Goldman Sachs Group Inc is walking away from the world’s biggest climate alliance for banks, in the latest sign that Wall Street is recalibrating its affiliation with such groups.
Goldman has decided to no longer be a member of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), the company said in a statement on Friday.
Firms are struggling to adapt to a deluge of increasingly fragmented environmental, social and governance (ESG) requirements from various standard-setters and jurisdictions. Goldman’s decision to leave NZBA was largely motivated by a need to comply with mandatory reporting guidelines, a person familiar with the matter said, adding that it would be helped by the rollout of the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the person said.
Photo: Getty Images via AFP
“We have the capabilities to achieve our goals and to support the sustainability objectives of our clients,” the bank said in a statement. “Goldman Sachs is also very focused on the increasingly elevated sustainability standards and reporting requirements imposed by regulators around the world.”
A spokesperson for NZBA declined to comment. Members of the group commit to achieving net zero financed emissions by 2050 at the latest and to set interim five-year decarbonization targets.
The move comes amid intense and growing pressure from the US Republican Party on such coalitions, as part of a wider attack by the party on what it has characterized as “woke” capitalism. Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton led a move to sue BlackRock Inc, Vanguard Group Inc and State Street Corp for allegedly breaching antitrust laws by using climate-friendly investment strategies to suppress the supply of coal.
That suit followed bans against ESG investing across numerous Republican-controlled states, with pressure expected to step up now that US president-elect Donald Trump is headed for a second term in the White House.
Against that backdrop, banks and asset managers have scaled back their association with high-profile climate groups.
In August, the asset management arm of Goldman said it had quit the world’s biggest climate alliance for investors, known as Climate Action 100+ (CA100+). Other firms that have quit the alliance include the asset management arm of JPMorgan Chase & Co and Pacific Investment Management Co.
On Friday, Franklin Templeton said it “won’t renew its status” as a signatory with CA100+.
CA100+, the world’s largest investor group formed to fight climate change, had been helpful in providing early-stages support, but Franklin Templeton has now built enough internal expertise around climate investing to no longer require the assistance of the group, the company said in a statement.
A separate climate alliance for insurers, NZIA, was gripped by an exodus last year, as firms responded to threats of antitrust litigation brought by US Republican state attorneys general, while a net zero alliance for asset managers suffered a blow when Vanguard, the world’s second-largest money manager, quit back in 2022.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
A proposed 100 percent tariff on chip imports announced by US President Donald Trump could shift more of Taiwan’s semiconductor production overseas, a Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) researcher said yesterday. Trump’s tariff policy will accelerate the global semiconductor industry’s pace to establish roots in the US, leading to higher supply chain costs and ultimately raising prices of consumer electronics and creating uncertainty for future market demand, Arisa Liu (劉佩真) at the institute’s Taiwan Industry Economics Database said in a telephone interview. Trump’s move signals his intention to "restore the glory of the US semiconductor industry," Liu noted, saying that
AI: Softbank’s stake increases in Nvidia and TSMC reflect Masayoshi Son’s effort to gain a foothold in key nodes of the AI value chain, from chip design to data infrastructure Softbank Group Corp is building up stakes in Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the latest reflection of founder Masayoshi Son’s focus on the tools and hardware underpinning artificial intelligence (AI). The Japanese technology investor raised its stake in Nvidia to about US$3 billion by the end of March, up from US$1 billion in the prior quarter, regulatory filings showed. It bought about US$330 million worth of TSMC shares and US$170 million in Oracle Corp, they showed. Softbank’s signature Vision Fund has also monetized almost US$2 billion of public and private assets in the first half of this year,