Good Governance Continues to Reduce COVID-19 Financial Damage

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Minneapolis, MN, October 26, 2020 – Magni Global Asset Management LLC (Magni) has continued to update its analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on equity valuations of countries. The previously documented outperformance continues through September 30, 2020. The effect is even stronger; the half of the investible world with better COVID-19 responses outperformed the other half by 15.61% year to date.

In June, Magni analyzed the impact of COVID-19 response on equity valuations. The Global COVID-19 Index continues to be used in this update as the measure of the effectiveness of a country’s response.

Other recent highlights:

Sweden, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates each made vast improvements in their medical responses, thus lifting all three into the top half of better responses to the pandemic.
South Africa and Egypt also made significant improvements, though not sufficient to move them into the top half.
Ireland and Greece dropped much lower into the bottom half with deteriorating medical responses.

“Magni believes the quality of governance is important investment information. The countries with changes in rank on pandemic response tended to have correlated equity market performance. The countries with good, yet stagnating ranks on pandemic response tended to have weaker market performance (e.g., Australia, Thailand),” said Kurt Lieberman, CEO of Magni. While past performance is not a predictor of future performance, Magni will be tracking to see whether the gaps continue or begin to close over time.

About Magni Global Asset Management

Magni Global Asset Management LLC is a leader in corporate governance research on countries and companies, focusing on the behavior of the entity. Magni developed the Sustainable Wealth Creation principles to evaluate country-level governance. The principles are based on widely accepted economic concepts regarding the accounting, legal, regulatory, adjudicative, and economic infrastructures of countries. Countries with strengths in these areas provide environments conducive to effective corporate governance. Magni’s extensive database contains research on countries across 280 qualitative factors over 17 years.

Magni established the Sustainable Value Creation principles to evaluate public companies. These principles were applied to analyze 468 qualitative factors on each company. In addition to researching each company’s relationship with its shareholders and employees, the assessment also includes relationships with customers, suppliers, competitors, and the communities in which a company operates.

For more information, please visit www.magniglobal.com, or follow us on Twitter @MagniGlobal.

Media Contacts:

Brad Hanson, Managing Director
Phone: 952-826-9610
[email protected]

Magni Global Asset Management

www.magniglobal.com

# # #