The last decade produced endless articles about Why passive investing is bad for some reason. I always thought the voting one was most interesting but Vanguard/Blackrock mostly abstained.
The last couple of years Blackrock has been swinging way more to being activist investors of our passive investments. They released their 2021 Stewardship Expectations and they had a 61% increase in engagements across 2000 global companies last year.
Quote:
Voting for impact
• Our votes against directors on pay led to changes
by over 80% of companies
• Our votes against directors on diversity led to
improvements by more than 40% of companies
• Companies responded to 75% of shareholder
proposals that attracted over 30% support
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If they want to use it, we've sort of indirectly given a few companies a lot of influence over how many public companies operate.