Target 17.13: Global macroeconomic stability
Enhance global macroeconomic stability, including through policy coordination and policy coherence
Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Why shareholder democracy is helpful
Macroeconomic stability is the province of central banks, finance ministries, the IMF and the Financial Stability Board. The board states that its decisions are not legally binding and that it operates by moral suasion and peer pressure. Corporate conduct still touches it in two documented ways. Shareholders have voted on systemic risk directly. Public Citizen's Bartlett Naylor won an SEC ruling requiring Citigroup to put a breakup study proposal to its 2016 annual meeting. A similar proposal at Bank of America in 2015 was rejected, though the bank later commissioned the study. Bank lobbying has also weakened safeguards. Executives of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank lobbied for the 2018 rollback that raised the strict-oversight threshold from 50 billion to 250 billion dollars. Critics drew a direct line from that deregulation to the 2023 bank failures. Owners of systemically important banks therefore hold a real but marginal lever, while the main stabilization tools remain public.
How this was scoredHelpful
Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Its financial policy advocate Bartlett Naylor filed shareholder proposals at Bank of America and Citigroup asking each bank's board to study whether divesting non-core business segments would enhance shareholder value.
2 campaigns on record
Appoint a Stockholder Value Committee of independent directors to address whether the divestiture of all non-core banking business segments would enhance shareholder value, and have it report publicly on its analysis no later than 300 days after the 2016 annual meeting.
Result: Proposal 8 at the annual meeting of 26 April 2016, not approved: 73,964,675 votes for, 2,004,403,208 against, 42,804,611 abstentions and 271,311,607 broker non-votes.
The SEC refused Citigroup leave to omit the proposal, so it reached the ballot over the company's objection, and that refusal rather than the vote is what this campaign achieved: about 3.6 percent of the shares voted for and against supported it. Citigroup had argued to the staff that a breakup study would be redundant given the more than 500 billion dollars of assets it had already disposed of through Citi Holdings, and that its board shared the proponent's goal of divesting non-core assets.
Promptly appoint a Stockholder Value Committee of independent directors to develop a plan for divesting all non-core banking business segments, and have it report publicly on its analysis no later than 300 days after the 2015 annual meeting.
Result: Proposal 8 at the annual meeting of 6 May 2015, rejected: 264,642,301 votes for, 6,146,554,975 against, 77,078,384 abstentions and 2,100,430,585 broker non-votes.
About 4.1 percent of the shares voted for and against. Naylor told International Business Times the following February that the bank had since hired a firm to conduct the breakup study, which is his account rather than anything a company document here confirms.
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is UN Sustainable Development Goals's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.