The EU wants to become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. That will not work without massive government investments and subsidies. The EU's “Green Deal” is the conceptual basis for this change. Indirectly, the state's policy will also trigger price inflation in “green” stocks. Green price bubbles could emerge at some point in the 2020s.

Banks have earned about $3.6 billion in fees in 2021 from arranging sales of ESG bonds for companies and governments. That is more than double the $1.6 billion banks pocketed so far this year from issuing debt for fossil-fuel companies. About $750 billion of ESG bonds have been issued this year, compared with $468 billion during all of 2020.

Institutional investors rushed to buy the UK’s first green sovereign bond with a 0.87% yield. The government will launch Green Savings Bonds through the national savings scheme. If it offered the “market-leading rate” for retail savings of 1.8%, the scheme would cost taxpayers £210m per year. Setting the rates lower could look unattractive to customers.

Global debt rose to a new record high of nearly $300 trillion in the second quarter of 2021. China has seen a steeper rise in its debt levels compared with other countries, while emerging-market debt excluding China rose to a fresh record high at $36 trillion. Debt among developed economies, especially the euro area, rose again in the second quarter.

SDX received the go-ahead from the Financial Market Supervisory Authority to operate a stock exchange and a central securities depository for digital assets in Switzerland. This authorization enables SDX to go live with a regulated, integrated trading, settlement, and custody infrastructure based on distributed ledger technology for digital securities.

Sustainable investment assets grew to $35.3 trillion globally last year. But the bulk of that money, some $25 trillion, is in a strategy called “ESG integration,” also known as “ESG consideration.” This means that managers are including ESG data in their financial models, but they’re not necessarily compelled to act on that information.

The value of the world’s stock of negative-yielding debt has ballooned to more than $16.5tn. Germany’s 10-year yield fell to minus 0.51%, the lowest level since early February. The country’s 30-year yield has also fallen beneath zero. All of Germany’s debt, which serves as a reference for bonds across the eurozone, now trades at negative yields.

The ECB president spoke Thursday as the central bank put into action the new monetary policy strategy. The measures reinforce the ECB’s efforts to convince markets that it will keep ultra-loose policy, including record-low negative interest rates. The ECB’s promise of continued ultra-loose policy sets it apart from some of the world’s biggest central banks.

Demand for exchange traded funds investing in senior loans has rocketed this year as investors hunt for respite from rising inflation. A net $7.3bn has been pumped into the sector so far this year. The trend is linked to rising inflation and interest rate expectations in the US and elsewhere, leading investors to favour floating-rate loans over fixed-rate bonds.

The 11 largest banks in the EU have €532 billion of investments and loans financing everything from extraction to transportation of fossil fuels, equivalent to 95% of their total common equity tier 1 capital. A sudden drop in value of these “fossil-fuel assets” would deplete the banks’ capacity to absorb losses and might even leave them vulnerable to bankruptcy.

The central bank said bond purchases under the €1.85tn pandemic emergency purchase programme (PEPP) would continue in the three months to September. Although the economy was “gradually reopening” and inflation was expected to continue rising this year, the central bank expected price growth to fade again next year.

The rich across the globe have big ambitions for sustainable investing. More than half still believe they have to sacrifice returns to invest in a sustainable way. The results from the study come after a survey last year showed the new generation of wealthy people prioritizes financial returns over do-good strategies just as much as their parents did.