Free Enterprise Project Urges Finance Giant To Remove
Companies With Chinese Government Ties From Its Indexes
Washington, D.C. – MSCI CEO Henry A. Fernandez indicated at the company’s annual shareholder meeting today that the company has no plans to even consider adjusting its global investment indexes to exclude Chinese government-involved entities. This is despite bipartisan Senate pressure and a rapidly-deteriorating public attitude toward Chinese investment in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
During the virtual meeting, Scott Shepard, Coordinator of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research, submitted the following question to Fernandez:
MSCI’s World ex USA Investable Market Index includes shares of many Chinese state-owned or-directed companies. Investors in that index fund effectively invest in the Chinese government and its instrumentalities. Even before the coronavirus crisis, Senators [Marco] Rubio and [Jeanne] Shaheen, among others, were calling for the Thrift Savings Plan, the federal workers’ retirement fund, to stop using the MSCI index as a benchmark for its investments. These calls will only increase as the push to decouple from China, and especially Chinese government-involved entities, grows intense. Will MSCI commit to divesting this and other indexes of Chinese state-involved entities in order to maintain the Thrift Savings Plan as a vast and vital client?
After the meeting, Shepard said:
The coronavirus crisis has underscored, as nothing else could have, the serious – even existential – risks that arise from relying too heavily on China, Chinese companies and Chinese supplies. China is not a free country. It cannot be relied upon to tell the world what goes on within its borders. As we have experienced, this makes us all far too vulnerable to contagions.
The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.
Help support The National Center
A gift to The National Center will be used to fund critically-important programs not offered by any other group, including:
The Free Enterprise Project (FEP), the liberty movement’s only full-service shareholder and activism group that’s effective in pushing corporate America to the right;
Project 21, the liberty movement’s only public relations agency for black conservatives and libertarians that has already created over 40,000 media opportunities;
The Environment and Enterprise Institute (EEI), which counters misinformation being spread by the environmental left.
During the virtual meeting, 
