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(Mark Hulbert, an author and longtime investment columnist, is the founder of the Hulbert Financial Digest; his Hulbert Ratings audits investment newsletter returns.)
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (Callaway Climate Insights) — Sitting right beneath our noses is a way to more or less immediately and significantly reduce green companies’ cost of capital.
All that needs to happen is for financial institutions to create so-called “safe asset” deposit accounts (checking and savings accounts, along with money market funds) that pay a modestly-below-market interest rate and whose deposits are then loaned only to green companies.
With this otherwise modest change, a new study argues, “green investments in the economy would ... quadruple in the medium,” and green companies would have a plentiful source of cheaper capital.