Bubbles, BRICs and Benchmarks: Rethinking Risk in a Global Portfolio
The Global Savings Glut In our digital age, the speed of communication and of capital has “flattened” the globe, heightened competition, increased economic interdependence and driven up volatility in markets around the world. Welcome to the global village. In this new global economy emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China (the “BRICs”) are shouldering aside developed nations as rapid industrialization and natural resource exploitation fire the afterburners on their economies. Indeed, emerging economies now account for more total global commerce than the United States. A byproduct of this explosive growth is what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke calls …
SEC Proposals Threaten Shareholders Rights To File Resolutions
2007 By Shelley Alpern The cicada is a locust-like insect that emerges from a long hibernation every umpteen years to create an incessant buzzing on some areas of the East Coast. Equally annoying in death as in life, when spent, cicadas drop from trees en masse, littering once-pleasant lawns and parks with piles of crunchy carcasses.Ten years ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) floated proposals for public comment that, if implemented, would have drastically curtailed shareholder rights. Like a cicada, the critics of the shareholder resolution process have resurfaced with different but equally dismaying ideas. In 1997, the story …
SEC Proposals Threaten Shareholder Advocates' Rights to File Resolutions
The cicada is a locust-like insect that emerges from a long hibernation every umpteen years to create an incessant buzzing across the country. Equally annoying in death as in life, when spent, cicadas drop from trees en masse, littering once-pleasant lawns and parks with piles of crunchy carcasses. On this tenth anniversary of the last Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last attempt to cripple shareholder advocacy, the commission has again floated potentially drastic changes to the shareholder resolution process that make our advocacy many times more difficult. In 1997, the story had a happy ending. After a barrage of support …
Trillium Asset Management Congratulates Apple on Moving into the Environmental Leader’s Circle
Boston, MA (May 3) – Trillium Asset Management, filer of a shareholder resolution pending on the May 10 proxy at Apple, Inc., today applauds Apple and CEO Steve Jobs on their newly disclosed commitments to using environmentally safer materials in Apple products. Trillium announced that it is withdrawing the resolution, which requested a corporate report on safer materials policies from consideration at Apple’s shareholder meeting. The Trillium shareholder resolution appearing on the Apple proxy asks the Apple Board of Directors to publish a report on the feasibility of “adopting a policy of becoming a leader in the use of safe …
Renewable Energy in Your Trillium Portfolio(A)
As global energy demand increases and global warming advances, developing clean energy sources and using energy more efficiently becomes more essential with each passing year. …
Corporate Buyers Power Green Electricity Market(A)
Ledership companies are using their market power to bring new renewable energy sources into the generation mix. …
Battle for the Soul of Organic
The average American consumer is long overdue access to affordable organic foods. Yet Wal-Mart’s pledge to squeeze the typical premium paid for organic foods from 20-30% down to 10%1 is making a whole lot of people very nervous. Wal-Mart’s modus operandi is to keep prices low by driving down costs in the production chain and keeping its own wages low; its competitors’ practices are variations of the same theme, if less cutthroat. Good ol’ American-style capitalism and its frequent bedfellow, inadequate regulation, now threaten to strip “organic” of everything it once stood for (and everything that has made it more …
Whole Foods Boosts Support for Animal Welfare, Local Farms(A)
Amid growing criticism of the "industrialization" of organic foods, Whole Foods has launched new initiatives to support local sustainable agriculture and animal welfare. …
29 Trillium Stock Picks Make the "100 Best Corporate Citizens List" of Business Ethics Magazine(A)
Coincidence? We don't think so. …
Spotlight on Your Portfolio: What We're NOT Buying…Yet(A)
Investors with Trillium managed portfolios know that an important part of our investment discipline is diversification across economic sectors. We are often asked if, due to social screens, we have trouble finding investment opportunities in certain sectors and the answer is almost always no (with some client-directed exceptions). Our policy is to under- or over-weight sectors relative to the market as an intentional reflection of our financial outlook for that segment of the economy. There are stocks we avoid as social investors: tobacco (classified under consumer staples), weapons manufacturers (typically industrials), and nuclear power (primarily utilities), as examples. We apply …
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