People
John Coates
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The FDIC to Index Funds: I’m Watching You
April 4, 2024
Index fund detractors have long urged regulators to restrain passive investment managers. Most such complaints were groundless—attacks from investment organizations that had lost market share…
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Banking regulators are scrutinizing whether index-fund giants BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street are sticking to passive roles when it comes to their investments in U.S.
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Harvard professor on crucial SEC climate rule: ‘A lawsuit is, sadly, almost guaranteed’
March 6, 2024
The Securities and Exchange Commission will vote Wednesday on a raft of climate-disclosure rules that have been in the works for years and, as has…
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Millions of Fund Investors Are Getting a Voice
February 23, 2024
Index fund investing has swept the world. In December, for the first time, U.S. investors entrusted more money to index funds than actively managed funds,…
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Harvard law professor on Elon Musk: ‘Over the past 100 years, Delaware has periodically irritated one or two executives by enforcing the law’
February 16, 2024
The legal corporate governance community is unmoved by Elon Musk’s call for companies to dump Delaware as their home state after his historic $55.8 billion…
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Biden’s top financial cop faces showdown with Wall Street
February 2, 2024
Wall Street is at war with Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, and the battlefield is the federal courts. Financial and business groups are…
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Holger Spamann, the Lawrence R. Grove Professor of Law at Harvard, has been named a fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI).
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Outsized Control and Outsized Risk
December 20, 2023
A few financial firms now own a significant portion of the American economy, to their peril and the peril of our democracy, argues John Coates.
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On the bookshelves, fall 2023
December 15, 2023
Harvard Law Today features a selection of the books showcased at campus events throughout the fall semester.
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The Stock Market Is Disappearing
October 30, 2023
The publicly traded company is disappearing. In 1996, about 8,000 firms were listed in the U.S. stock market. Since then, the national economy has grown…
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California’s gift to Gensler’s SEC
September 27, 2023
California played its hand on compelling companies to come clean on carbon emissions. Now it’s up to the Securities and Exchange Commission to decide whether…
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Are Index Funds Making the Economy Less Fair?
September 12, 2023
Bit by bit, financial interests concentrated again. In the 21st century, the old trusts appear to be back, but in different garb. It’s a far…
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The ‘Problem of Twelve’ — redux
August 24, 2023
Last summer Alphaville wrote a list of the dozen most powerful people of the investment world, inspired by a paper written by Harvard University’s John…
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In "The Problem of Twelve," John Coates argues that a small number of large financial institutions increasingly pose a threat to American democracy and to themselves.
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Are index funds getting too powerful?
August 7, 2023
Index funds are a very popular way of investing across the stock market. “The top four index funds alone – State Street, Vanguard, BlackRock and…
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Summer 2023 Harvard Law faculty reading recommendations
June 13, 2023
Looking for a summer book recommendation? Check out what these members of the Harvard Law School faculty plan to read — and listen to — this summer.
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Why the Right Invented a Conservative Right to Post
December 9, 2022
Early december might have marked the first time anyone ever asserted a First Amendment right to see the president’s son’s penis, an argument that the…
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The INDEX Act: A challenge to the voting influence of institutional investors that may yield unintended consequences
November 4, 2022
The Act’s supporters say it would shift voting power from large investment advisers to individual investors, but the reality could be far more complex. In…