ImpactAlpha Podcasts

On episode 5 of our special series, Beyond Tradeoffs, produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network, David interviews Roy Swan and Christine Looney about Ford Foundations Mission Investment strategy.

In Episode 4 of ROI's Beyond Trade-offs series, produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network, Vishal Mehta of Lok Capital recalls how the Delhi-based impact investor blended venture capital and grant funding to build markets for financial services, health care and education for low-income Indians.

Today on ROI, we feature an interview with Ommeed Sathe of Prudential Financial in the third episode of Beyond Tradeoffs, produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network. Prudential, a serious institutional investor with nearly $1.4 trillion in assets, is demonstrating that is possible to incorporate impact strategies within the norms and constraints faced by institutional investors. Their $800 million impact portfolio is invested with a specific mandate to show measurable benefits in financial inclusion, affordable housing preservation, educational excellence, workforce development and sustainable agriculture and other areas.

In the second episode of ImpactAlpha’s “Beyond Trade-offs” podcast series, produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network, Goldman Sachs’ John Goldstein charts the development of “risk-return-impact” frameworks that meet the needs of institutional investors. One of his jobs, he says, “is to help Goldman’s investors do better at doing what they do by incorporating environmental, social and governance into how we invest for all our clients.”

In a new series of podcasts produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network, ImpactAlpha asked a range of investors, from fully “market-rate,” to unapologetically concessionary, what lies… Beyond Tradeoffs. What we heard is that investors of all types are finding strategies to avoid specific and systemic risks, to be aligned with long-term trends, to generate tangible and measureable social and environmental benefits and to otherwise meet their objectives – all along the continuum of risks and returns.

Hidden within the $3.8 trillion market for U.S. municipal bonds are not only mispriced social and environmental risks, but huge potential for on-the-ground impact in historically disadvantaged neighborhoods. On this episode, David Bank chats with Eric Glass about how Alliance-Bernstein approaches municipal bonds with an impact lens.

According to billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, capitalism is not working well for the majority of Americans. In a recent essay he argues that it is producing self-reinforcing spirals up for the haves and down for the have-nots and that these conditions pose an existential risk for the U.S. In the latest episode of ImpactAlpha’s Returns on Investment podcast, the roundtable regulars took up the challenge as well, with a provocative discussion of inequality and the age-old tension between capital and labor.

The dramatic fall from grace of Bill McGlashan, co-founder and former CEO of TPG Growth and The Rise Fund, after being indicted in the Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal, Rose-Smith suggests, may say more about private-equity and alternative-investment asset management in general than about impact investing in particular.

Are newspapers and newsmagazines "impact investments"? And are the billionaires who buy them making a positive impact? Listen in as David, Imogen, and Brian take up the topic of impact investing in news media on the latest episode of ROI

Newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has galvanized the political debate with a proposed Green New Deal that would rely primarily on government financing to pay for the required investments in climate-friendly agriculture, transportation, buildings, manufacturing and, of course, energy. In the latest Returns on Investment podcast, roundtable regulars Brian Walsh and Imogen Rose-Smith tried to force ImpactAlpha’s David Bank into his own awkward choice: private capital or government funding?