corporate governance

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Are Chief Executives Overpaid? by Deborah Hargreaves

banking crisis, benefit corporation, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, business climate, corporate governance, Donald Trump, G4S, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, loadsamoney, long term incentive plan, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, performance metric, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Snapchat, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, wealth creators

Governments in recent times have tended to steer clear of too much regulation of big business, and most of the rules applying to the way companies are run are loosely bracketed under the term ‘corporate governance’. Corporate governance in the UK is non-binding, but applied on a ‘comply or explain’ basis, which means that you follow the guidelines and if you don’t, you explain to your shareholders why not. In the US, the rules are more legalistic, but there are fewer of them and shareholders advise companies on governance standards. A corporate scandal will often prompt a kneejerk reaction by ministers – in the UK this takes the form of a corporate governance review by a member of the business elite, introducing a revised set of guidelines.

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His package was – by today’s standards – a modest £475,000, but the company was newly-privatized and making staff redundant, and it had generated a lot of public anger. A classic response to public anger in the UK was to commission a corporate governance review of company practices by a member of the great and the good. These followed hot on the heels of each other in the 1990s, starting with Sir Adrian Cadbury in 1992. The problem with these corporate governance reforms was that they tried to establish best practice and were not binding. Also, they shied away from anything radical, not surprisingly given that they were usually run by a corporate heavyweight who did not want to rock the boat.

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The onus would then be on the new institutions to establish some clear guidelines that could be enforced and entrenched without relying on the whim of shareholders. A new emphasis on corporate governance would start to shift the business community towards a more inclusive focus. If we are to achieve a new sort of capitalism, we need to turn our companies from short-term profit-making machines for shareholders into long-term investors in the skills and wages of the workforce, the sustainability of the environment, as well as longer-term returns for investors. Pushing for pay reform There is no shortage of calls for pay reform and corporate governance changes, but most proposals involve tweaking the existing system rather than overhauling it.

What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us, and How to Fix It by Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik, David Pitt-Watson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Admiral Zheng, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, compensation consultant, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, passive investing, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payment for order flow, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, post-work, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, WikiLeaks

• LinkedIn, the social networking site pitched to professionals, features groups that host crossborder dialogue on corporate governance. One, run out of Canada, has more than twenty thousand participants. • Harvard Law School’s Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation has become a prime resource for academic papers and comment on corporate governance in the United States. Sponsors have vastly magnified their outreach by posting regular notices on Twitter at @HarvardCorpGov.43 • The granddaddy of social media in corporate governance is www.corpgov.net, founded and edited by California-based James McRitchie. He has been posting news and analysis and inviting dialogue on the site since 1995, which makes its origins virtually prehistoric

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The result: $37 million less in savings than there should have been. John F. Wasik, “Finding, and Battling, Hidden Costs of 401(k) Plans,” New York Times, November 7, 2014. 3. The United States is an exception, as it has no national authoritative corporate governance code. 4. Nolan Haskovec, Working Paper: Codes of Corporate Governance: A Review (Yale School of Management-Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance, June 2012), http://web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/millstein-center/Codes%20of%20Corporate%20Governance_Yale_053112.pdf. Index Accountability: civil society and, 119–23 confidence in free enterprise and, 96 government fund governance regulation and, 107–9 information and, 149–50 in mutual funds, 102–3 institutional investors and, 109–14 of fiduciaries to citizen investors, 230 regulations fostering, 147–49 restoring to asset management, 221–22 social media and, 114–19 trust in government and, 141 Accounting standards, 185 Action Plan (EU), 9 Activism Score, 121 Adelphia Communications, 44, 248n50 Admati, Anat, 215 Advance Voting Instructions (AVI), 91 Affiliation scams, 264n10 AFL-CIO, 120–21 Agency capitalism, 33, 74–80 Agency system, 32 Alberta (Canada) Investment Management Corporation, 59 Alpha, 49–50, 57, 241n41 Ambachtsheer, Keith, 100–101 Ambachtsheer gap, 100–101, 250n5 American Business Conference, 91 Annual fees, 1–3, 53–54, 233n2, 238n6 Annuity, 2–3, 198–99, 233n4, 264n7 AODP.

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It also underlies virtually every law that governs marketplace conduct, from disclosure regulations to who gets to vote to reorganize a company in bankruptcy.50 A report from Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance and the IRRC Institute catalogues innumerable regulations based on the assumption that “voting interests and economic interests are … aligned.”51 The report’s key conclusion is that “the legitimacy of modern corporate governance rests on the premise that, in shareholder elections, shareholders are economically motivated to vote in a manner that maximizes the value of the corporation’s shares.” Solutions: Injecting Ownership Back into Capitalism If the causes of diminished ownership in our capital markets are multifaceted, so too must be the solutions.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

O’Kelley, Jack “Rusty,” and Melissa Martin. “Global and Regional Trends in Corporate Governance for 2018.” Russell Reynolds Associates, December 8, 2018. www.russellreynolds.com/insights/thought-leadership/global-and-regional-trends-in-corporate-governance-for-2018. O’Kelley, Rusty, Anthony Goodman, and Melissa Martin. “2019 Global & Regional Trends in Corporate Governance.” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, December 30, 2018. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/12/30/2019-global-regional-trends-in-corporate-governance/. Olivetti, Claudia, and Barbara Petrongolo. “The Economic Consequences of Family Policies: Lessons from a Century of Legislation in High-Income Countries.”

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Some institutional investors are taking a unified stance and joining with their peers of comparable scale and stature to form coalitions to push for changes in corporate governance. One such coalition, Investor Stewardship Group (ISG), includes more than sixty organizations, with combined assets in excess of $30 trillion. The group’s aim is to codify a framework of basic investment stewardship and corporate governance standards. ISG has put forward six principles that it believes are fundamental to good corporate governance at US-listed companies, including that institutional investors should attempt to resolve differences with companies in a constructive and pragmatic manner.

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“Corporate Purpose: Stakeholders and Long-Term Growth.” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, May 29, 2019. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/05/29/corporate-purpose-stakeholders-and-long-term-growth/. . “The New Paradigm and the EU Shareholder Rights Directive II.” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, May 11, 2019. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/05/11/the-new-paradigm-and-the-eu-shareholder-rights-directive-ii/. . “Some Thoughts for Boards of Directors in 2019.” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, December 14, 2018. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/12/14/some-thoughts-for-boards-of-directors-in-2019/.

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann le Fur, Antonio Salvi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, ASML, asset light, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, delta neutral, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, impact investing, implied volatility, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, performance metric, Potemkin village, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk/return, shareholder value, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Vishny, Law and finance, Journal of Political Economy, 106(6), 1133–1155, December 1998. F. Lipman, L. Lipman, Corporate Governance: Best Practices, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006. R. Monks, N. Minow, Corporate Governance, 5th edn, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2011. R. Mork, A History of Corporate Governance around the World: Family Business Groups to Professional Managers, University of Chicago Press, 2007. www.ecgi.org, the website of the European Corporate Governance Institute. www.icgn.org, the website of the International Corporate Governance Network. www.oecd.org, the website of the OECD, which devotes a large section to corporate governance issues. On stock options and variable remuneration: M.

