Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor and likely future presidential contender, has opened up a new front in his party’s war on “woke capitalism”. He is proposing to change the rules around how public bodies within Florida borrow from the markets by issuing bonds.
The proposal is that they would no longer be able to work with ratings agencies that value the bonds using the ESG (environmental, social and governance) sustainability criteria that have become commonplace in the world of finance in the past few years. Public bodies and companies with lower ESG scores can see this reflected in their borrowing costs, and some politicians on the right object to this “interference” with market valuations.
