Companies have responded to the recent focus on board composition and refreshment by onboarding new directors. According to the 2017 Spencer Stuart U.S. Board Index, 397 new independent directors were elected to S&P 500 companies in 2017, representing a 15% increase over the same period in 2016. Meanwhile, companies are expanding the kinds of attributes…
Main Street Investors Coalition’s Latest Lie
They have no connection to Main Street or investors, and the only coalition they represent is the group of corporations and CEOs who fund them. They adopt a fake folksy name and use “we” about investors and put endearing stock photos of ordinary people and slick graphics in their tweets. They cite their affiliate organizations…
US SIF: Sustainable, Responsible, and Impact Investing Trends Report
US SIF has published a new report on sustainable, responsible, and impact investing trends, noting a one-third increase: The demand for sustainable and impact investing is growing—investors now consider environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors across $8.72 trillion of professionally managed assets, a 33 percent increase since 2014. Money managers and institutional investors are scrutinizing…
Exxon Must Face Class-Action Suit Over Climate-Change Accounting – Bloomberg
Bloomberg reports: Exxon Mobil Corp. must face a lawsuit by investors who blamed a drop in the company’s shares on the disclosure that regulators were scrutinizing its reserve accounting related to climate change. U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade on Tuesday denied Exxon’s bid to dismiss the suit. Kinkeade wrote that the Greater Pennsylvania Carpenters Pension…
CEO pay jumps to $19 million annually, as fears mount over the wealthy pocketing gains – The Washington Post
A nice synchronicity with the announcement of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed Accountable Corporations Act. The article below, says that stock grants and stock options “can lead to substantial paydays for CEOs when companies perform well in the market.” We note that they lead to substantial paydays when the market as a whole performs well, even…
Support for Senator Warren’s Accountable Corporations Act
Leading scholars and practitioners have written to endorse Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed Accountable Corporations Act. Dear Senator Warren, We are a group of long-term scholars and practitioners of the law, finance, and economics of corporations and other business entities. We write you now in support of your Accountable Capitalism Act. We believe legislation along these…
Elizabeth Warren unveils bold new plan to reshape American capitalism | US news | The Guardian
We are delighted to see corporate governance become a central issue in the political debates shaping up for the next Presidential election, though we have some hesitation in endorsing some of the ideas in Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed Accountable Capitalism Act. We do not think of this proposal as “redistributing wealth,” however, as The Guardian…
Treasury says some banks are not financial-services firms, giving them a new tax break
We’re living in the world of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty…
Will the Left Get Fooled Into Abandoning Worker Pensions?
A very important piece by David Webber: In the past decade, one of the few hopeful developments in an often bleak labor landscape has been the rise of a new form of activism built on the power of labor’s $3.5 trillion pensions. A new class of activists at the AFL-CIO Office of Investment, the American…
In Which We Hear (Indirectly) from Main Street Investors Coalition and Get a Surprising Claim About Their Views on Climate Change
When our post on the SEC Proxy Roundtable was reprinted on the Conference Board’s corporate governance blog, it elicited a response from Main Street Investors Coalition advisory board member Bernard Sharfman, who challenged our assertion that the corporate-funded fake front group led by a former energy industry lobbyist is a climate change denier. We have…
