 per day all of February which means that the percentage change from the previous year has been steadily declining throughout the month, down from 60% at the start of the month to around 40% now. The seasonally adjusted sales to new listings ratio is at 90%, unchanged from January. (House Hunt Victoria)

• Being Honest About Your Investment Performance In October of last year I asked people on Twitter whether they knew how well their investments had done since they started investing. Of those that answered, 33% said “Yes” and 66% said “No.” Chances are that you are in the “No” camp. So was I, until recently. (Of Dollars and Data)

• What If Interest Rates Don’t Matter as Much as We Think? Just because stocks have done fine when rates have risen in the past doesn’t mean it will happen in the future. But interest rate levels, in and of themselves, aren’t the sole cause of every market movement. They are just one factor among many that impact how people allocate their assets. And maybe, just maybe, they don’t matter as much as we all think. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• It’s Hard to Run on Bond ETFs For an S&P 500 ETF you can go buy all the S&P 500 stocks fairly efficiently and electronically, but for a 500-bond ETF it would be very difficult to go buy 500 bonds (Bloomberg)

• How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6 million In October 2020, Miami-based art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile spent almost $67,000 on a 10-second video artwork that he could have watched for free online. Last week, he sold it for $6.6 million. (Reuters)

• ‘Share-plunge’ GameStop traders serve valuable function Without short sellers, the investing public is truly doomed. And for proof, look no further than a one-time penny stock that’s headed back to nosebleed levels. What was largely overlooked during the hearings was that even as the hedge funds lost money, they were eventually proven right. As they predicted, shares of GameStop collapsed. Small investors who ignored the short thesis and engaged in the Reddit-induced mania by buying near the top (sometimes with borrowed money) got crushed as the stock plummeted below $50. (New York Post)

• E-mail Is Making Us Miserable: In an attempt to work more effectively, we’ve accidentally deployed an inhumane way to collaborate. (New Yorker)

• Surf’s Up. The Temperature Isn’t. Growing numbers of surfers are taking to the Great Lakes — even when the weather is well below freezing. (New York Times)

Brandon Westgate's "508" New Balance Part Westgate’s back, blastin’ street gaps and sailing off of every bump in sight. Must be fun to be able to fly. Great music and great skating.

Mortgage Interest Rates, Stock Market, and Stanfield

Monday morning news drop

• Today’s freakishly low mortgage rates can’t last. What will pandemic home buyers do when they rise? There’s a postpandemic period of reflection coming where we look back on the decisions we made while COVID-19 raged and wonder, what the heck were we thinking? Get ready for it, home buyers. Living in a big home in the suburbs may suit you now, but will you be able to afford your mortgage after you renew it at much higher rates? (Globe and Mail)

• Will Higher Interest Rates Kill Growth Stocks? Interest rates are important. They’re the lifeblood of the economy. To say they’re one of several inputs instead of the only input is not to minimize their importance, but to state reality. (Irrelevant Investor)

• The Stock Market Is Smarter Than All of Us The idea of the wisdom of crowds is not that a group will always give you the right answer but that on average it will consistently come up with a better answer than any individual could provide. The same is true of the stock market. The stock market isn’t always right but it is amazing how much it’s right more often than it’s wrong. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Layoffs at Stanfield's a blow to community The local MLA says the loss of 150 jobs at Stanfield's in Truro, N.S., is a blow to the community. The company, a fixture in the community for more than 150 years, recently lost a government contract to manufacture medical gowns. (CBC)

• What Those Shocking Texas Power Bills Have in Common With Uber Surges, Broadway Tickets, and Airfare It’s called marginal-cost pricing, and it isn’t just a red-state problem. (Slate)

• Shopify’s Sustainability Fund Investing $5M annually in the most promising solutions to fight climate change. (Shopify)

• Atlantic Ocean circulation at weakest in a millennium, say scientists Decline in system underpinning Gulf Stream could lead to more extreme weather in Europe and higher sea levels on US east coast (Guardian)

Sneakerheads, Green Energy, Bond Markets, and the Republican Party

Weekend news drop

• Sneakerheads Have Turned Jordans and Yeezys Into a Bona Fide Asset Class When the pandemic presented a buy-low opportunity, one college dropout hit the road and filled his truck with $200,000 worth of kicks. The sneaker boom has created opportunities for a new generation of speculator. Young resellers are the first to treat footwear as a bona fide asset class, products as worthy of informed valuation and investment as any other commodity. The sneaker market, for them, is a lot like playing the market. (Businessweek)

• Rents Jump 9.8 Per Cent for Vancouver’s Worst and Cheapest Housing Report finds rents in privately-owned SROs increased almost twice as much as other rents in the region. (Tyee)

• Why Canada should invest in ‘macrogrids’ for greener, more reliable electricity As the recent disaster in Texas showed, climate change requires electricity utilities to prepare for extreme events. This “global weirding” leads to more intense storms, higher wind speeds, heatwaves and droughts that can threaten the performance of electricity systems. The electricity sector must adapt to this changing climate while also playing a central role in mitigating climate change. (On Site)

