Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition Issue #672
12/09/2022, 12/10/2022, 12/11/2022
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1) ESG Funds Losses Far Higher Than The Market
We have several decades of stock market evidence that social-investment funds typically underperform the market. So we weren’t at all surprised to read this headline yesterday:
Most large ESG funds trail market benchmark According to the analysis:
The 10 largest ESG funds by assets have all posted double-digit losses, with eight of them falling even more than the S&P 500’s 14.8% decline. The laggards include BlackRock Inc.’s $20.7 billion iShares ESG Aware MSCI USA exchange-traded fund (ESGU) and Vanguard Group’s $5.9 billion ESG US Stock ETF (ESGV).
It’s obvious why these ESG funds have lost so much money this year. They have steered clear of investing in fossil fuels – companies like Exxon and ConocoPhillips – at the very time these traditional oil and gas stocks have soared in value.
When BlackRock CEO has been asked why he is putting politics ahead of his fiduciary duty to his investors, he has indignantly replied that ESG investing yields higher returns
Not usually and especially not in 2022. ESG merely puts the political biases of the big fund managers above the financial returns of the investors.
Oh, and BTW, one of the worst-performing WSG funds has been Vanguard. They just announced this week they are getting out of the ESG business.
Yesterday President Biden announced a $35.8 billion bailout of the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund (which Jimmy Hoffa gave to the mob to build casinos in Vegas in the 1950s and 1960s). That's just over $100,000 for each person covered by the pension plan.
Where did he get the money for that? The $1.9 trillion "COVID relief" stimulus passed on party lines early in 2021.
What would we do without our favorite Senator Rand Paul? He scored another victory this week by blocking an insidious bill called the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act, which attempted to impose new fees on mergers to fund more zealous antitrust enforcement.
"Big is always bad except, of course, when it comes to the size and scope of government," Paul said sarcastically.
"The same people who supposedly fear the concentration of power in the marketplace celebrate the concentration of power in the state – a state that inserts itself into and nullifies private contracts, breaks up companies it deems too large, and inflicts punishment on those who succeed in the competition or consumers."
All over the world, the reports are coming in: the COVID lockdowns caused a lot of collateral damage in the form of excess deaths above normal trends. A conservative estimate of lockdown deaths in the U.S. is roughly 100,000 – but the higher deaths from cancer – die to delayed screening and treatments are still rolling in.
England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, the British government’s chief scientific advisor, say Brits will face a “prolonged period” of deaths due to the pandemic. Not from COVID itself, but from the lockdown measures taken to contain it.
Thousands of routine treatments and appointments that were delayed are fueling a surge of deaths from cancer and heart disease.
The British Heart Foundation’s new report “Untold Heartbreak” says there have been 30,000 excess deaths involving heart disease.
Elsewhere, Australia’s Actuaries Institute complains there should an urgent investigation of the “incredibly high” 13 per cent excess death rate in 2022, with one-third having no link to Covid.
Karol Sakora, a prominent British oncologist, warns that “Attempts to rewrite pandemic history must be resisted — lockdowns and associated choices had an unforgivable impact on cancer patients with an immeasurable amount of suffering as a result. I fear it has only just begun.”
5) Meanwhile Twitter Was The Lead Cheerleader For Lockdowns
Twitter has said for years that they don't take sides politically, and their filtering policies are aimed at reducing "misinformation." Of course, today's misinformation is often tomorrow's truth. But it turns out that what they were doing was even worse than that. When it came to COVID, they were putting a thumb on the scale to hide the anti-lockdown side from public view.
Our friend Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford Medical School — an unquestionably qualified expert and one of the leaders of the Great Barrington Declaration and champion of open schools — was on Twitter's "trends blacklist," which means his tweets were excluded from the trending tab on the side of the sight, a major driver of visibility:
