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“Perilous Profiteering: The companies building nuclear arsenals and their financial backers”

$63 billion drop in investments: New report shows impact of nuclear weapons ban treaty on nuclear weapons business, ICAN, 

Anew report released by ICAN and PAX today, has found that the number of banks, pension funds, asset managers and insurance companies investing in the production of nuclear weapons has gone down in 2021, and shows significant drops in the shareholder values of investments in the 25 companies involved in nuclear weapon production around the world. There is also an early but visible impact of the entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), with many institutions citing the treaty’s entry into force and the risk of a negative public perception as reasons for the change in their investment policies.

The 2021 report “Perilous Profiteering: The companies building nuclear arsenals and their financial backers” exposes the banks, pension funds, asset managers and insurance companies investing in the production of nuclear weapons and examines the companies involved in producing, manufacturing, or developing nuclear weapons for six of the nine nuclear armed countries for which data was available between January 2019 and July 2021. 

Download the Executive Summary

Download the full report

Key findings from the report:

• While $685,184 million was made available to the 25 nuclear weapons producing companies during this period, this actually marks a $63 billion drop from the 2019 “Shorting our security”report, a trend that is affecting the producing companies’ stock holdings. There is also a marked shift in how the nuclear industry is raising funds to off-set debt, from significant loans to issuances, and underwriting of bond issuances rose by $80 billion.
• Northrop Grumman is the biggest nuclear weapons profiteer, with at least $24 billion in outstanding contracts, not including the consortium and joint venture revenues. Raytheon Technologies and Lockheed Martin also hold multi-billion-dollar contracts to produce new nuclear weapon systems. 

Table on original lists the top 10 investors in nuclear weapons –Vanguard, State street, Capital Group, Blaxk Rock, Bank of America, Citigroup, J P Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley

The Good news:

• In 2021,127 financial institutions stopped investing in companies producing nuclear weapons, valued at $31 billion. .

• Several of these institutions are from states that joined the TPNW, including the Bank of Ireland and AIB (Ireland), and Investec (South Africa), but they are not the only ones. Exclusions by financial institutions based in nuclear-armed states or allied countries are worth billions, such as Longview Asset Management (U.S.) which divested $5.7 billion from General Dynamics or Nomura (Japan) which divested $273 million from Larsen & Toubro.
• The nuclear weapons industry itself is getting smaller, with companies acquiring or merging together, which in turn makes it easier for financial institutions and other investors to exclude them from investments. Instead of tracking down hundreds, or even thousands of contributors to catastrophic threats, it’s simply a matter of exiting a few relationships

November 13, 2021 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, business and costs, weapons and war