• The Activists Who Embrace Nuclear Power On December 8, 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his “Atoms for Peace” speech at the United Nations General Assembly. He described the dangers of atomic weapons, but also declared that “this greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind.” Stockpiles of uranium and fissionable materials could be used “to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.” (New Yorker)

• Traders on Yield Watch in Bond Markets ‘Not for Faint-Hearted’ After last week’s market turmoil, there’s really just one question on traders’ minds: how central banks will react to the jump in bond yields. (Yahoo)

• A Festival of Lies The Republican leaders responsible for leading their party in the 2022 election cycle are coming to CPAC. Their participation is consistent with their refusal to disavow Trump’s false claims — or take responsibility for their own role in creating the conditions that resulted in the January 6 riot. (Popular Information)

• The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages The GOP has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s. (The Atlantic)

• Deficit hypocrisy comes home to roost The Republican Party has, for the foreseeable future, lost all credibility on the issue of federal spending and deficits. It’s a rare case of ideological hypocrisy, of practice never conforming to theory, coming home to roost. (The Week)

• Visualizing Cyber Harassment Content warning: this blog contains racist and anti-semitic language and terminology associated with sexual assault. (Medium)

• Sex Tapes, Hush Money, and Hollywood’s Economy of Secrets Meet Kevin Blatt, the celebrity fixer who’s a master at shepherding compromising material off the internet—or into the hands of the highest bidder. A Movie Star’s agent will never take a call from a stranger, but Kevin Blatt reads every message and follows up on every tip. You never know who might have the goods. Over the past two decades, Blatt has become a one-man clearinghouse for everything seedy in Hollywood—the fixer you call when you want to see whether the thing you have that could humiliate a famous person is worth anything. (Wired)

• Ultra-fast Fashion Is Eating the World: Even a pandemic can’t stop people from buying clothes they don’t need. In times of crisis, consumers don’t stop shopping—they just limit their purchases to affordable pleasures. Fast fashion had expanded its market share during the 2008 global financial crisis; now this new cohort of companies—known as ultra-fast fashion—was poised to do the same. (The Atlantic)

Housing Market, Britany Spears, and the Dot-Com Gamestop

Friday morning news drop

• Vancouver Island and Victoria Q4 Building Permits Construction activity slowed somewhat during the fourth quarter of 2020 though remaining at a relatively high level. Total building permits issued during the fourth quarter of 2020 slipped four per cent to $652.3 million following the strong rebound in the prior quarter coming off the pandemic shock-driven second quarter. To read the full report, click here. (VICA)

• More investors have moved into Greater Victoria's apartment market Greater Victoria and the Island are no longer well-kept secrets for Canadian real estate investors, with numbers released this week by Colliers International showing this region is a bright light on the radar of institutional investors and real estate investment trusts. (Times Colonist)

• Where Have All the Houses Gone? The inventory of homes for sale is startlingly low. The pandemic is part of the reason, but it’s not the whole story. (The Upshot)

• What if it Doesn’t End Badly? The past decade has been one of endless prosperity. At least in risk assets. Since 2011, the S&P 500 has gained nearly 300%. (Irrelevant Investor)

• Dot-Com Survivors Have Wisdom for the GameStop Crowd In October 1999, five months before the internet bubble burst, I wrote a cover story for Fortune magazine titled “Trader Nation.” It was about how middle-class Americans were embracing the stock market, with some quitting their jobs to become day traders. I thought it would be worth talking to the same people to glean lessons about how living through a stock bubble can affect investors for the rest of their lives. (Bloomberg)

• Three r/WallStreetBets GameStop investors explain why they did it, what went wrong, and how much they made There’s no one story of the frenzy of the last few weeks. Some people invested a few bucks as a joke, while others poured in life savings and maxed out credit cards. Some invested after seeing a single Tweet, while others had meticulously followed, analyzed and posted about GameStop for a year. Some thought the whole thing was a joke, while others saw themselves as heroes of an Oscar-winning Wall Street revenge movie. (Business of Business)

• Why Texas Broke: The Crisis That Sank the State Has No Easy Fix When the cold spell plunged the energy powerhouse into darkness, Texans found profound flaws in their infrastructure. Meaningful change may be a long time coming. (Businessweek)

• Born to Run: U.S cannabis enters the sweet spot We know four primary metrics support the U.S cannabis growth story, although the fundamentals aren’t as forgiving as they were last year (Cannabis Confidential)

• Britney Spears Was Never in Control Why did I ever believe a teen girl could hold all the power? (The Cut)

Victoria Housing Market, Canadian Government Debt, Investing, and Art Heists

Thursday morning news drop

• CPABC: Greater Victoria housing starts and major project inventory slowdown in 2020 According to BC Check-Up: Invest, an annual report by the Chartered Professional Accountants of British Columbia (CPABC) on investment trends across the province, the number of housing units that began construction across Greater Victoria declined by 12.4 per cent in 2020 compared to the number started in 2019. (Financial Post)

