It quickly emerged after Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was shuttered two weekends back that it had spent millions of shareholder (and, it appears, depositor) money for partisan political purposes that lie beyond the scope of its directors’ and executives’ statutory remit, including on – of course – decarbonization and equity-based discrimination initiatives. The expenses by themselves did not sink SVB, but its larger ESG commitments, and the assumptions and blindnesses that go along with them, certainly did.
SVB blew quite a lot of money on ESG-style politics. It committed $5 billion to the decarbonization pipe dream, and its collapse was mourned by Christina Qi, a former ESG-committed hedge fund manager, because it “has been devastating in more ways than one: They supported women, minorities, & the LGBTQ community more than any other big bank. This includes not just diverse events, but actual funding. SVB helped us move one step forward; without them, we move two steps back.” (As Russ Greene of Stand Together tartly and trenchantly noted, instead of all this “sustainable” capitalism, “[m]aybe Silicon Valley Bank should have focused on capitalism capitalism.”
That’s surely correct, because while the performative ESG efforts certainly drained away money that SVB eventually very much needed for other purposes, it was the thorough-going commitment to ESG thinking, to notions of “sustainable” and “stakeholder” and the other varieties of non-at-all-capitalism capitalism that really did the bank in.