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Chapter 43 Corporate governance Or on being politically correct You may be surprised to find a chapter on corporate governance in a corporate finance textbook. Corporate governance is not, strictly speaking, a financial issue and is based on the legal considerations underlying the framework within which a company is run. However, as you may by now have come to expect, we approach the subject mainly from the angle of value. In other words, we attempt to find answers to the question “Will good corporate governance foster the creation of value and will poor corporate governance necessarily destroy value?”

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It’s now up to researchers to determine whether this simplification was the cause or the consequence of the spread of corporate governance. Section 43.2 Corporate governance and financial theories 1. Theory of markets in equilibrium The classic theory is of little or no help in understanding corporate governance. What it does is reduce the company to a black box, and draws no distinction between the interests of the different parties involved in the company. 2. Agency theory Agency theory is the main intellectual foundation of corporate governance. The need to set up a system of corporate governance arises from the relationship of agency that binds shareholders and managers.

The Finance Book: Understand the Numbers Even if You're Not a Finance Professional by Stuart Warner, Si Hussain

AOL-Time Warner, book value, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, credit crunch, currency risk, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, forward guidance, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, market bubble, Northern Rock, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, supply-chain management, time value of money

Greggs plc, 2015 (extract from directors’ remuneration report) Remuneration payable for 2015 for each Executive Director (Audited) The following table presents the remuneration payable for 2015 (showing the equivalent figures for 2014) for the Executive Directors: Salary £ Pension contribution (including salary in lieu) £ Taxable benefits £ Annual incentives (including profit share) £ Long-term incentives* £ Total remuneration £ Roger Whitesides 2015 507,188 114,118 12,397 594,043 1,357,891 2,585,637 2014 495,300 111,442 12,381 619,125 – 1,238,248 Richard Hutton 2015 289,736 37,233 13,659 244,334 493,628 1,078,590 2014 282,944 52,508 11,491 254,650 141,043 742,636 Raymond Reynolds 2015 258,530 31,804 13,949 218,019 440,465 962,767 2014 252,472 31,060 12,433 227,225 125,858 649,048 22 Corporate governance and whistleblowing ‘The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.’ Louis Gerstner Jr, former CEO and chairman IBM In a nutshell Corporate governance refers to the system by which companies are managed (i.e. directed and controlled). ‘Good’ corporate governance systems prevent directors from making and taking decisions that benefit themselves to the detriment of shareholders and others. Countries around the world have developed corporate governance regulations. In the UK, guidance is focused on directors (leadership, effectiveness and remuneration), board accountability (risks and going concern) and relations with shareholders (‘stewardship’).

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Guidance also covers disclosure of information and potential conflicts of interest. Whistleblowing is an important aspect of good corporate governance. Whistleblowing is the reporting of wrongdoing (fraud, illegality or unethical practice) in an organisation. A whistleblower bringing information to the attention of their employer or a relevant organisation is protected (in certain circumstances) under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998. Need to know Corporate governance Corporate governance is a key issue whenever there is separation between a company’s ownership and control. In public companies (plcs) directors appointed to run a company are usually different to shareholders who own the company.

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parent companies Pay As You Earn (PAYE), 2nd payback period, 2nd PAYE (Pay As You Earn), 2nd payroll PCPI (Private Company Price Index) P/E (price/earnings) ratio PE (private equity), 2nd peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, 2nd PEG (Price Earnings Growth) performance measures from the balance sheet, 2nd and budgets from the profit and loss (P&L) solvency planning and budgets and forecasts profit PLCs see public limited companies (PLCs) pre-emption rights, 2nd preference shares premiums, business valuation prepayments, 2nd price customisation, 2nd Price Earnings Growth (PEG) price skimming price/earnings (P/E) ratio pricing, profitable Private Company Price Index (PCPI) private equity (PE), 2nd private limited companies business valuation, 2nd corporate governance financial statements sources of equity finance profit versus cash distributable gain versus gross, 2nd operating, 2nd planning retained, 2nd tax on profit and loss (P&L) profit to volume ratio see contribution percentage of sales (CPS) ratio profitability, performance measures profitable pricing property companies prospectus provisions, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Public Interest Disclosure Act (PIDA) 1998 public limited companies (PLCs) business valuation corporate governance directors’ remuneration disclosure requirements, 2nd and equity finance, 2nd financial statements public offering, 2nd purchases qualifications, audit reconciliation, between financial and management accounts redeemable shares reducing balance method of depreciation regulatory environment accounting standards corporate governance external financial audit information in public domain related parties remuneration, directors, 2nd representative bodies reserves, 2nd, 3rd residence, for taxation restructuring retained profits, 2nd return, definition, 2nd return on capital employed (ROCE), 2nd return on equity (ROE), 2nd return on investment (ROI), 2nd, 3rd return on net assets (RONA) return on total assets (ROTA) revaluation, 2nd revaluation reserve, 2nd revenue, 2nd, 3rd revenue recognition, 2nd revenue reserves, 2nd, 3rd rights issue, 2nd risk see financial risk ROCE (return on capital employed), 2nd ROE (return on equity), 2nd ROI (return on investment), 2nd, 3rd rolling budgeting, 2nd RONA (return on net assets) ROTA (return on total assets) sales, 2nd, 3rd Sarbanes-Oxley secured debt, versus unsecured debt service providers services share capital share price, managing the shareholder value shareholders, 2nd Shell short-term assets see current assets short-term liabilities significant influence single obligation small businesses audit directors’ remuneration disclosure requirements financial statements solvency, 2nd spreadsheets, 2nd start-up businesses and debt finance and equity finance statutory accounts, 2nd, 3rd Stewardship Code stock, 2nd stock days stock turnover straight line method of depreciation subsidiaries sum of digits method of depreciation suppliers, managing system controls TALCL (total assets less current liabilities), 2nd tangible fixed assets (TFA), 2nd, 3rd tax avoidance business corporation, 2nd, 3rd deferred, 2nd, 3rd evasion and interest international tax gap, 2nd technical insolvency see balance sheet insolvency technology, 2nd technology sector Tesco, 2nd, 3rd TFA (tangible fixed assets), 2nd, 3rd Time Warner timing and accruals accounting and the balance sheet of budgets and the profit and loss (P&L) and tangible fixed assets total assets less current liabilities (TALCL), 2nd treasury, responsibilities trial balance (TB), 2nd true and fair, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th Turing Pharmaceuticals turnover, stock UK accounting standards corporate governance credit rating UK Corporate Governance Code (the Code), 2nd, 3rd understated reserves unsecured debt, versus secured debt US accounting standards corporate governance valuation balance sheet business premiums stock Value added tax (VAT), 2nd value for money variable costs, 2nd VAT (Value added tax), 2nd venture capital (VC), 2nd viability statement disclosure Volkswagen Waitrose WhatsApp whistleblowing, 2nd, 3rd work in progress (WIP) working capital, 2nd, 3rd working capital days yield, annual YouTube zero-based budgeting, 2nd Praise for The Finance Book ‘Reduces the time required by management to understand the essentials of accounting and finance, enabling them to spend more time focusing on their core business’.

