BlackRock began renaming environmental, social and governance (ESG) earlier this year. It’s now calling it “transition investing.”
The company recently updated its climate and decarbonization stewardship guidelines. The document makes no mention of ESG, but it shows in many ways, the world’s largest investment manager with $10 trillion in assets under management is still pursuing many of the same goals.
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The Supreme Court held Thursday held that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) use of in-house judges violates the right to a jury trial guaranteed in the Constitution when the agency is seeking civil penalties.
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Advancing American Freedom, a conservative group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, is sounding the alarm about a Biden administration effort to collect Americans’ private financial information, according to a memo obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2012 authorized a program to make it easier for financial regulators to track transactions in U.S. markets by creating a “consolidated audit trail,” or CAT. This would require brokerages and exchanges to collect and report certain financial information to regulators and other financial organizations. Under the Biden administration, the SEC approved a new funding model for CAT in September 2023.
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A vote during the ExxonMobil 2024 shareholder meeting Wednesday will pit those who think an oil company should act according to the concerns of climate activists against those who think companies should act to produce the best investment returns for their shareholders.
It is the latest front in the growing fight between proponents and opponents of environmental, social and governance (ESG), as the movement struggles to maintain the clout to effect social change through investments.
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Electric vehicle (EV) maker Lucid Motors announced that the company would be laying off staff in a bid to lower expenses amid a slowdown in the market.
The layoffs will affect 6% of its workforce, equating to around 400 employees, and will trim from all employee levels, including leadership and mid-level management, according to a filing submitted Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Lucid is one of several EV makers to announce layoffs in recent months as consumers decline to adopt the product at the rate expected.
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Federal agents gathered evidence during the 2016 election that Hunter Biden had used access to his father on an official government trip to Beijing aboard Air Force Two to connect prospective Chinese business partners with then-Vice President Joe Biden, according to a massive cache of documents recently turned over to Congress and obtained by Just the News.
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Six major American financial institutions struggled to accurately assess the extent of their exposure to climate change and related risks, according to the Federal Reserve.
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Shareholders at auto manufacturing giant Ford Motor Co. voted down a proposal Thursday requiring that a report be compiled on the use of child labor in its electric vehicle (EV) line.
The proposal, which was presented by the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) at Ford’s annual shareholder meeting, called for Ford to report to shareholders the extent to which the company’s EV supply chain involves, depends or relies on child labor outside of the U.S., according to Ford’s proxy statement. The NCPPR called for the report due to the prevalence of child labor in the harvesting of the components used to craft EVs, particularly cobalt, which is commonly sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
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Requiring publicly traded companies to make climate-related disclosures has voluntarily been put on hold by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The SEC’s move came before a decision was reached by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. John Rady, counsel for the SEC in the case, notified the court in a letter.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) has been slammed with comments from supporters and critics of its proposed climate disclosure rule.
The release of the final rule has been continually delayed, but its publication is anticipated in the next few months. Congressional Democrats are urging for it to be done sooner rather than later.
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Washington’s revolving door is getting a fresh green paint job: Federal architects of a controversial new rule requiring businesses to measure their carbon footprints throughout their supply chains have joined a start-up company poised to reap millions by performing those calculations.
At least three ranking Securities and Exchange Commission officials have joined Persefoni, a company formed in 2020 for the purpose of measuring such footprints of large business enterprises.
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Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is the latest to join a coalition of attorneys general “demanding answers” from global investment firm BlackRock Inc., questioning its ability to manage funds passively.
Since August 2022, three groups of attorneys general representing 24 states have banded together in actions challenging company practices at BlackRock – the largest asset manager in the world and the first to reach $10 trillion in assets – claiming that it has allowed political persuasions to interfere with the investment of its clients’ funds.
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As former President Donald Trump’s social media platform soared to its best month ever, a growing number of Republicans in Congress are expressing concern that the Biden Securities and Exchange Commission may be slow-walking a compliance review to thwart a merger that could inject hundreds of millions of dollars into Truth Social from investors.
