The biggest use of cash among S&P 500 companies is making their public footprints smaller — a strategy that’s paid dividends in 2018.According to Goldman Sachs, aggregate share repurchases (or buybacks) rose by nearly 50 percent to $384 billion in the first half of 2018. That tops the $341 billion spent on capital expenditures, which…
Gender quotas make an impact in the boardroom
Ceramics manufacturer Villeroy & Boch has been around since 1748, but it recently faced a very contemporary problem. The company was forced to leave a position on its supervisory board vacant for several months, because it was unable to find a qualified female candidate.Franziska Giffey, Germany’s minister of family affairs, said Villeroy & Boch’s problem…
Gore Calls on Institutional Investors to Adopt ESG Focus | Chief Investment Officer
Former US Vice President Al Gore spoke to the choir Wednesday, receiving loud applause as he told the Principles of Responsible Investing annual conference that investing to combat climate change is part of their fiduciary role.Gore, speaking to institutional investors at the PRI conference in San Francisco, did not cite any specific economic papers but…
More institutional investors putting money on ESG – Pensions & Investments
ESG investing is growing in the U.S. among institutional investors, with issues such as climate change, gender diversity and weapons distribution garnering significant attention.Institutional assets invested under environmental, social and governance principles in the U.S. totaled $4.73 trillion at the start of 2016, a 16.9% increase from 2014, according to the U.S. SIF Foundation, Washington,…
SEC Rescinds Two Proxy Advisory Firm Letters
“Sentence first, verdict afterwards!” shouts the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. And apparently it is also what SEC Chairman Jay Clayton is doing in rescinding two 2004 proxy advisory firm letters BEFORE any testimony, comments, or fact-finding in the upcoming roundtable on the proxy system. “The staff is providing this notice of withdrawal…
Can Shareholders Make Guns and Gun Companies Safer?
VEA Vice Chair Nell Minow writes on Medium: In May, I wrote about shareholder initiatives at gun manufacturer Sturm, Ruger & Company to improve the board of directors and get better information about safety measures and mitigation of harm associated with company products, including efforts to improve gun safety and assessment of the corporate reputational…
Main Street Investors Coalition: Comes Sort of Clean and Also Does Not
Those rascals at the fake dark money front group Main Street Investors Coalition are at it again. Just to recap, this is the CEO-funded organization that has no relationship whatsoever to Main Street or investors and the only coalition it represents is the National Association of Manufacturers members and other corporations who provide its funding….
Indexed Investments and “The Problem of Twelve”
John Coates has a thoughtful paper on the legal and economic challenges of “the problem of twelve,” the prospect of a majority of shares in public companies being managed by just twelve entities, in effect twelve people. [T]he rise of indexing presents a sharp, general, political challenge to corporate law. The prospect of twelve people…
Trump and Warren are Both Wrong
Jesse Fried says that Senator Warren and President Trump both want to weaken shareholder oversight, Senator Warren with her legislative proposal and President Trump in asking the SEC to review elimination of quarterly reporting: In the absence of any solid evidence that shareholders harm firms, the case for weakening investors has been based on myths,…
Visualizing How the 50 Largest U.S. Companies are Connected
We love this analysis by The Visual Capitalist of the most interconnected boards: 3M (7 connections)The 3M board has 12 members on it, including people like the retired CEOs of Kroger and UPS, and the current CFO of Microsoft.As for board members in common, there are seven people on 3M’s board that have a connection…