How the City Really Works: The Definitive Guide to Money and Investing in London's Square Mile by Alexander Davidson

accounting loophole / creative accounting, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Exxon Valdez, foreign exchange controls, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, index fund, inflation targeting, information security, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, pension reform, Piper Alpha, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk free rate, shareholder value, short selling, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Most independent studies on different corporate governance regimes place the UK at or near the top in standards. The UK approach combines high  224 HOW THE CITY REALLY WORKS ________________________________ standards of corporate governance with relatively low costs, is proportionate, and is relatively prescriptive about how the company’s board organises itself, according to a November 2006 publication, The UK Approach to Corporate Governance, by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), which is responsible for corporate governance in the UK. Clearly corporate governance has made enormous progress since the business excesses of the late 1980s, including collapses such as that of Polly Peck, and frauds such as the plundering by Robert Maxwell, chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers, of his companies’ pension funds (see Chapter 31).

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The future The FSA’s principles-based regime, with its emphasis on management responsibility, as discussed in Chapter 22, makes corporate governance a major issue. Regulators, senior management, listing authorities, analysts and investor-related trade bodies have an interest. Rating agencies take account of corporate governance when they give companies a credit rating. In 2007, corporate governance was a frequent theme on FSA supervisory visits to financial services companies. It is a key focus for compliance and risk management functions within the firm. _________________________ OVERVIEW OF CORPORATE GOVERNANCE 231  Over time, there will be pressure from the stock market, environmental and other groups, and league tables to promote good standards, according to consultants.

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Nowadays, law enforcers, including customs, aim to recover more than this amount in a single year but, on one money laundering reporting officer’s estimates, at best fewer than 1 per cent of money launderers in the UK are caught, and it is hard to achieve even this. 25 Overview of corporate governance Introduction This chapter explains how corporate governance works. We will look at, among other things, the Cadbury Code, the Combined Code and the Myners Report, and the Listing Rules. Read this with Chapter 26, which focuses on governance in relation to accounting. The concept Corporate governance is about how a company conducts its corporate affairs and responds to stakeholders, employees and society. It covers ethical, legislative and other rules specifying how a company should act.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Since 2010, the FDP has been on life support. It may even fall below the 5 percent threshold required to hold any parliamentary seats in the 2013 elections.18 Corporate Governance: Codetermination The differences between the family capitalism countries and Reagan-era America is not just seen in attitude, voter expectations, outcomes, or executive morality. There are quite significant structural differences as well. The most important is the device at the center of the black box of corporate governance in northern Europe, which accounts for Germany in particular being the globe’s most competitive economy. I mentioned earlier that shareholder capitalism places America at a competitive disadvantage, in part because it empowers short-termism.

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That explains the judgment rendered on shareholder capitalism by Lynn Stout, Cornell University professor of corporate and business law at the June 2012 Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation: “Worse, when we look at macroeconomic data—overall investment returns, numbers of firms choosing to go or remain public, relative economic performance of ‘shareholder-friendly’ jurisdictions—it suggests the shareholder value dogma may be economically counterproductive.”54 How Family Capitalism Avoids Weak Corporate Governance Cutting R&D or human capital investment is scarcely the prescription for firm and shareholder prosperity. That’s why economists like Edmund Phelps have argued that sustained new longer-term investment by US firms is needed, in innovation, in cutting-edge products, and in business methods, to boost employment and productivity.55 But refocusing the US corporation takes an attribute in scant supply among jittery American executives: a willingness to explain to boards, colleagues, and investors that a long-term perspective will be more profitable for shareholders.

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Codetermination is the innovation that has had the most impact on corporate governance since World War II—the black box at the economic core of the most competitive high-wage democracies in the world. And codetermination is the only proven option for creating the American Dream for your children. As the home of the Reformation, the Renaissance, John Calvin, John Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Friedrich Hayek, it is no surprise that northern Europe also became the center over the last century of reforms to strengthen capitalism. The explanation for that outcome is straightforward: voters have expectations of superior corporate governance. Enterprises are the device rich democracies have crafted to create rising living standards for all; maximizing that goal requires high-quality management committed to productivity growth and amenable to broadcasting the gains from such growth throughout society.

file:///C:/Documents%20and%... by vpavan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Bogle, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, margin call, Mary Meeker, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, payment for order flow, price discovery process, profit motive, risk tolerance, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, tech worker, technology bubble, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-coupon bond, éminence grise

A GOOD BOARD: TRANSPARENCY IS PART OF THE CULTURE AT PFIZER If you're looking for an example of a company practicing good corporate governance, consider Pfizer Corp., a pharmaceutical company that has really pushed the envelope. In 1992, Pfizer became the first company to name a vice-president for corporate governance, and today remains one of the few companies with such a position. It also has a corporate governance committee, in addition to the standard audit, compensation, and executive committees. And its proxy statement lists the company's corporate governance principles. Companies don't have to do this, says Peggy Foran, the company's current vice-president for corporate governance. "But Pfizer makes an extra effort to be open, in the belief that it leads to better investor relations," she says.

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But as activist shareholder groups and the financial media frown on this practice as a management-protection ploy, companies increasingly are putting individual directors up for annual reelection by shareholders. Why Should You Care? I believe a company's corporate governance is one of the most important factors to consider before investing in a company. Put simply, corporate governance is the relationship between the investor, the management team, and the board of directors of a company. Each of these groups has different rights and responsibilities. When the three groups are able to communicate openly and independently, we can say that a company is exhibiting good corporate governance. This does not mean that the board second-guesses every decision made by the top executives of a company.

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I think it's your responsibility as an owner of a company's shares to express your opinion whether or not you support the company's actions. Like democracy, corporate governance works only when you exercise your right to vote. You may also think that as an individual investor, there's little you can do to change corporate governance. Yet you have powerful allies in the form of large pension funds and mutual funds, known as institutional investors. They collectively vote the shares of millions of people who, like you, have invested in these funds through their company pensions and 401(k) retirement accounts. Not all institutional investors care about corporate governance, but some of the very biggest ones are passionate about it— and can flex a lot of muscle.