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Microsoft is laying off 10,000 employees, nearly 5% of its workforce, in what the tech company calls a \
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The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday announced charges against eight “social media influencers” in what the agency said was a coordinated effort to manipulate stocks via multiple Internet platforms.
The agency said in a press release those charged where involved in a $100 million securities fraud scheme in which they used the social media platforms Twitter and Discord to “manipulate exchange-traded stocks.”
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In the approaching 2022 midterm elections, American voters will have the opportunity to decide whether oil industry executives are really to blame for high energy prices—or if it’s instead the political class that needs a shakeup.
In a new report for Real Clear Energy, Joseph Toomey, a career-management consultant, makes a persuasive case that the energy inflation now victimizing American consumers and taxpayers is the result of deliberate public-policy choices made here at home. Even as President Biden vilifies energy companies, the evidence is overwhelming that the current regime in Washington is beholden to climate extremism at the expense of affordable energy, Toomey argues.
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A coalition of 16 Republican governors sent a letter Tuesday to President Joe Biden, urging him to rescind a proposal introducing a series of climate requirements for companies.
The recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposal, which forces publicly-traded companies to share so-called climate change risks and greenhouse gas emissions, would harm businesses and investors by adding high compliance costs, the governors argued in the letter addressed to both Biden and SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. The climate disclosure rule, they added, would also represent an overstepping of the SEC’s authority.
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America’s top financial regulator issued climate disclosure rules that are more burdensome for smaller companies than large companies, according to the agency’s own analysis.
While the rules would cost large corporations $640,000 at first and $530,000 in subsequent years, they would cost smaller publicly-traded companies $490,000 initially and $420,000 in following years, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said in its proposal. The regulator’s analysis suggests that smaller companies would feel a relatively larger financial burden as a result of the proposed disclosure rules.
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A group of 40 House Republicans sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Monday, urging the agency to rescind a regulatory proposal forcing companies to disclose “climate-related risks.”
The Republicans, led by House Oversight Subcommittee on Environment Ranking Member Ralph Norman, slammed the financial regulator, saying it exceeded its congressionally-mandated authority in issuing the climate rule, in the letter obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The lawmakers added that the rule was especially inappropriate given the ongoing energy crisis.
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The biggest decision the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is likely to make this year will be on mandated disclosure of information related to climate change and corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. The Commission has been working on the issue since early last year, and a new proposed rule is now scheduled to be released on March 21st. The contents of that rule will likely determine the future direction of “responsible” investing in the United States.
In March of last year, then-Acting Chair Allison Herren Lee issued a request for information on the matter, consisting of 15 questions and described as a response to the “demand for climate change information and questions about whether current disclosures adequately inform investors.” The questions covered a wide range of topics, from how to measure greenhouse gas emissions to how climate disclosures “would complement a broader ESG disclosure standard.”
When the SEC first issued guidance on climate change-related disclosures for public companies in 2010, the standards were fairly general and advisory, but the questions from last year’s request-for-information suggests that the agency’s leadership is considering a more aggressive and prescriptive framework.
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Corporations, including Citigroup, Apple and Match, are helping their employees undergo abortions in light of new, state-level restrictions.
Citigroup announced a policy of covering travel costs for U.S.-based employees seeking abortions “in response to changes in reproductive healthcare laws in certain states” in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing. The policy will cover airfare and lodging, according to Bloomberg.
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While Republican Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz has billed himself as a staunch opponent of big corporations, his ties to major technology and pharmaceutical corporations complicate his campaign rhetoric.
Oz, who announced his candidacy in late November, is running for the empty Senate seat left by retiring Republican Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey. The celebrity doctor has made opposition to major technology and pharmaceutical companies a hallmark of his campaign, pitching his experience working in television and exposing scams as an example of his anti-corporate positions.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) plans to crack down on private companies, forcing them to disclose financial and operation statements more frequently, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Regulators have grown more concerned over the lack of oversight regarding private fundraising for companies, the WSJ reported. The private investment market has become a popular way for companies to raise money without undergoing the regulatory scrutiny required for public trading.
