ISS and Glass Lewis have been pushing America’s largest corporations to the left.
President Trump issued a major executive order last Thursday that will help investors by kicking politics out of company boardrooms. It targets the proxy adviser industry, which advises pension funds, mutual funds and hedge funds on how to vote on corporate ballot items. This industry is long overdue for the “accountability, transparency, and competition” the order calls for.
Two firms, ISS and Glass Lewis, control roughly 90% of the proxy advisory market. Each is foreign-owned: ISS is majority-owned by Deutsche Börse Group; Glass Lewis is owned by Peloton Capital Management, a Canadian private-equity firm, and its chairman, Stephen Smith.
Aside from industry concentration and foreign ownership, two salient facts about these firms highlight the need for more federal oversight.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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James R. Copland is a senior fellow and director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of “The Unelected: How an Unaccountable Elite is Governing America.” Follow him on Twitter here.
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