Handbook of Modeling High-Frequency Data in Finance by Frederi G. Viens, Maria C. Mariani, Ionut Florescu

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business process, buy and hold, continuous integration, corporate governance, discrete time, distributed generation, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, housing crisis, implied volatility, incomplete markets, linear programming, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, Menlo Park, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, power law, principal–agent problem, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process

Companies of sectors 1 and 2 show only annual cash pay to directors (7.89. payDirectors) and companies of sectors 3, 4, and 5 show only stock shares granted to directors (10. stockDirectors) as relevant corporate governance variables. In order to capture the effect of corporate governance variables, in the next section, we present a representative ADT that includes only these variables. 3.3.1.2 Interpreting the S&P500 Representative ADTs with Only Corporate Governance Variables. The representative ADT for all companies with only the corporate governance variables (top panel of Fig. 3.3) captures most of the variables (payDirectors, optionAllValExec, stockDirectors, and TotalValOptCEO) or rules associated with high corporate performance in all 7 Energy includes energy equipment and services.

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See also Volatility index (VIX) comparing, 105–106 convergence of, 105 Contaminated returns, variance and covariance of, 257 Continuous integral operator, 367 Continuous semimartingales, 246, 253 Continuous-time long-memory stochastic volatility (LMSV) model, 220 Continuous-time stochastic modeling, 3 Continuous-time vintage, 78 Convergence-of-interests hypothesis, 54 Convex duality method, 296 Copula models, 77 Copulas, 75–76 CorpInterlock, 62, 63 Corporate governance, 53–54 of S&P500 companies, 54–60 Corporate governance best practices, 59 Corporate governance scorecards, 51–52 Corporate governance variables, 69 interpreting S&P500 representative ADTs with, 58–59 Corporate performance, predicting, 69 Correlation coefficient, 400 Correlation fluctuations impact on securitized structures, 75–95 products and models related to, 77–79 Cost structures, 392 424 Covariance(s) estimating, 244 forecasting, 280–285 Covariance function, 252 Covariance matrix, 170 Covariance stationarity, 177, 179, 181 Covariation-realized covariance estimator, 266 Covolatility function, 249 Covolatility measurement/forecasting, as a key issue in finance, 243 Cox, Ingersoll, Ross (CIR) square-root model, 257 cpVIX, 103 Crash imminence, precautions against, 121 Creamer, Germán, xiii, 47 Crisis detection, 131 Crisis-related equity behavior, 150 Cubic-type kernels, 261, 263 Cumulative abnormal return, 62, 63 Cumulative consumption process, 297, 305–306 Cumulative distribution curve, 346 Cumulative distribution function, 176 Current market volatility distribution, estimating, 115 Current weighting, 49 Customer perspective, 51 Cutting frequency, 258, 259 cVIX-1, 101, 102.

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The learning and growth perspective is the foundation of the BSC. This perspective looks at the motivation, training, and capacity to innovate that employees need to have in order to implement the new strategies. Different from the corporate governance scorecards presented at the beginning of this section, which emphasize corporate governance scoring, Kaplan and Nagel (2004) proposed the creation of a board BSC that includes corporate governance variables and is oriented to strategic planning at the board level. The strategy of an organization, its main objectives, and its key business drivers define the indicators of the BSC. However, the choice of indicators is, in general, highly subjective and is often driven by the company management or industry practices.

Global Governance and Financial Crises by Meghnad Desai, Yahia Said

Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency peg, deglobalization, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, German hyperinflation, information asymmetry, Japanese asset price bubble, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent-seeking, short selling, special drawing rights, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, transaction costs, Washington Consensus

Worse still, with minimal evidence and faulty reasoning, the 1997–98 crises in the region have been blamed on these institutions, almost as if they were solely responsible for creating the conditions for the crises just waiting to happen. Not surprisingly then, from this perspective, thoroughgoing corporate governance reforms should be given top priority while the pre-crisis systems need to be abandoned altogether. The IMF pushed for radical corporate governance reforms claiming that corporate governance was at the root of the crisis, with some reform-minded East Asian governments agreeing. However, it is doubtful that corporate governance was a major cause of the crisis, though there were some symptoms of corporate distress in all the crisis-affected economies before the crisis.

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Such elimination of otherwise viable enterprises would most certainly undermine the processes of capacity and capability building deemed essential for accelerated development or catching up.17 Crises, recovery and reforms in East Asia 103 In light of the bases for and nature of the recent recovery, the earlier and ongoing emphasis on the urgency of corporate reform was clearly ill informed and ill advised. Corporate profitability has undoubtedly improved. But there is no clear evidence that corporate governance reform was key to bringing about the recoveries in the region. In fact, many corporate governance reform measures are only intended to prevent future crises, and the priority given to them is often at the expense of short-term economic recovery. With their earlier predictions of imminent ‘doom without corporate governance reform’ not realised, those insisting on such reforms as pre-requisites for recovery have now switched to warning of a second downturn for countries like Malaysia where resistance to such reform has been more explicit and officially articulated.

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(Financial Times, 14 September 2000). 14 This section and the next draw from Furman and Stiglitz (1998). 15 Shin (2000) describes how Korean corporate reforms sought to remould its corporate structure along more American lines. 16 An economy’s corporate governance arrangements are inevitably the consequence of evolutionary developments including colonial inheritances and cultural heritages. Most economies accommodate a diversity of corporate governance arrangements, often varying with size, activity and history. Grossly dysfunctional arrangements would be replaced unless propped up by patrons such as the state. While some may well have become dysfunctional due to changing circumstances, there is no universally optimum corporate governance model appropriate to all circumstances (Chandler 1990). 17 Shin (2000) argues for building a second stage catching-up system for Korea, instead of IMF and other proposed transitions on ostensibly Anglo-American lines.

Mastering Private Equity by Zeisberger, Claudia,Prahl, Michael,White, Bowen, Michael Prahl, Bowen White

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, book value, business process, buy low sell high, capital controls, carbon credits, carried interest, clean tech, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, currency risk, deal flow, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, fixed income, high net worth, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, junk bonds, Lean Startup, low interest rates, market clearing, Michael Milken, passive investing, pattern recognition, performance metric, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, time value of money, transaction costs, two and twenty

This chapter details the key considerations that drive the exit process and explains the main exit strategies employed by PE funds, stepping through the process and discussing motivations of the various parties involved. 11 CORPORATE GOVERNANCE Corporate governance in private equity (PE) refers to the practices, processes and rules put in place to align the interests of owners, investors and management. A sound corporate governance framework is crucial to oversee and coordinate activities at a funds’ investee companies. Governance effectively decentralizes decision-making, identifies appropriate performance measures and reward systems, and implements effective tools to monitor performance; it is a fundamental part of PE’s formula for success.