“When they’re big firms, they can have a huge impact on thousands of people’s lives with absolutely no visibility for investors, employees and their unions, regulators, or the public,” SEC Commissioner Allison Lee told the WSJ. “I’m not interested in forcing medium- and small-sized companies into the reporting regime.”
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Electric truck manufacturer Nikola announced Tuesday it had settled fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), agreeing to pay the regulator $125 million.
The settlement is in response to allegations by the SEC that Nikola’s founder and former chief executive Trevor Milton misled investors about Nikola’s products and technological progress in order to boost the company’s share price. The SEC alleged that Milton misrepresented the anticipated costs and sources of electricity for its truck venture.
Milton was indicted by the Department of Justice in July on fraud charges, to which he pleaded not guilty.
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Federal regulators hit the largest bank in the U.S. with a $200 million fine Friday for failing to keep track of employees’ use of messaging apps, including WhatsApp, to evade federal record-keeping laws.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced Friday that a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase & Co. would pay $125 million after admitting to “widespread” record-keeping failures. The bank will pay an additional $75 million fine to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for allowing unapproved communications since 2015.
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Facebook is being investigated over leaked company documents and allegations by a former employee, according to financial filings.
The company’s 10-Q form filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday mentions that Facebook is “subject to government investigations and requests” seemingly related to documents leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen that detail tech giant’s business practices and internal research.
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A series of new leaks from Big Tech giant Facebook has revealed even more bias against conservatives from the company’s employees, even to the point of causing internal debates between employees and upper management, according to the New York Post.
The latest leaks come from message board conversations reviewed by the Post, which showed back-and-forth discussions within Facebook about how to deal with conservative news outlets during last year’s race riots by far-left domestic terrorist organizations such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
Some employees expressed their desire to completely remove sites such as Breitbart from Facebook’s “News Tab” feature. When one such employee asked a manager about doing so, the manager responded by pointing out that “we saw drops in trust in CNN 2 years ago,” before rhetorically asking “would we take the same approach for them too?”
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Another former Facebook employee filed a whistleblower complaint Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that the tech giant misled its investors by failing to combat the spread of hate and misinformation on its platform, The Washington Post reported.
The former employee, whose name is not yet public, alleged that Facebook executives chose not to pursue adequate content moderation policies related to hate speech and misinformation for the sake of maximizing profits. The complaint also alleges that Facebook did not do enough about alleged Russian misinformation on the platform for fear of upsetting former President Donald Trump.
In particular, the complaint alleges that Trump and his associates received preferential treatment, according to the Post.
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The top U.S. financial regulatory agency approved a rule that forces publicly-traded companies to reveal the diversity of their executive boardroom to investors.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted in favor of the rule, which will apply to all companies traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange, according to the text of the approval released Friday. The rule, first proposed by Nasdaq in December, will also require companies to hire at least one female director and one either minority or LGBTQ+ director to their boards.
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by Andrew Kerr A class-action lawsuit filed against the investing app Robinhood on Thursday just hours after it prohibited its users from purchasing GameStop stock is unlikely to be successful in court, legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. And federal regulators with the Securities and Exchange Commission…
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By Robert Romano In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a new transaction fee pilot that would “subject stock exchange transaction fee pricing, including ‘maker-taker’ fee-and-rebate pricing models, to new temporary pricing restrictions across three test groups, and require the exchanges to prepare and publicly post data,”…
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By Robert Romano In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a new transaction fee pilot that would “subject stock exchange transaction fee pricing, including ‘maker-taker’ fee-and-rebate pricing models, to new temporary pricing restrictions across three test groups, and require the exchanges to prepare and publicly post data,” according to the…
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By Robert Romano 114 out of the nation’s 1,400 multi-employer pension plans covering 1.3 million workers are underfunded to the tune of $36.4 billion, with plans expected to start going insolvent in the next 5 years or so, an Aug. 2017 analysis by Cheiron has found. This is the end result…
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