Back in April, I noted a very useful paper by Caleb Griffin on ESG voting trends by Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street.
Professor Griffin has now posted a very useful and concise summary of his findings and conclusion at the CLS bog. I recommend it.
One of his findings strikes me as particularly troubling:
An analysis of the Big Three’s ownership and voting control over Fortune 250 companies reveals that they have the power to determine the outcome of as many as 49.1 percent of environmental proposals, that Vanguard and BlackRock combined (the “Big Two”) have sufficient voting control to determine the outcome of up to 35.1 percent of such proposals, and that Vanguard alone has sufficient voting control to determine the outcome of up to 15.8 percent of such proposals.
What doubles me about that finding is the power it shows the big three increasingly wield as the dominant investors of our time. Bigness by itself is not a crime, but Leviathans can wreak vast harm even unintentionally. It's past time for the SEC and the antitrust regulators to take a serious look at the big three.