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Yet no matter what exit route is chosen, only a successful sale validates the investment thesis, enables the fund to show strong returns and allows the PE firm to restart the cycle of fundraising. Section Overview The chapters in this section will walk the reader through the post-investment period all the way to the point of exit. CHAPTER 11. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE: The key features of PE corporate governance—a sense of urgency, active ownership and an alignment of interests with portfolio company management—are vital ingredients on the way to a successful exit. We discuss the role of portfolio company boards in both minority and majority investments. CHAPTER 12. SECURING MANAGEMENT TEAMS: PE firms work closely with the management teams in their portfolio companies.

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Cornelli, F. and Karakas¸, O. (2012) Corporate Governance of LBOs: The Role of Boards, May, available at SSRN https://ssrn.com/abstract=1875649 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1875649. Cumming, Douglas J., Siegel, Donald S. and Wright, Mike (2007) Private Equity, Leveraged Buyouts and Governance, Journal of Corporate Finance, 13(4): 439–460, SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=983802. Davis, E.H. (2009) Minority Investments by Private Equity Funds, Kirkland & Ellis LLP, November 5, https://www.kirkland.com/siteFiles/Publications/ 8E62BE0BF5EC88C8FCDEF4065D6180E3.pdf. EVCA Corporate Governance Guidelines (2010), https://dato-images.imgix.net/45/1459783870-F_EVCA_CorporateGovernanceGuidelines_2010.pdf?

The Clash of the Cultures by John C. Bogle

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, junk bonds, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, Occupy movement, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Ponzi scheme, post-work, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, random walk, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two and twenty, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Ownership has its privileges—one of the most important of which is to ensure that the interests of shareholders are served before the interests of management. But most short-term renters of stocks are not particularly interested in assuring that corporate governance is focused on placing the interests of the stockholder first. Even long-term owners of stocks have not seemed to care very much about exercising their rights—and indeed their responsibilities—of stock ownership. The agency society I’ve described earlier has too often failed to lend itself to significant involvement in corporate governance. Index funds ought to be in the vanguard of serious reforms, for they can’t and don’t sell stocks of companies whose managements are deemed to have produced inadequate returns on the capital they oversee.

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Votes against management, for example, may make it harder for fund managers to get information from a corporation or to win the right to advise its pension plan. Controversial votes may draw unwanted publicity. By their long forbearance and lassitude on corporate governance issues, mutual funds bear no small share of the responsibility for the failures in corporate governance and accounting oversight that were among the major forces creating the stock market bubble of the late 1990s, and the (50 percent) bear market that followed.6 If the owners of our corporations don’t care about governance, who else is there to assume that responsibility?

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But in terms of being active participants in corporate governance, the silence of nearly all mutual funds remains. The same silence also emanates from pension funds and their managers. With critical issues like executive compensation and political contributions now in the spotlight, it is high time for fund managers to stand up and be counted on the controversial issues of the day. They also must break their long silence and actually make their own proposals, demanding that they be placed in corporate proxies. I see these steps toward greater activism in corporate governance by our giant investor/agents who represent the shareholder/principals, as essential to sound long-term investing, to our system of modern capitalism, and to the national interest.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Large and influential corporations today have large numbers of shareholders, and there is a separation of ownership and control. Control is in the hands of a CEO and a coterie of managers. Getting this group to act in ways that maximize societal welfare, or even the wealth of shareholders, is the central problem of corporate governance, the rules and regulations pertaining to how firms are run. Corporate governance is concerned with what the objectives of the firm should be and whose voices should be heard during decision-making processes. These considerations, in turn, affect the incentive structures of executives. Chapter 5 shows how this particular issue played out in the financial sector.

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What enables a market economy to serve society is competition. European governments, and in particular the EU, must be as innovative as the private sector in combating market power, and as committed to limiting it as the private sector is to enhancing it. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE For decades, Europe has debated best-practices for corporate governance. Should European firms simply maximize the value of the firm to their shareholders or should they take into account the (often diverging) interests of other stakeholders? Even within shareholder capitalism (as the first perspective is often referred to) there is a debate: Should the focus be on today’s stock market value or on longer-term value?

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See also competitive markets critical components summarized, 139 managerial incentive systems, 140–43 the right mix of decision-makers, 139–40 rules for decision-making, 139 compulsory licenses, 148 Consumer Prices, Harmonised Index of (HICP), 64 convergence criteria, 33–35 cooperative ownership, 270 cooperatives and local banking institutions, 184–86 core inflation metrics, 82 corporate governance central problem of, 127–28 CEOs and executives, 137–38, 140–43 long- vs. short-term gains, 136 stakeholder capitalism and, 136–37 corporate taxation investment and, 194–95 lower tax rates and, 191–92 moving toward resolution, 198–99 tax avoidance and evasion, 195–97 tax competition, 192–94, 195 transfer pricing and, 198 corporations and businesses. See also corporate governance; corporate taxation; small- and medium-sized enterprises CEO and executives of, 137–38, 1400–143 globalization benefitting, 288–89, 304 intellectual property rights benefitting, 325–26 markets of (see market economies; market power) organizational forms of, 141–43 tax reformation of, 318–20 trade regulations impacting, 317–18 trade talk privileges of, 314 credit card companies, 133 credit issues credit availability (see loans and lending) credit rating agencies, 171 German practices causing, 46 internal devaluation impacting, 42 macro-prudential regulations and, 92–93 crisis countries analysis of, 68 austerity impacting, 37 divergent issues of, 48–49 ineffective EU policies in, 60–61 internal devaluation and, 41–44 single currency system impacting, 39, 54 cross-border externalities, 307–8 deadly sovereign-bank embrace, 176 debt Debt Doctrine, 17–18 debt-to-GDP ratio, 78–79 limiting (see Stability and Growth Pact) mutualization of, 55–57 restructuring of, 57–58 2008 crisis impacting, 35 Debt Doctrine, 17–18 decentralized bargaining, 263 deficits.

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Stockholders were nearly wiped out, and the asbestos victims' awards were strictly capped. The moral — the corporate governance moral, that is, leaving aside the stingy treatment of the injured — is that the financier on the board may be quiet when things are going well, but in a crisis, he or she may be a crucial player. The Johns-Manville example may be a model of the broader upsurge of financial influence; financiers may have been satisfied with corporate performance during the Golden Age, but more recent decades have been the economy-wide equivalent of an asbestos crisis. This might be a good time to take a look at recent theories of corporate governance. Jensenism Starting in the mid-1970s, Michael Jensen, Chicago-school fellow traveller now at Harvard, began developing a finance-based theory of corporate governance that would become influential in the 1980s.

