Sovereign bonds: Give us an E, give us an S… but maybe hold the G

Investors should stop pretending to care about ESG risks.

If their own research is to be believed, the world’s largest asset managers are fully seized of the importance of taking environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks into consideration when investing in sovereign Eurobonds.

Yet time and again, when it comes to the crunch, those same fund managers happily load up with long-term debt from regimes with weak governance and high political risk.

Take two recent bond sales from central and eastern Europe. On June 17, Belarus’s government raised $1.25

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