The insurance industry have investments of hundreds billions of dollars. Since this article talks about US, Canadian, and European insurers it would be safe to assert that the insurance industries in these areas would have total investments in the trillions of dollars.
I have read about this finding on other websites and they acknowledged that these figures “may” include holdings of index funds and mutual funds that might invest in this stocks. In other words some of these investments may not have been made deliberately by the insurers.
So in addition to the fact that these investments are a very tiny fraction of the total holdings of these firms and that they may not have even purchased all of it deliberately, its a major stretch to jump from this finding to the argument that there is some major conspiracy that insurers are trying to ruin your health and thereby jacking up your premiums. Frankly, its a ludicrous argument.
What is not mentioned in this article just how they determined “fast food”. What were all the restaurants and food companies that were included? Subway is a fast food joint but their food is often healthier than what many people eat at home.
The point that insurers should be activist investors in the “fast food” companies that they do hold shares in also forgets just how large some of these fast food companies are. McDonalds is a $75 billion dollar company. Even if all of these insurers owned all of their holdings in the fast food industry only in McDonalds stock, that would only amount to 2.5% of the total common stock. Which is not nearly enough to assert firm control on the management decisions of McDonalds. But of course all these holdings are not held in only a single company.
The combined fast food industry in all these countries is huge. The cumulative value of these investments are small. This whole controversy is contrived.