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"Noise," Journal of Finance i\ (July), pp. 529-543. Black, Fisher, and Myron Scholes (1973). "The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities," Journal of Political Economy d>\, pp. 637-654. Blair, Margaret M, ed. (1993). The Deal Decade: What Takeovers and Leveraged Buyouts Mean for Corporate Governance C^diShmgion: Brookings Institution). — (1995). Ownership and Control: Rethinking Corporate Governance for the Twenty-First Century V^zshm^ion: Brookings Institution). Blair, Margaret M., and Martha A. Schary (1993a). "Industry-Level Indicators of Free Cash Flow," in Blair (1993), pp. 99-147. — (1993b). "Industry-Level Pre.ssures to Restructure," in Blair (1993), pp. 149-203-Blanchard, Olivier, Changyong Rhee, and Lawrence Summers (1993).

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., 182 liberals incorrect position on Fed, 123 upscale, 311 Lintner, John, 162 Liscio, John, 102, 104 Litan, Robert, 88 Livingston, James, 93-94 localism often not progressive, 302-303 London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), 35 London Stock Exchange, 13 Long, William, 283-284 loose-money ideology, 301 Malkiel. Burton, 105 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 209 Malthusianism, green, 245 Managerial school, 251 managerialism, 258; see also corporations, governance managers hired by workers, 239; see also corporations, governance; money managers Mandeville, Bernard, 208-210 Manhattan, income distribution, 79 Manne, Henry, 277, 278 manufacturing, FIRE "output" surpasses, 76 margin, 30 market(s) apologists, 179-183 clearing vs. nonciearing, 138 information asymmetry and, 172 costlessness/expense of, 138, 139 failures, 138 freedom of (Marx), 231 incomplete, 179 manipulation of, 53, 105 religious belief in, 150 self-regulating, and governance issue, 247 Markowitz, Harry, 179 Marx, Kari, 13, 135, 187, 229-241 anticipation of governance literature, 246 on credit as boundary-smasher, 235 as fundamental, 244 corporate form as presaging worker control (Marx), 239-240 critique of Ricardo's self-realization, 213-214 as endogenist, 220-221 gold in a crisis, 221 on government debt, 24 on interest rates, 244 on interest-bearing capital, 22 and Keynes, 212-214 on money and crisis, 232-236 as object of greed, 236 and power, 231-232, 320 no abolition of interest alone, 237 primitive accumulation, 252 revenue vs. capital, 245 on unproductive labor, 209 wrong on bailouts, 235 Marxian views of finance, 244 Marxism as Benthamism (Keynes), 212 mathematics required for economics, 139 Matthei, Charles, 314 Maxxam, 274 Mayer, Martin, 89 McDonough, William, 40 mean reversion, 178 Means, Gardiner C, 246, 252-256. 257-258 media, financial.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

The OECD has done excellent work in trying to develop rigorous global governance standards. See their corporate governance statement at http://www.oecd.org/corporate/. 37. Eisinger, The Chickenshit Club. 38. B. McLean and P. Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (Penguin Books, 2003). 39. Committee on the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance, “The Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance,” December 1, 1992, https://www.icaew.com/-/media/corporate/files/library/subjects/corporate-governance/financial-aspects-of-corporate-governance.ashx?la=en. 40. “The Agreement of the People,” October 28, 1647, Constitution Society, http://www.constitution.org/eng/conpur074.htm. 41.

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This would simply unleash other risks, with unpredictable consequences for the yen, consumer behavior, and Japan’s corporations.35 A Japanese debt restructuring, however, may finally provoke changes to the cross-holding system across corporations and might potentially see the introduction of a more international corporate governance system. This is one of the key fault lines in the distinction between a truly globalized world and a multipolar one. In a multipolar world, different corporate governance systems would prevail and grow, allowing weaker, more permissive systems to spread like weeds. The ultimate outcome would be to raise the cost of capital in a world where capital can flow freely, to leave investors (in some cases) at the mercy of the arbitrariness of governments, dominant shareholders, and corporate management. In the context of financial markets, corporate governance does not matter much, most of the time.

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If more companies and regulators internationally were to adopt rigorous global governance standards, it would create a layer of global corporate actors with global governance standards and in this sense would challenge the notion that the corporate world also needs to be divided on a multipolar basis.36 My expectation that this can happen is low. Recent experiments with broad corporate governance reforms have failed. In Japan, for example, one of the tenets of “Abenomics”—after Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe—was the intention to make Japanese companies less complicated and somewhat more Western (e.g., by returning capital to shareholders), the ultimate aim being to improve the return on equity of Japanese companies. This has not materialized, and the follow-through in corporate governance change has been weak. Equally, in the United States, there is no formal corporate governance code, which is why more aggressive governance mechanisms—takeovers and publicly pugnacious shareholder activism, for example—tend to be more prevalent.

Economists and the Powerful by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring, Niall Douglas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, buy and hold, central bank independence, collective bargaining, commodity trading advisor, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversified portfolio, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, illegal immigration, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, land bank, law of one price, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, old-boy network, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Solow, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, shareholder value, short selling, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

They examined pay-for-performance compensation schemes as they developed starting in the 1990s and checked if their actual features conformed more to the optimal contracting approach of principal–agent theory or to what they call the managerial power approach. Their book, Pay Without Performance, became a watershed in the economic corporate governance discussion. It gave real world power issues in corporate governance a name and made it a stumbling block in the way of the economic mainstream (Bebchuk and Fried 2003; Bebchuk and Fried 2004). According to the managerial power approach, managers create compensation schemes that are as favorable to them as possible under what they call the “outrage constraint.”

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According to their research, an investment strategy that bought the shares of the 10 percent of firms with the strongest shareholder rights and sold the 10 percent of firms with the weakest shareholder rights, would have earned returns that were 8.5 percentage points higher than normal (Gompers, Ishii and Metrick 2003). According to Bebchuk, Cohen and Ferrell (2009), the 24 ingredients to this corporate governance index can be reduced to just 6 important elements, which all measure in one way or another the degree of entrenchment of top managers (i.e. how hard it is for shareholders to get rid of them). Cuñat, Gine and Guadalupe (2010) examined shareholder-sponsored corporate government proposals in two thousand widely held US corporations from 1997 to 2007 and compared the stock market reaction to proposals that narrowly failed to those which narrowly passed.

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Pay Without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bebchuk, Lucian A., Yanif Grinstein and Urs Peyer. 2010. “Lucky CEOs and Lucky Directors.” Journal of Finance 65: 2363–2401. . Forthcoming. “Corporate Governance and the Timing of Option Grants.” Journal of Finance. Becht, Marco, Patrick Bolton and Ailsa Röell. 2007. “Corporate Governance and Control.” In Handbook of Law and Economics, ed. A. M. Polinsky and S. Shavell. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Becht, Marco, Julian Franks, Colin Mayer and Stefano Rossi. 2009. “Returns to Shareholder Activism: Evidence from a Clinical Study of the Hermes U.K.

