Target 17.13: Global macroeconomic stability
Enhance global macroeconomic stability, including through policy coordination and policy coherence
Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Why shareholder democracy is helpful
Macroeconomic stability is the province of central banks, finance ministries, the IMF and the Financial Stability Board. The board states that its decisions are not legally binding and that it operates by moral suasion and peer pressure. Corporate conduct still touches it in two documented ways. Shareholders have voted on systemic risk directly. Public Citizen's Bartlett Naylor won an SEC ruling requiring Citigroup to put a breakup study proposal to its 2016 annual meeting. A similar proposal at Bank of America in 2015 was rejected, though the bank later commissioned the study. Bank lobbying has also weakened safeguards. Executives of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank lobbied for the 2018 rollback that raised the strict-oversight threshold from 50 billion to 250 billion dollars. Critics drew a direct line from that deregulation to the 2023 bank failures. Owners of systemically important banks therefore hold a real but marginal lever, while the main stabilization tools remain public.
How this was scoredHelpful
Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Its financial policy advocate Bartlett Naylor filed shareholder proposals at Bank of America and Citigroup asking each bank's board to study whether divesting non-core business segments would enhance shareholder value.
2 campaigns on record
Appoint a committee to study whether divesting all non-core banking business segments would enhance shareholder value, and report the findings within ten months.
Result: not stated in source
The SEC rejected Citigroup's attempt to block the proposal and required management to put it to a shareholder vote.
Study whether divesting non-core banking business segments would enhance shareholder value.
Result: Rejected by shareholders
The bank subsequently hired a firm to conduct a breakup feasibility study.
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is UN Sustainable Development Goals's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.