There are many who believe that banks are not doing enough to combat Climate Change.
Their bosses travel in business class, they are busy financing fossil fuel projects, and cars that run in fossil fuels, new aircraft and expansions of airports, hotels and badly insulated buildings and homes. Then to crown it all they lobby hard to water down or delay regulations that could leave them with stranded assets like coal mines and fossil fuel power plants.
But your correspondent has noted that one change has started to occur by banks using the circular economy, and for that we must be eternally grateful or not?
But now they have started to recycle staff, and staff at the highest level.
Handelsbanken, one of the best banks here in the Nordics, trained a Danish guy for some 16 years and then appointed him to be CEO, only to find that he was impossible to work with when he got that job – so they sacked him after he was at the helm for 17 months. After a short time in purgatory.
Then Nordea, the biggest bank here, decided that he would make a good senior manager and tested him out in Denmark for a short time and then as the head of HR. Handelsbanken had said that he was impossible to work with because he never delegated, but Nordea says he is an ideal fit as CEO, even though they have only tested him as an Danish manager and as an HR boss for less than 2 years… (They also said that about the last one who managed to melt away have of the share price.)
Having the new man as a CEO is quite another matter and the short rise in Nordea’s share price upon the appointment is not any guarantee that he will be the Guardian Angel who will save Nordea from the fires of Hell…
… but at least he has been placed firmly in the circular economy.
The other one who was placed in the circular economy was the Swede who ended up running Swedbank. He came from the insurance and pension finance group called Folksam that owns a big hunk of Swedbank.
However, the big boss of Cevian Capital, the private equity investor Mr. Gardell, who likes to put bank and company shares into the circular economy by putting them through his washing machine, unfortunately said that Nordea has a better man than Swedbank at the helm. He is long of the shares of both banks, but we must assume he was more worried about the low price of Nordea shares. He was talking them up.
So the concluding remark must be that banks are beginning to catch on to climate change with all this recycling stuff… and we must suppose that we must be grateful for small blessings!