The Inequality Puzzle: European and US Leaders Discuss Rising Income Inequality by Roland Berger, David Grusky, Tobias Raffel, Geoffrey Samuels, Chris Wimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, Caribbean Basin Initiative, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, fear of failure, financial innovation, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, offshore financial centre, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, rent-seeking, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, time value of money, very high income

The press has been quite adept at using CEO profiles and lifestyle portraits to raise public anger during a recession, but the media target the wrong subject because they confuse the agent for the principal. The Board and the remuneration committee set executive compensation, and it is the much more complicated issue of corporate governance that deserves more public attention. The ultimate principals, of course, are the shareholders, but the complexities are such that it is much easier to broadcast segments about CEO paychecks than discuss corporate governance issues. Five Principles for Moving Forward 207 The principal-agent problem, where the agent acts as the principal rather than advancing the interests of the owner, is neither unique to CEOs and business, nor is it a contemporary issue.

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Although the consensus view continues to be that much of the increase in inequality stems from a rising demand for skilled labor and a corresponding increase in the payout to such labor, it’s likely that other sources are also implicated, such as globalization, market liberalization, changing tax policies, financial innovation, changing social mores, deunionization, changing corporate governance, market failure, and shifting demographics. It is well beyond the scope of this book to offer new evidence on these competing accounts. Rather, we would like to present the accounts of rising inequality that business, political, and labor elites tend to mention. Why are these accounts so important?

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Collomb became Chief Executive Officer of Lafarge in 1989 and Chairman in 2003. He is also a director of Total, ATCO, and DuPont, as well as Chairman of the French Institute of International Relations and Chairman of the Institute for Studies in Science and Technology. He is a member of the Governing Body of the European Institute of Technology, the European Corporate Governance Forum, and the Institut de France (Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques). A graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole des Mines in Paris, he holds a French law degree and a Ph.D. in Management (University of Texas). He also founded the Center for Management Research at the Ecole Polytechnique. ______________________________ How would you describe economic inequality in North America and Europe?

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff by Clara Shih

Benchmark Capital, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, glass ceiling, jimmy wales, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, pets.com, pre–internet, rolodex, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social web, software as a service, tacit knowledge, Tony Hsieh, web application

5 Social Network Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81 Hypertargeting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .82 Loyalty and Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .89 Social Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .96 Challenges and Limitations 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .103 Social Innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .107 Concept Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .108 Prototyping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .115 Commercial Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .117 Continual Iteration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .120 7 Social Recruiting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .123 The Best Social Networks for Recruiting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .124 Sourcing Candidates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .126 Candidate References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .134 Employer and Recruiter Reputation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .135 Keeping in Touch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .137 Advice for Candidates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .141 How to Protect Against Employee Poaching Part III: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .141 Your Step-By-Step Guide to Using Facebook for Business 8 Engage Your Customers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .145 Start with Clear Strategy and Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .146 Find Your Unsanctioned Communities Define and Establish Your Presence 9 Get Your Message Across . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .148 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .155 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .163 Hypersegment Your Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .164 Choose Your Media Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .167 From the Library of Kerri Ross viii Th e Fa ce b o o k E ra 10 Build and Manage Your Relationships Setting Up Your Facebook Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .181 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .181 Interacting on Facebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .187 Asking for and Providing Introductions 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .193 Corporate Governance and Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .195 Choosing the Right Network Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .196 Identify Key Risk Areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .198 Partner with Legal, IT, and PR 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .200 The Future of Social Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .203 The Innovator’s Dilemma The ROI of Social Social Trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .204 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .205 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .205 What the Future Means for Doing Business Final Remarks A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .206 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .211 Snapshot of Top Social Networking Sites, March 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .213 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .223 From the Library of Kerri Ross Fo re wo rd ix Foreword Ten years ago, I was an executive at a traditional enterprise software company.

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It also talks about etiquette for initiating or accepting friend requests, using online networking in conjunction with offline networking, providing or requesting introductions, and other interactions. Most of the examples from this chapter are from Facebook but can be generally applied to other social networking services. • Chapter 11,“Corporate Governance and Strategy,” speaks to the challenges, obstacles, and realities of implementing social networking technologies in a corporate setting. Specifically, this chapter urges businesses to consider the risks around privacy, security, intellectual property, confidentiality, and brand misrepresentation, and the importance of partnering closely with legal and IT departments to put the right systems and policies in place to mitigate these risks. • Chapter 12,“The Future of Social Business,” likens the status quo of online social networking to where we were with the Internet in the late ‘80s.

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But despite the low barriers to starting a network on Ning, growth of new Ning sites appears to have slowed while the number of applications and audiences of Facebook continues to soar. Why should businesses choose specialized networks versus general-purpose networks containing specialized groups to reach their audiences? We will explore the pros and cons further in Chapter 11,“Corporate Governance and Strategy.” From the Library of Kerri Ross Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Software Company,2005-2008 For Evaluation Only.C h a p te r 1 Th e Fo u r t h R e vo l u t i o n 21 Figure 1.3 New Orleans, Louisiana-based John F. Kennedy High School’s specialized social network community hosted on Ning.

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System by Philip Augar

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, deal flow, equity risk premium, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, information retrieval, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, new economy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, systematic bias, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, yield curve

Their role is described with reassuring words like ‘monitoring excessive concentration’, ‘measurement, management and analysis of risk profile’ and ‘responsible risk management’ in the annual reports and detailed financial filings made on Form 10-K (10Ks). Intelligent, responsible risk management is essential to the success of a modern investment bank and the existence of a comprehensive system of communication and committees shows shareholders that good corporate governance is in place. But good corporate governance cuts both ways: risk management means capturing profit as well as protecting against loss. The descriptions of these committees make it very clear that the investment banks are joining up the dots. Morgan Stanley manages trading risk ‘on a Company-wide basis, on a worldwide trading division level, and on an individual product basis’.7 Bear Stearns described ‘constant communication between trading department management and senior management concerning inventory positions and market risk profile’, including ‘formal reports of positions, profits and losses and certain trading strategies’ to a committee ‘which comprises senior managing directors from each trading department as well as the Risk Management Department’.8 A committee at Lehman Brothers that includes the key business heads ‘meets weekly and reviews all risk exposures, position concentrations and risk taking activities’.

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The chairman and the CEO is frequently the same person and the other directors, although ‘independent’ in the regulatory definition of the word, are often non-executives drawn from the CEO’s peer group. In the UK, executive boards are bigger and corporate governance gives non-executive directors more power and responsibility, but they too are usually drawn from a small group of connected people. Boardrooms in America and Britain are therefore full of people who in the corporate governance environment of the nineties were more likely to go along with the CEO’s plan than to recommend alternative development strategies. In the absence of restraint at board level, the shareholders were the obvious people to apply the brakes.

