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CNBC: For public companies that haven’t yet committed to ESG reporting, it can be hard to know where to start. But the increasing pressure to participate—from regulators, politicians and investors— should leave no question about when to start: If you aren’t reporting ESG metrics yet, you are already behind.

A new report by the Nasdaq ESG Advisory Practice captures research on the ESG reporting trends of 800 leading global companies.

“Then I wished to know the truth about the fourth beast, which was different from all the others, exceedingly dreadful, with its teeth of iron and its nails of bronze, which devoured, broke in pieces, and trampled the residue with its feet.” Daniel 7:19 

“The right time to start ESG reporting was yesterday” says Meagan Tenety, Senior Lead ESG Advisor at Nasdaq, who lead the report. “Today, if you don’t already have something in place either from a regulatory or shareholder’s perspective, you are at risk of being left behind.” The risk is particularly acute for small- and mid-cap companies, Tenety says. “We’re seeing a dearth in disclosure among a lot of companies under a $10 billion market cap.

If these companies grow a little bit over the next couple of years, they could be in rough waters, particularly with investors. Read More

Zero Hedge: Equity futures are in the red Wednesday morning as Dr. Anthony Fauci’s warnings about the supposedly “dire threat” posed by the Delta variant continue to be dramatically amplified by the American media.

“The words of his mouth are iniquity and deceit: he hath left off to be wise, and to do good.’ Psalm 36:3 KJV

On Wednesday, Bloomberg published the latest in a series of stories effectively re-stating the same facts: the vaccination rate in a handful of deep-red states has substantially lagged the rate in the rest of the country. The lead-in for Wednesday’s story was the fact that the gap between the most- and least-vaccinated states has continued to widen. Though even Bloomberg concedes that “on a national level, the news appears good…the country’s vaccination campaign is among the most successful in the world…”

Source: Bloomberg

One academic quoted in the Bloomberg story, Timothy Callaghan, who studies rural health at Texas A&M, warned that “we’re going to have counties where vaccination is rare and nowhere close to herd immunity, and others where it’s high. We could be headed toward a divided country of haves and have nots.”

They also warned that an analysis last week of COVID cases in 700 counties found that the new delta variant first identified in India (which, according to Bloomberg, is “far more contagious”) has been found more often in less-vaccinated US counties.

But is the Delta variant really “far more contagious” than earlier iterations of SARS-CoV-2?

In a recent piece published by the Blaze, writer Daniel Horowitz explains that the existing data suggests Delta isn’t any deadlier or more infectious than other strains. Horowitz described the warnings from epidemiologists and public health bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci as “panic porn dressed up as science.”  Read More

Wolf Street: House prices soared by 14.6% from a year ago, according to the National Case-Shiller Home Price Index, the biggest increase in the data going back to 1987. But it pales compared to the raging mania that has taken hold of individual metros.

Today’s release, called “April,” is based on a three-month average of sales recorded in public records in February, March, and April, of deals made a month or two earlier. So that’s the time frame. The metros here – the most splendid housing bubbles – are in order of the biggest house price increases since the year 2000:

Los Angeles metro:

Prices of single-family houses in the Los Angeles metro jumped by 1.8% in April from March and by 14.7% year-over-year. All Case-Shiller Indices were set at 100 for January 2000. The index value for Los Angeles of 339 indicates that house prices soared by 239% since January 2000, despite the collapse during the Housing Bust, which makes Los Angeles the most splendid housing bubble on this list.

Read More