- As more banks participate in ESG and experiment with what they can get away with, people may lose access to their funds if they hold the wrong beliefs or lack good social credit score. This is already in place in China and all the big banks are looking at dipping their toes into this game.
PayPal already experimented with this and back-peddled when their stock dipped as a result. A few dozen big banks in the US are now participating in ESG. Only time will tell what they dare to implement.
This is bang-on. We're seeing daily examples of companies forcing their "values" on users, and it's most acute in big monopolies. It's fine to debate whether people should be kicked off twitter (they can just build their own lol), but depriving people of money in retaliation is a whole other level, only seen in places like Canada
ESG's are environmental, social, and governance metrics. It is a method of altering the behavior of businesses and individuals through incentives or in some cases disincentives. Rather than altering group and individual behavior through legislation, banks and financial institutions can alter the behavior of businesses and people using a social credit score.
The legislators of my state and several other states are actively fighting banks that exhibit this behavior. None of the small banks I interact with will ever participate in that concept.
The core idea is that pension funds should only invest in companies which are socially responsible. In order to achieve this, pension funds/large investors assign (or outsource the assignment of) scores to each companies based on each company's "Environmental, Social, and Governance" practices. As these have become more and more standard, large corporations have started changing their policies to improve their ESG scores. Pushing companies to be more responsible for externalities sounds good and reasonable, but the implementation gives a lot of power to the people who define and calculate ESG scores, and like all metrics, ESG scores are flawed and gameable. (A common complaint is that companies can get away with dispicable behavior by gaming the scores in other categories.)
These scores are currently a big deal on the right, since they tend to be based on socially liberal values and tend to push companies into left-leaning policies, but the left should be just as concerned about the trend given that the trend is to reduce the diversity of policies among the very large companies which (seek to) control our lives.
The chips in credit cards aren't damaged by magnetic fields. Mag stripes will eventually be discontinued. (For instance, cards from Mastercard won't have mag stripes after 2033.)
- barter economy when the power or network or website goes down.
- all transactions tracked.
- can have your money disabled by a 3rd party.
- transaction fees, particularly when traveling internationally.
- magnetic fields suck. Plastic gets brittle.