• It’s never been cheaper for governments to borrow. What could possibly go wrong? The recent report of the Commons finance committee contains 145 separate recommendations for this spring’s federal budget. They urge the government to spend more on everything from long-term care to universal pharmacare to a national early learning and child-care system and beyond: on young and old, on education and housing, on cities, on airports, on and on and on. (Globe and Mail)

• Canadian power companies face climate change reckoning after Texas's free-wheeling electricity grid freezes At least three Canadian utilities saw predictable cash flows in loosely regulated market, but failed to foresee climate risk (Financial Post)

• This Book Is Not About Baseball. But Baseball Teams Swear by It. A psychology book by a Nobel Prize-winning author has become a must-read in front offices. It is changing the sport, bringing us full circle from Moneyball. (New York Times)

• The Power and the Silence: What Goes on Behind the Boss’s Back Power, true power, is a wonder to behold. It is also, for the powerless, unnerving, chiefly because it calls for self-suppression in quantities equal to power’s immense self-confidence. Survival, I learned then, is not our strongest drive, whatever the evolutionists may say. Our strongest drive is to please the people over us, especially those who have no one over them. (Unbound)

• I know what I’ve been put on earth to do Downtown Josh Brown is not only a first-rate CEO, he is a deeply insightful person whose judgment and insights that people rely on everyday. He spent his 20’s broke, miserable and stuck in a dead-end job. He knew he wasn’t meant to be living and working the way he was and there was a massive chip on his shoulder as he turned things around in his 30’s. (Reformed Broker - Downtown Josh Brown)

• The 25 Greatest Art Heists of All Time Although technology has gotten more sophisticated and the means by which heists are committed have changed, burglaries of the world’s greatest artworks continue to be executed often, effectively adding new and bizarre chapters to the annals of art history in the process. (Arts News)

Construction Trades, ESG Ratings, Inflation, and Deforestation

Wednesday morning news drop

• Construction industry fears a skilled-trades shortage Like so many other sectors, the trades are not immune from the wave of baby boomers set to retire in the coming decade, adding urgency to the recruitment of younger and underrepresented people, those in construction say. (Globe and Mail)

• An Agile Approach to Change Management In the wake of Covid-19, organizations are fundamentally rethinking their product and service portfolios, reinventing their supply chains, pursuing large-scale organizational restructuring and digital transformation, and rebuilding to correct systemic racism from the ground up. Traditional change management process won’t cut it. The author borrows from agile software development processes to reinvent the change management playbook. (Harvard Business Review)

• Buy the Dip If the stock market had a mantra, it would be “buy the dip.” Today, millions of market participants repeated this over and over again. Today, the S&P 500 was down nearly 2% at its low point, but it stormed a late comeback to finish positive. This sort of move has happened on 121 other occasions since 1970, or 1% of all days. But what’s more interesting than how often they happen is where they happen. (Irrelevant Investor)

• An inside look at ESG ratings and why they should matter to you As interest in sustainable investing has grown, so too have the number of companies that now receive environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings. Sustainalytics, a Morningstar company and a globally recognized provider of ESG research, ratings and data, has been continually focused on expanding its research, with coverage that’s climbed to over 12,000 companies today. (Bloomberg)

• Why Most Entrepreneurs Aren't Delegating Effectively You might be wondering why delegation is so important in the first place. After all, if you're running a small business, you might be perfectly capable of handling most of the work by yourself. (Entrepreneur)

• The American dream is now in Denmark A conversation with Danish businessman Djaffar Shalchi about why he wants to make rich people like himself pay more in taxes (The Ink)

• Four Reasons Not to Worry About U.S. Inflation The economy is a long way from capacity, inflation is slow-moving, inflation expectations are well-anchored, and the Fed has tools to keep inflation in check. (Bloomberg)

• Hipgnosis Is Buying Music Libraries — and Plans to Spend $1 Billion More A former music manager’s company has acquired more than 100 publishing catalogs, including a 50 percent stake in Neil Young’s, as well as hits performed by Rihanna and Shakira, and is eyeing a $1 billion-plus deal pipeline. (Hollywood Reporter)

• The Psychology Behind the Boom in Collectibles The boom in collectibles doesn’t make sense if you’re thinking exclusively from the rational part of your brain. But most people don’t think exclusively from the rational part of their brain. (Wealth of Common Sense)

• Cutting down forests: what are the drivers of deforestation? Since the turn of the millennium, the world has been losing around 5 million hectares of forest every year. Nearly all of this occurs in the tropics; almost half of all deforestation takes place in Brazil and Indonesia. Three-quarters is driven by agriculture. Beef production is responsible for 41% of deforestation; palm oil and soybeans account for another 18%; and logging for paper and wood across the tropics, another 13%. These industries are also dominant in a few key countries. Effective solutions will be focused on these agricultural activities and those countries where most deforestation occurs. (Our World in Data)