Your pension may also be invested in countries with repressive regimes which practise torture. Your holiday savings may well be financing companies which manufacture dangerous products like cigarettes. People concerned about such possibilities are increasingly trying to pressurize banks and financial institutions into investing ethically. And even some of the more obstinate of them are changing their behaviour. The British bank Barclays, for example, has recently withdrawn from investment in South Africa.
Money is very difficult to keep track of once it has left our hands.