Corporate governance - Vigil

When Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, speaks to reporters in a webcast news conference on Wednesday afternoon, he’s likely to face questions about a simmering topic: inflation.

Companies are spending more money on dividends and share repurchases after pausing or shrinking them last spring in an effort to preserve cash during the coronavirus pandemic.

Companies’ adoption of an annual shareholder vote on their climate strategies, or Say on Climate, has arguably been the most dominant issue of the 2021 proxy season. Since the first management proposal arrived on shareholders’ ballots, at the Spanish infrastructure operator, Ferrovial SA, we have seen a number of both management and shareholder proposals on this topic, all of which varied to some degree.

When, on August 19, 2019, several hundred CEOs of major corporations signed the Business Round Table declaration that the fifty-year commitment to ‘maximizing shareholder value’ was no longer the goal of big business and that these firms shared ‘a fundamental commitment to all our stakeholders,’ many wondered what, if any, corporate behavior would change. The answer is becoming clear: not much.

Focus is on how Jack Ma won speedy permission for stock listing last year

Lyft is selling its autonomous vehicle division to a subsidiary of Toyota — the latest in a series of acquisitions that is seeing the world of self-driving cars grow increasingly smaller.

We were told we were all in this together, I recall, when COVID-19 emerged and the havoc it would wreak on the world’s economy was still unknown. Companies announced that their CEOs, executive teams or boards would take a pay cut – it was the right thing to do, after all.

China is set to report its first population decline since records began in 1949 despite the relaxation of the government’s strict family planning policies, which was meant to reverse the falling birth rate of the world’s most populous country.

The gap between executive compensation and average worker pay has been growing for decades. Chief executives of big companies now make, on average, 320 times as much as their typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1.

Canadian National Railway said on Monday quarterly profit fell 3.6 per cent as the COVID-19 pandemic hit shipment volumes of coal, petroleum and chemicals.

India ordered its armed forces on Monday to help tackle surging new coronavirus infections that are overwhelming hospitals, as countries including Britain, Germany and the United States pledged to send urgent medical aid.

As Constellation scaled up, its executives began scouting for larger takeovers, targets worth $300-million or more. And that’s when Mr. Leonard found he had something in common with high-school students with a fear of missing out on the cool kids’ parties.

When the central bank boss sat down (virtually) to chat with me and my colleague Mark Rendell last week, he insisted that he has no plans to pursue a more activist role for the Bank of Canada in the climate fight. He doesn’t intend to follow the lead of the European Central Bank, which is expanding its purchases of green bonds and is considering focusing its corporate-bond-purchase program on green assets, nor the Bank of England, which recently amended its formal inflation-fighting mandate to include an additional objective of supporting the transition to a net-zero-carbon economy.

Big cities lost residents, as younger households left for the suburbs and older people accelerated retirement moves, while fewer newcomers came to take their places

Officials are expected to keep policy on hold while acknowledging recent improvements in hiring and inflation data

Joe Biden is set to sign an executive order forcing federal contractors to pay a minimum wage of $15 an hour as the US president ramps up pressure on businesses to offer higher pay to their employees.

Exxon Mobil Corp.’s proxy battle with a fund manager intensified after the activist investor accused the oil giant of obscuring the trajectory of its greenhouse gas emissions through disingenuous reduction targets.

Top shareholders said they would vote against re-electing key Credit Suisse Group board members, a broadside against the bank’s leadership following a $5.5 billion loss from hedge fund Archegos Capital Management.

Canadian National Railway Co. says it will begin takeover talks with target Kansas City Southern in the coming days, as Canada’s largest railway steps up efforts to block rival Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd.’s purchase of the U.S. carrier.

COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths among children remain rare – even with more infectious and deadly variants of the coronavirus, pediatric specialists say. But amid high rates of infection among the general population, the likelihood of severe disease in children increases.

The electric-car maker’s performance reflected increasing sales and production around the world.

BCE, Canada’s largest telecommunications firm by stock market value, said it’s the unnamed company Shaw mentions in a regulatory filing on Friday. The documents outline a bidding war that unfolded in the weeks before Rogers announced a deal March 15 to buy Shaw for $40.50 a share.

Shareholders holding more than 15 per cent of Credit Suisse 
stock want to oust the board’s risk committee chairman, Andreas Gottschling, after investments imploded, the Financial Times reported on Monday, following a similar call by proxy adviser Glass Lewis.

The Missouri-based railway, the target of a bidding war between the two Canadian rail carriers, said Saturday it will negotiate with CN to determine if CN’s higher offer is a “superior proposal” to that of CP.