Deborah Goldberg, Massachusetts state treasurer and chairwoman of the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management board, has voiced her support for further integrating environmental, social and governance factors into the fund's investment processes, even as ESG has drawn fire in Florida and other states for allegedly conflicting with fiduciary duties to maximize returns for retirees.
At MassPRIM's regularly scheduled board meeting Thursday, Ms. Goldberg, said the ESG Committee the $91.9 billion fund set up last year to help build out its ESG framework would be better called the "common sense investment practices for the long term" committee.
There's been "a lot of 'misuse' of the term," said Ms. Goldberg, who pointed to the work MassPRIM has been doing since 2020 in conjunction with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to improve the quality of ESG measurement in the financial sector as helping to dispel the confusion.
Far from undermining fiduciary principles, taking ESG considerations into account is "what practical common sense business people and investors and, by the way, the ratings agencies have been doing for years," Ms. Goldberg noted.
The first meeting of the fund's ESG Committee will occur at the next board cycle, according to MassPRIM's agenda documents.
