Finis

Today I wrote the conclusion for the proxy voting report I’ve been working on for about two months. My Preventable Surprises team agreed to spend 900 pounds today getting it designed and printed, very generous of them. Hopefully we can distribute it to the media at the end of next week.

I can’t tell you how tired I am of working on this. I am really ready to move on to something else--anything else. I had planned to do an article for Responsible Investor about the largest investors’ voting record on resolutions calling for alignment with the Paris Agreement. Then my contacts at the European Climate Foundation encouraged me to turn it into a report, which I’ve done. And then some. Here is the beginning of the intro:

"The shift to passive investments and ETFs set off an intense concentration of asset management in the US. The top five fund complexes managed 47% of the country’s mutual fund and ETF assets in 2016 compared with 36% in 2005, according to the Investment Company Institute.1 Not only is the slice of the pie growing for the top five, the pie is getting bigger. US investment companies managed $19.2 trillion in assets at year-end 2016, a 72% increase in a decade.

"With increased control of the stocks and bonds of America’s corporations comes increased scrutiny of investors’ fiduciary responsibility to clients, particularly on climate risk.”

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