Woke and fiduciary spells trouble – Carosa
Herein lies the fiduciary conundrum: You must act in your client’s best interest. But what’s in your client’s best interest?
I missed the 1960s.
No, I didn’t mean to say I “miss” the 1960s, as in, having a longing for them, or a nostalgic reverence for them.
I literally missed the 1960s.
And not because I was born too late. I wasn’t. It’s just that I spent my elementary school years growing up in an ethnically diverse blue-collar community of mostly first-generation immigrants. It was the 1960s, but the older generation (like my grandparents) still lived as if we were in the middle of the Depression. The younger adults (like my parents) were a bit more advanced. Imagine Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It To Beaver.
I was raised surrounded by the innocent purity of the 1950s ethic, with perhaps a dash of Charlie Brown Christmas thrown in as a token deference to the then-current decade of the 1960s. It was an era where boys were taught to be gentlemen by holding doors open for girls. Get the picture?
Then my father got a new job in a different city. We moved to a more affluent (in comparison to where we came from) white-collar suburb. It was 1970. I was all of 10 years old.
I remember wanting to make friends with the new kids. I thought being polite might be the best strategy. So, one morning during one of the first days at my new school, I held a door open for a girl.
“Male chauvinist,” she snarled. All the boys and girls joined her in laughing at me.
I felt like Charlie Brown.
I was only 10. I was confused. I didn’t know what to do. I had been transported from the pleasant serenity of the square 1950s straight through to the radical activism of the hip 1970s.
I missed the 1960s.
Literally.
Today, oh so many decades later, I recognize what I experienced then was a clash of two cultures – the old and the new. Like two air masses bumping into each other, the front line was fraught with turbulence, uncertainty, and not a little fireworks.
The same cultural collision is occurring today.
It’s the old hangers-on vs. the new hopelessly woke. And it’s not for the faint of heart, with each side digging its heels in and plenty collateral damage shunted aside like so much highway roadkill. If you’re a fiduciary, you’d better take heed (see “Fiduciary Lessons from Ken Fisher Fallout,” FiduciaryNews.com, October 29, 2019).
Whether they like it or not, here’s the issue fiduciaries are facing: At what point does the pressure from social norms trump your legal obligation?
On the face of it, the experienced veteran would answer “never.” That used to be the consensus.
Not anymore.
As the Ken Fisher fiasco shows us, many believe it’s acceptable to remove business ties from a firm whose leader said something that upset a very vocal – aggressively vocal, at that – crowd. Yet, most – but definitely not all – recognize Fisher’s comments had no bearing on relevant fiduciary benchmarks.
But I don’t want to stir up an already buzzing hornets’ nest any further, for the issue of woke appears in other facets of fiduciary matters.
Little more than a decade ago, aspiring stock analysts would never be taken seriously if they mentioned anything akin to introducing socially responsible factors into their analysis. The old pros would laugh at them; thus, giving them their own Charlie Brown moment.
Most – but not all – stock analysts and portfolio managers today continue to be reluctant to risk their career betting on subjective ESG assessments rather than hard and fast accounting numbers.
Marketers in the industry, however, know better. They sense the demand among (primarily) younger investors to make a statement with their portfolios. And they’re seeking to meet that demand, even if they have to drag along with them the portfolio managers by their ears.
Herein lies the fiduciary conundrum. When managing the investments of a third party, you must assume the fiduciary mantle. This requires you to always act in your client’s best interest.
The wiggle room is this: What’s in your client’s best interest? Traditional fiduciary benchmarking has always been objective. The world of woke is an ever-changing thick fog of pea soup de jour. You never know what will be the next viral trigger that sets off the social media channels.
What’s a fiduciary to do? It’s confusing. They only have existing case law to fall back on.
I don’t have the answers. I left that particular crystal ball in my other multiverse. I can offer two things, though.
The first is a prediction. We won’t know the full extent of one’s fiduciary liability to “woke” until the next bear market. Bear markets do more than shrink the national treasure, they tend to clarify investing mistakes. And, man, someone’s got to pay for those mistakes.
The second is the lesson I learned when I was 10 years old.
Yes, being laughed at for behaving like a gentleman confused me – but only for a moment. While many of my peers simply refrained from holding doors open, I refused to concede the ethic from which I was initially brought up.
I continued to hold doors open for girls.
But I also began holding them open for boys, too.
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