Blackstone Hires Global Head of ESG for Private Equity

Amisha Parekh joins the private equity firm from Bloomberg’s sustainable finance unit.


Private equity firm Blackstone has named Amisha Parekh as its global head of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) approaches for private equity. As a managing director within the firm’s portfolio operations group, Parekh will lead ESG diligence, policy development and strategy, and reporting for all businesses in the firm’s private equity reporting segment.  

Blackstone said Parekh’s hiring is part of its strategy to increase ESG integration across the investment lifecycle and make ESG the core focus of its operational intervention and asset management strategy.

“Executing against our ESG efforts and creating positive impact across our portfolio is imperative to delivering value to our clients,” Joseph Baratta, Blackstone’s global head of private equity, said in a statement. “Amisha will be a critical partner in these efforts and I’m thrilled to welcome her to the firm as we continue to build and operationalize an industry-leading ESG platform at scale.”

Parekh joins Blackstone from Bloomberg, where she was most recently head of the company’s ESG data acquisition and curation efforts, and where she helped launch Bloomberg’s sustainable finance product offering. Prior to Bloomberg, Parekh was a senior manager at Deloitte, where she worked on corporate strategy projects and helped manufacturing, consumer goods, and retail clients develop sustainability strategies and improve operational performance. She is also an adjunct professor of business strategy for sustainability at Glasgow Caledonian New York College.

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Parekh earned her Master of Business Administration degree from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, a master’s in environmental policy and behavior from the University of Michigan, and a bachelor’s in computer science from SUNY Binghamton.

Last year, Blackstone pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 15% among all new investments globally where it controls energy usage within the first three years of ownership. It has also set a goal of having at least a third of its representation on portfolio company boards for new control investments be diverse.

“I look forward to deploying Blackstone’s scale and expertise to help drive value for our investors by creating impact across our private equity portfolios,” Parekh said in a statement. “I’m impressed by Blackstone’s commitment to ESG integration across the firm and look forward to contributing to the growth of its ESG efforts.”

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Whew, Crypto’s Correlation to Stocks Seems to Be Over

Bitcoin has been arm in arm with the S&P 500 for months, raising questions about its use as an alt.

Whew, Crypto’s Correlation to Stocks Seems to Be Over

 

Bitcoin has been arm in arm with the S&P 500 for months, raising questions about its use as an alt.

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Cryptocurrency, an outlier investment extraordinaire, has been correlated to the stock market for months, but this link may finally be breaking. After all, crypto pretty much embodies an alternative investment, one that doesn’t jibe with stocks, which depend on such prosaic things as earnings.

Since its Sept. 2 peak, the S&P 500 had fallen 3% as of yesterday, while the largest crypto denomination, Bitcoin had increased 9%. The stock index nudged up again yesterday, as Bitcoin lost around 2%.

both had been rising in tandem, something one doesn’t expect from Bitcoin. And that made a lot of institutional investors—at least those who are open to digital currency—leery that crypto in general and Bitcoin in particular weren’t doing what alts should do. Namely, zig when stocks zag.

Well, crypto’s bona fides as an alt have been restored, according to strategists at JPMorgan—in a research note, JPM’s Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou made that point. He added that institutional investors likely would be coming back to Bitcoin. One allurement, he continued, is that Bitcoin likely will be a better hedge against inflation than gold, a traditional refuge during times of rising prices. Which we may well be entering now.

Certainly, this unlinking of crypto from stocks may have more to do with the volatile nature of the asset class. On the negative end, China has moved to ban using crypto for many transactions. On the positive side, Bank of America has issued a report saying crypto had grown so swiftly that it now is part of the financial terrain, like it or not. Bitcoin these days commands a $1 trillion market cap, which furthers the argument that it is a good, if erratic, store of value. The same has long been said of gold, which also is known for its volatility.

Meanwhile, George Soros’ fund has disclosed that it owns some crypto. US Bancorp’s became the latest example of an establishment financial company planning to debut a crypto custody service for institutional investors. Plus, Brazil is looking at possibly making Bitcoin legal tender.

But skepticism abounds about crypto. Brian Mosoff, CEO of Ether Capital, told Bloomberg that, yes, crypto was very much a risk-on asset like equities. Still, he said, a lot of investors “don’t yet have full conviction that the asset class is here to stay.” 

 

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