National Review By Andrew Stuttaford August 14, 2021
Late last year, I wrote a brief piece prompted by this Wall Street Journal report on a proposal by Nasdaq:
Nasdaq Inc. is pushing to require the thousands of companies listed on its stock exchange to include women, racial minorities and LGBT individuals on their boards, in what would be one of the most forceful moves yet to bring greater diversity to U.S. corporations.
The exchange operator filed a proposal with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday that would require listed companies to have at least one woman on their boards, in addition to a director who is a racial minority or one who self-identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. Companies that don’t meet the standard would be required to justify their decision to remain listed on Nasdaq.
Banks, asset managers and lawmakers in California have taken various steps to diversify the predominantly white and male boardrooms of American corporations. Nasdaq’s move could have greater impact because of its ability to set rules for the nearly 3,000 corporations listed on its exchange….
This did not strike me as a good idea. A company’s board is elected by the firm’s shareholders, or, to put it another way, its owners. That’s their right, and they should be left to get on with it without interference.
That Nasdaq believed that it was appropriate for it to intervene in this way is a reflection of the way that the principle of shareholder primacy is being eroded in an era in which stakeholder capitalism, an insidious and increasingly influential ideology in its own right, has become intertwined with the peculiarly aggressive variant of “socially responsible” investing (SRI) known as ESG, under which companies are benchmarked against various environmental (the ‘E’), social (‘S’) and, more reasonably, governance (‘G’) benchmarks.
More:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-woke-exchange-continued/?utm_source=blog-landing&utm_medium=desktop&utm_campaign=continue-reading
