United Church Funds (UCF) is celebrating the very successful campaign at pharmaceutical company Mallinckrodt, where a resolution that UCF sponsored on lobbying disclosures generated 79.7% support from the company’s shareholders.United Church Funds and Investors for Opioids Accountability (IOA) members congratulate Mallinckrodt for supporting the shareholder proposal regarding a report on lobbying activities and agree with…
Index Funds May be Able to Vote 41% of S&P 500 Shares in the Future | Corporate & Securities Law Blog – JDSupra
Research by Lucian A. Bebchuk, Harvard Law School, and Scott Hirst, Boston University School of Law, indicates three key index fund advisors could cast 34% of votes in the next decade at S&P 500 companies, and about 41% of votes at S&P 500 companies in two decades. The key index fund managers are BlackRock, Vanguard,…
Stocks: Too Many Companies Are Paying Too Much for Buybacks | Fortune
You know the rule: Buy low, sell high. Public companies, it seems, haven’t learned this basic investing lesson. They’re buying back more of their own shares than ever before: In 2018, on the heels of tax reform, the amount of buybacks surpassed $1 trillion in a year for the first time ever. While the amount…
VEA Vice Chair Nell Minow on Boeing: ‘There Is Something Wrong with the Board’
“By virtue of the fact that this company has ended up where it is, there is something wrong with the board, says corporate governance expert Nell Minow, Vice Chair of ValueEdge Advisors. “At the end of the day, the buck literally stops with them.”….A more detailed look reveals some concerning details around Boeing’s board composition….
Does ESG Investing Produce Better Stock Returns?
It’s time to put to rest the conventional wisdom that investing for anything other than shareholder value results in poor investor outcomes. There’s plenty of evidence that companies prioritizing ESG issues actually generate superior long-term financial performance across a range of metrics — including sales growth, return on equity (ROE), return on invested capital (ROIC),…
Amazon faces an enormous slate of shareholder proposals for the first time – CNN
Amazon received more resolutions than any other company this year, according to a count by Alliance Advisors. Although a few were either withdrawn by their proponents or excluded with the permission of the Securities and Exchange Commission, shareholders still will vote on 12 measures at Amazon’s annual general meeting on Wednesday, on issues ranging from…
These Six Corporations Are Supporting the Controversial New Abortion Bans
Investigative reporter Judd Legum of Popular Info has identified six major corporations who are supporting the state legislators behind the controversial new abortion bans: Coca-Cola, Eli Lilly, Aetna, ATT, Walmart, and Pfizer. He explains in the Twitter thread the laborious process of getting the information, the exact dollar amount of each contribution to each legislator…
Big Companies Pay CEOs for Good Performance—and Bad – WSJ
The mechanics of chief-executive pay have grown ever more complex, but the rules remain simple: Strong performers get a raise. So do most of the rest. For the fourth year straight, the biggest U.S. companies set CEO pay records in 2018, a Wall Street Journal analysis found, even as a majority delivered negative stock price…
We Three Kings: Democratizing Voting at the Index Fund Giants | Oxford Law Faculty
Law professor Caleb Griffin writes in the Oxford Business Law Blog offers three options for addressing the problem he sees in concentration of proxy voting rights in just a small handful of players, primarily index funds: Passive funds will soon own the majority of all U.S. equity assets, and the way they vote their proxies…
Billionaire Chairman’s Sons Are Cutting Deals With D.R. Horton – Bloomberg
VEA Vice Chair Nell Minow is quoted in an article about an insider transaction that raises some very significant conflict of interest concerns. Those are important details, said Nell Minow, the vice chairwoman of ValueEdge Advisors, which specializes in corporate governance. Before a public company approves a deal with fathers, sons or other related parties,…
