Shareholder Activists Run Amok

Active shareholder activists… Shareholder activism has hit an all-time this year with the launch of 191 campaigns, which is up 19 percent from its long-time average. Credit the turbulent economy for the increased activity.

A record 61 Q3 campaigns set the pace and defied the typical “summer slowdown” period, according to the report issued by Barclays Shareholder Advisory Group. The US and APAC regions accounted for 80 percent of the overall activity.

Twenty five CEOs resigned due to activism pushes during the first nine months of this year. That approaches the record 27 resignations for all of 2024.

Activists took over 99 board seats, up 17 percent from last year’s period.

Elliott Capital Management claimed an impressive nine board seats during Q3, including spots at HP Enterprise, Medtronic, Global Payments and Genuine Parts.

Barclays attributes part of the success of activists as due to the improved quality of director nominees. Nearly four in ten (39 percent) of them were former CEOs or CFOs. About three in four (73 percent) had public company director experience.

Most of the shareholder action took place in the industrial segment, followed by technology and healthcare sectors.

Barclays anticipates a very active Q4 as director nomination windows open up. That’s good news for financial PR firms.

Harris pens autopsy… Kamala Harris’ “107 Days” is an autopsy of her failed presidential campaign that is “at best pointless, at worst tasteless,” according to Irish journalist and author Fintan O’Toole.

Her memoir “seems more of symptom of distress than a diagnosis of the disorders that have brought American democracy into mortal danger,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books.

“With dissent being decriminalized, troops on the street, an enormous infrastructure of repression being built before our eyes, Democrats do not need reruns of the disaster movie, but a sharp and urgent understanding of why they failed and how they can fight back,” wrote O’Toole.

Democrats have got to drop the idea that moving to the center is the best way to trump Trump. There is no center or half-way point any more.

Trump has successfully branded Democrats as radical left lunatics. There is no compromise or capitulation that will make Democrats anything other than radical left lunatics.

O’Toole recommends that Democrats embrace radicalism. “Resistance to despotism is innately respectable—the task is to make it politically potent by connecting it to the profound discontent Trump has been able to exploit,” he wrote.

Renewal for the Democratic Party will come from the outside. O’Toole presents Zohran Mamdani’s run for the New York mayor as a way to energize the Democratic Party.

Yet old-line politicos like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer fail to embrace Mamdani. They would rather die defending the established Democratic order than drawing new life from external energies.

O’Toole credits Trump for understanding that the US has entered a political era in which the alternative to radicalism is redundancy.

He warns that if Democrats “do not grasp the potency of his insight, that alternative awaits them.”

Mulling legal options? The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institution is reviewing its legal options after Ontario ran an ad.

The nation’s ad critic-in-chief jumped on that statement and claimed that Reagan “loved tariffs for the purposes of national security and the economy.”

That’s nuts. The Wall Street Journal dismissed Trump’s claim as off-the-wall. It editorialized that “the Gipper was a free trader, no matter what the current president says.”

The Foundation was wrong to provide Trump with some PR cover. It did make one shrewd move. The Foundation’s statement on X invites people to listen to Reagan’s unedited speech on YouTube.

Trump should also tune in.