← Back to context

Comment by JumpCrisscross

18 hours ago

> absolutely does balance interests - namely, its own - beyond simply being an academic vehicle for communication of a stable thesis

As a business, sure. As a committee, it’s still a deeply technical process. I can say with a lot of confidence that optics weren’t considered in any of this, possibly to a fault.

> and a nontrivial portion of the U.S. economy

This vastly overstates the amount of assets tied to the S&P 500. It’s a lot. But it’s a strong minority of equity exposures.

> I can say with a lot of confidence that optics weren’t considered in any of this, possibly to a fault.

How can you possibly know that? Do the people on that committee have a cast-iron tenure guarantee?

  • > How can you possibly know that?

    I know folks who have been on these. They don’t have tenure. But they’re basically emeritus. If S&P wanted to do something that would cause chaos, it would be fucking with those folks because they made a decision that looks bad.

    • It’s a public benchmark fund that has much of its value based on its decisions being publicly stable and publicly consistent.

      Who would want to invest in a benchmark fund with arcane(the literal term as opposed to mundane) rules that were privately decided? If your statement is accurate it sounds like moving out of such a fund would be prudent. I feel like it’s not accurate since they are sticking to their guns and not changing the rules to benefit oligarchs like Musk such as Nasdaq is doing.

      4 replies →

There's overlap between strong minority and nontrivial, so not sure how it can be vastly overstated. Do you have numbers you can add to this, or any explanation of equity exposure etc?