As we knew they would, the Wall Street Journal is whining about the Biden administration’s initiative on private equity’s mistreatment of employees. Their fraudulent argument is based on distorted facts, hysterical, sneering rhetoric, and logical fallacies. See comments in bold. Biden officials last month launched a campaign to leverage worker retirement savings to promote their…
Shareholder Proposals on Bank Risk from Climate
The real headline here is in the final sentence below, so let us put it up top and in bold: JPMorgan Chase JPM, Citigroup C, and Royal Bank of Canada RY have agreed to the shareholder proposals from he New York City Employees’ Retirement System to disclose a metric it calls the Clean Energy Supply…
Rhode Island Pension Fund Files A Motion Regarding the Outrageous Shari Redstone/Paramount Proposal
The mess at Paramount will be a business school case study for decades. The short version: three directors and the CEO have left as Shari Redstone is pushing for a complicated merger deal that benefits her over the other shareholders, despite a better offer for all shareholders from another group. That is several kinds of…
ESG is About Opportunity as Well as Risk
The Environmental Protection Agency announced this morning it will distribute $20 billion to eight groups through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a major climate initiative under the Inflation Reduction Act that aims to spur clean energy in places long overlooked across the country at a time when the U.S. is struggling to meet President Joe…
White House Pushes Pension Funds to Consider Labor Standards
White House officials will meet on Tuesday with leaders from five major pension funds who have committed more than $1 trillion in capital requiring robust labor standards in private-equity investments, in an effort to push more funds to follow suit.Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend. The…
Anti-DEI Is the Extreme Right’s Smokescreen
Remember the Wizard of Oz saying, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?” Remember the way magicians use misdirection to hide the mechanics of their tricks? Remember “the best defense is a good offense?” Well, what the extreme right is doing by blaming DEI for everything that goes wrong is just a billionaire-funded…
The Tesla Board Still Doesn’t Understand the Job
The well-known definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. The should-be well-known definition of a board that fails to meet any concept of independent judgment or fiduciary obligation to shareholders is Tesla. Facing criticism that it is overly beholden to Elon Musk, Tesla’s board of directors said on Wednesday…
Will the Rules on Incentive Pay We’ve Been Waiting for Since 2010 Finally Happen?
Long-dormant efforts to restrict Wall Street pay have returned to the agenda as regulators make another push to address unfinished business from a 2010 financial overhaul. Banking regulators are planning to revive a proposal that would require big banks to defer compensation for executives and take back more of their bonuses if losses pile up,…
Michael Frerichs Rebuts the Anti-ESG Arguments
We are big fans of Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs and highly recommend the entire text of his excellent essay rebutting the arguments against ESG: We are witnessing a widespread, highly coordinated, politically motivated attack on investors and the hard-working people they serve. This pushback is anti-free market and anti-investor, and it is misleading and…
Will Delaware Legislators Overturn a Rare Pro-Shareholder Court Decision?
A recent very narrow pro-shareholder decision by the Delaware courts is so concerning to corporate insiders that they are pushing the legislature to pass a law overturning it. In the decision, the court ruled that a contract giving one person control over many key corporate decisions, including approval of all members of the board, violated…
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