Yingfeng Ku

When people are talking about sustainable finance, there are two main things they should consider in both sustainability and financial return. Many academic papers or investment institutions demonstrated the advantages of sustainable finance, such as better financial performance (Ortas, et al., 2015; Lee, et al., 2016; Yadav, et al., 2016) and risk reduction (Jansson & Biel, 2011; Morgan Stanley, 2019). While Lean & Nguyen (2014) and Cunha et al. (2020) argue that in the period of crisis, sustainable finance present a inferior return and risk performance. These researches express positive signs to investors, sustainable finance not only has better financial performance but also could achieve self-value of investors. But form the perspective of investment institutions, sustainable finance means they have to hire more sophisticate and cost more in human capital for meeting both the criteria of financial return and social return at the same time. Note: European Union Action Plan

My first blog of sustainable finance gives you a brief introduction to sustainable finance. The second blog will give you a general idea of why people choose sustainable finance. Sustainable finance based on the sustainability, which means in financial activities, people should consider the needs of future generations, rather than short-termism. This could be regard as the ultimate reason of sustainable finance. International Platform on Sustainable Finance (IPSF) established for the services of countries in the world for exploring better sustainable finance. Therefore, at the level of human beings or state, we can say sustainable finance is for: Having a sustainable development in long-term period If you access the website of banks or investment companies, sustainable finance of investment is now definitely displayed with prominently: For financial product providers, sustainable finance is not only could attractive potential sustainability investors, but also bring them other be

With the signed of agreements such as Pairs Agreement, to deal with global warming and climate changes become a state-based strategy, sustainable development has become an inevitable tendency. In finance community, there has been a growing interest in sustainability among the investors, and lead to the occur of sustainable finance. Recently, sustainable finance seems to be a ‘market fad’. The amount of assets and the number of market participants engaged in sustainable finance are continuous to climb in global  (The Global Sustainable Investment Alliance, 2019) . Banks and investment companies are also trying to align their policy with sustainability, issuing sustainable financial products which referred as ESG based. This means products should meet specific environmental, social and governance requirements. Someone may think ESG finance as sustainable finance nowadays because of the vigorously promote from media or companies. But the answer is negative, sustainable finance is wider t

Due to the impact of Covid-19 pandemic, a lot of companies are considered to curtail or delay their dividend to shareholders, to keep the company afloat in the situation of declining revenues. The shareholders should regard this as normal because everyone’s dividends are affected in some extent, however, for the shareholder of Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s largest dividend payers, they did not think so. Royal Dutch Shell cut its payout in April for the first time since the second world war. Jessica Uhl, chief financial officer at Shell, reiterated that the dividend cut was the “prudent and appropriate thing to do” and reflected the “real reality” presented by the pandemic. These explanations seem are feeble for its shareholders and drew criticism, the reason is the Shell company did not provide information on how it planned to allocate capital in the coming years.   Cut dividends that have not changed for years, and unknown capital allocation in the future, I believe Shell’

Things have not been good for Victoria's Secret (VS) in 2020. With revenues falling by years and the impact of epidemic, its owner Leslie Wexner, is considering a ‘potential sale’. Before that, VS had experienced two booms. The first was when its founder, Raymond, opened a store that sells women underwear to men in 1977. He earned $500,000 first year. But it did not last long, a sales bottleneck occurred. Its strategy of making men its main customers led to women could not accept it, and there were limited number of male customers. After 1982, Raymond sold VS to Wexner, VS’s sales model focuses on female customers. Wexner led VS toward luxurious and noble route. This marks the beginning of another glorious in VS. From 2016, VS reached another turning point, sales revenue become stagnate and drop, share prices began to fell and shops closed. Until scandals surfaced of VS in 2020, it has hit the bottom again.   One shop of Victoria’s Secret, photo’d in Nanjing Both experienced

 When people browsing the news in finance, the title with an unbelievable mount of money can always catches their eyes, for example: ‘Stanhope merges with FWM to create $24.2bn wealth manager’ And people could see that: London-based Stanhope runs $13bn in assets under management and oversees the investments of the Duchy of Lancaster, the £538m portfolio of property and financial assets owned by the Queen (Flood, 2020) . “ People in finance just have so many money” They might say something like this. The same thing happened to me, when the first time my relatives and mates know about that I am a student major in finance, they said: “That is great! You will be rich after you find a job.”   Some people think that those people who working in financial industry can earn a lot of money and have a higher wage standard compare with other industry. Imagine a person in a suit and working in office could completing transactions values of hundred million in a couple of minutes, how doe