EXCLUSIVE — Three of the world’s largest asset management firms have used retirement shares as leverage in corporate political fights to push environmental, social, and governance investing goals on Wall Street, a free market watchdog is claiming.BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street have effectively turned clients’ retirement accounts into pro-ESG voting power, according to a new report from the Bull Moose Project shared exclusively with the Washington Examiner.The Bull Moose Project, a populist conservatism advocacy group, found that the Big Three asset managers have cornered the market on “passive funds,” which many Americans rely on for retirement, to accumulate outsized voting power inside major American corporations.
These funds are considered “passive” because they simply track the stock market and are designed to replicate its performance. Mimicking market returns, passive funds fluctuate in accordance with the index they are tied to, such as the S&P 500 or Nasdaq.
The Bull Moose Project says passive funds that automatically mirror the market do not draw from detailed, company-specific research that informs how traditional active investors choose to cast shareholder votes. Rather, according to the Bull Moose Project, the massive reservoir of shareholder voting power consolidated by the Big Three is largely delegated to the whims of small “stewardship” teams inside these firms that focus on top-down ideologies and political trends, not bottom-up business analysis.
