Every finitely generated group is weakly exact

Abstract

We show that every finitely generated group admits weak analogues of an invariant expectation, whose existence characterizes exact groups. This fact has a number of applications. We show that Hopf $G$-modules are relatively injective, which implies that bounded cohomology groups with coefficients in all Hopf $G$-modules vanish in all positive degrees. We also prove a general fixed point theorem for actions of finitely generated groups on $\ell_{\infty}$-type spaces. Finally, we define the notion of weak exactness for certain Banach algebras.