Are Your Mutual Funds Building the World? Marco Vangelisti on PYP 421
Channel: Sick to Fit | Plant Yourself Podcast
Date: 2020-08-07

If you're fortunate enough to have savings, you've probably thought about how to invest them responsibly.

The standard answer is to stick your money into no-load mutual funds that track the market and leave it there for as long as possible. Low risk because of the diversification. Low fee because there's no genius managing your money, just an algorithm. And high return because over the long term, it's almost impossible to beat the market.

What could possibly be wrong with that?

Today's guest, Marco Vangelisti of Essential Knowledge for Transition, points out that all the bad things that are happening on the planet right now - habitat destruction, pollution, climate instability, oceanic dead zones, massive poverty and income inequality, social and political unrest, rising fascism - all funded in part or wholly by those very mutual funds.

If you're an ethical vegan, you might think that a portfolio that excludes Perdue, Dannon, and Tyson Farms would be in concert with your values. But if you're invested in mutual funds, with hundreds or thousands of companies' equities represented, you're what Vangelisti calls an "unaware and extractive" investor. Your capital returns are essentially theft, either from the earth's natural resources that have been commandeered by a private institution at the expense of the commons, or from exploited people (whether laborers or inhabitants of areas that are being exploited).

In our conversation, Marco shares the problems with mainstream investing, and offers several tiers of investment approaches that range from "aware" to "no harm" to "positive impact" to "regenerative."

He also offers his perspective on risk, given the stock market's current untethering from reality and the historical crashes that have followed periods like the one we're living through now. As in, perhaps a strategy that maintains capital is actually less risky than all those mutual funds if the market is likely to crash within the next ten years.

And he gives specific suggestions for places to invest to reverse climate change, empower Black and minority entrepreneurs, and defund the war industry.

I'm signed up for Marco's course on Aware and No-Harm Investing, and he's offered a 20% discount to Plant Yourself listeners. Go to EK4T.com/register and choose the TANHI course option, and enter the discount code PLANT in the bottom field.
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