American Stocks Shrug Off Anti-Apartheid Pressure
The sale of stock of companies doing business in South Africa doesn't seem to have driven down the market value of those shares.</br></br>"It hasn't had an impact on stock prices," says David Hauck, a senior analyst of the Investor Responsibility Research Center, a consulting group that researches public-policy issues.</br></br>The center estimates that universities and public pension funds have sold $450 million of such stocks in recent years. By comparison, three days stock market trading in International Business Machines Corp., one of about 300 big U.S. companies in South Africa, currently totals about $587 million.</br></br>"Once the market is convinced that there's selling for non-economic reasons . . . people who don't really care about non-economic issues will push the prices back to the market level," says Mr. Hauck.</br></br>According to the center, and the American Committee on Africa, a New York-based group lobbying for such stock divestiture, 44 university endowments, and 13 municipal and five state pension funds are selling some if not all shares in companies with operations in South Africa, or removing deposits from banks that lend to South Africa.