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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Wrong. Two entities run everything: Blackrock and Vanguard.

Why is this repeated everywhere? They’re just fund managers and most of their “money” is in automated index funds investing retail and institutional investors.

B/c when the fund managers buy assets to make the index fund to resell to retail investors, they usually get the same voting rights from their ownership as a normal shareholder, and they don't pass that part on to the retail investors, no?

Vanguard does. They make recommendations about whom you should vote for, but vote you do.

Wrong. If you own VOO you don’t get to vote on the underlying assets.

They often actually do, vanguard sends me proxy statements now and then which I deign to ignore.

Wrong. If you own VOO or VTI, you don’t get to vote on the underlying assets.

If you care about voting don't own the ETFs and instead own the funds directly?

It's not so much about that as an individual, but rather, is it good for the market that the managers of these index funds that just pass through ownership of the asset really get such powerful voting rights? To make it even weirder, I believe these funds are sometimes bought by public pension fund managers and the like. So it feels oddly corrupt.

Bogle himself commented on it in his later years - managers capitalism - by managers for managers, not for the employees or the owners.

http://johncbogle.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/n...

Correct, Vanguard votes on the underlying assets of an index fund, not individual (or other) investors. You do get to vote if you own shares of individual companies.

Because their money is accumulated net wealth that makes the rothschilds sweat...

Did you not watch what happened with Twitter? Musk called them on it and decided to start buying -> told he couldn't join the board if he bought more than BlackRock and Vanguard collectively held and they proceeded to buy more than he had individually after that.

These companies manage ETFs, so instead of purchasing shares from 500 companies tracked in S&P 500 (and paying 500x the commission), you can just purchase X shares of the VOO ETF. On paper, it looks like they own everybody else, but in practice they are just proxies.

I think the GP's (heavy-handed) point is that the proxy ownership doesn't extend to voting rights: when you own shares in an ETF, there is no way for you to individually vote based on the underlying constituent stocks.

(This is arguably a bad thing for long term economic health, since broad-market ETFs have a dampening effect on otherwise healthy amounts of speculation. But I think it's a far cry from saying that they "control" the market, since it's a mostly passive effect.)

And they're totally interlocked.

Wrong. One entity runs everything: Bilderberg.

Nah, they are locked in mortal combat with the trilateral commission.

Yes, and it will end in a double fatality. Humanity will thus be freed so another new clandestine ruling body may emerge.

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