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‘Core Values Start at the Top’ An article in the Financial Times in July 2002 under this headline written by Sanford Weill, then Citigroup’s Chairman and CEO, is a patriotic call to arms in the cause of corporate governance: ‘America has long had a financial system to be proud of and it is therefore critical – particularly at a time of danger and uncertainty – that both industry and government enact changes to address the recent corporate governance scandals.’ Weill had no doubt where the responsibility lay: ‘The current crisis is an opportunity to recapture core values. But this will only be possible if CEOs accept the responsibility that comes with their rank.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

“If you could sit in on some of these board meetings, you’d be shocked,” says Icahn, who compares CEOs and boards to eating-club presidents and their slightly dumber friends whose job it is to make them look good. Plenty of other activist investors actually believe that their brand of activism is the cure for what ails America, both economically and socially. Icahn, for one, blames “poor corporate governance for a growing disparity in income and slow growth” in the country. “If we don’t get better corporate governance, we’re going to lose our hegemony,” he says.51 It’s a fascinating inversion of logic. But the truth is that most activists don’t develop deep relationships with the firms they invest in; they merely troll through SEC filings looking for indications that a company might be weak or underpriced—and then pounce.

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But if more of them use their power to buy and hold shares of firms that practice good corporate governance and follow business strategies that support the real economy, then finance could potentially become not an impediment to growth but in fact a true supporter of it. It’s a bold goal, but one that authentic wealth makers like Bogle believe is attainable. Indeed, he believes it’s something that the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, would have favored. Bogle recalls a conversation he had a few years back with several other big fund managers who’d gotten together to talk about how the industry might encourage better corporate governance within firms. Bogle felt that asset managers like Vanguard had the potential to play a critical role in fighting off activist investors (like the sort covered in chapter 4) and the high-frequency traders of the world.

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If every asset manager in the country were forced to use his or her corporate proxy vote (the vote that gives them a say on issues like executive pay, corporate boards, and even some big company decisions) to help enforce better corporate governance, they could help businesses push back against the short-term pressure from Wall Street for quick returns and easy profits that undermine longer-term growth. (Such actions would work only if the entire system were focused on passively managed funds, so that fund managers themselves didn’t have incentives to push the quarter over the longer haul.) To be sure, some fund managers have complained that such forays into corporate governance would be too costly. Yet one large asset manager, TIAA-CREF, has already taken on the challenge.

Kicking Awaythe Ladder by Ha-Joon Chang

Asian financial crisis, business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, fear of failure, income inequality, income per capita, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land bank, land reform, liberal world order, moral hazard, open economy, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, scientific management, short selling, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus

Competition law Contrary to what is assumed in much current literature on the subject, corporate governance is not simply a matter internal to the corporation in question. Actions by very large firms with significant market power can have consequences for the whole economy (e.g., their bankruptcy can create financial panic) or undermine the basis of the market economy itself (for example, through the socially harmful exploitation of a monopoly position). In this context, corporate governance becomes a matter for society as a whole, not just for the particular company's shareholders. Corporate governance in this sense does not simply involve company-level laws, for example, those specifying the duties of the board of directors to the shareholders.

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They include restrictive macroeconomic policy, liberalization of international trade and investment, privatization and deregulation.2 The 'good institutions' are essentially those that are to be found in developed countries, especially the Anglo-American onesl The key institutions include: democracy; 'good' bureaucracy; an independent judiciary; strongly protected private property rights (including intellectual property rights); and transparent and market-oriented corporate governance and financial institutions (including a politically independent central bank). As we shall see later in the book, there have been heated debates on whether or not these recommended policies and institutions are in fact appropriate for today's developing countries. Curiously, however, many of those critics who question the applicability of these recommendations nevertheless take it for granted that these 'good' policies and institutions were used by the developed countries when they themselves were in the process of developing.

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However, such simple distinctions quickly break down. For example, patent law might be regarded as an 'institution', but a country could adopt a 'policy' of not recognizing patents as indeed Switzerland and the Netherlands did until the early twentieth century. Similarly, when we examine competition law we will do so in the context of corporate governance institutions, but also as a part of industrial policy. 1.3. T h e Chapters Chapter two deals mainly with what these days are called industrial, trade and technology policies (or I T T policies for short). This is because, in my view, differences in these policies separate the countries that have been more successful in generating growth and structural change from the others.

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

Joh reports chaebol rankings for each year from 1993 through 1997 from the Korea Fair Trade Commission. Joh, “Corporate Governance and Firm Profitability,” supra note 4, at Table 10. Based on total assets belonging to firms in the same chaebol, Hanbo was number 14 in 1995, up from number 28 in 1994. 10. See Donald Kirk, Korean Crisis: Unraveling of the Miracle in the IMF Era (New York: Palgrave, 2001), chapter 8. 11. See Stephan Haggard, The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (Washington: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2000), 56–57. 12. Sung Wook Joh, “Korean Corporate Governance and Firm Performance” (working paper, 12th NBER seminar on East Asian Economics, 2001). 13.

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Sung Wook Joh, “Korean Corporate Governance and Firm Performance” (working paper, 12th NBER seminar on East Asian Economics, 2001). 13. Joh, “Corporate Governance and Firm Profitability,” supra note 4. See also Jae-Seung Baek, Jun-Koo Kang, and Kyung Suh Park, “Corporate Governance and Firm Value: Evidence from the Korean Financial Crisis,” Journal of Financial Economics 71 (2004): 265–313. 14. Details of Korea’s economic performance immediately prior to the crisis are in “Korea Letter of Intent to the IMF,” supra note 1. 15. For a timeline of events, see Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, The 1997–98 Asian Financial Crisis, February 6, 1998, available at http://www.fas.org/man/crs/crs-asia2.htm.

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“Hear: Geithner’s Stress Test” (podcast), Planet Money, February 25, 2009, audio available at http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/02/hear_geithners_stress_test.html. 55. Department of the Treasury, TARP Standards for Compensation and Corporate Governance, June 10, 2009, available at http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/reports/ec%20ifr%20fr%20web%206.9.09tg164.pdf. 56. Stephen Labaton and Edmund L. Andrews, “Geithner Said to Have Prevailed on the Bailout,” The New York Times, February 9, 2009, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/business/economy/10bailout.html. 57. Department of the Treasury, TARP Standards for Compensation and Corporate Governance, supra note 55. 58. Stephen Labaton, “Treasury to Set Executives’ Pay at 7 Ailing Firms,” The New York Times, June 10, 2009, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/business/11pay.html. 59.

The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It by Anat Admati, Martin Hellwig

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Wall, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, open economy, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, Yogi Berra

Hayes (2012, 99) refers to “IBGYBG” (I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone) as a theme that underlies risk-taking incentives. 28. UBS (2008). 29. See McLean and Elkind (2004) and Hayes (2012). Wilmarth (2007) describes how cases such as those of Enron and WorldCom represented a double failure of corporate governance. In addition to the immediate corporate governance failures at the failed firms, banks experienced their own corporate governance failures as they breached their fiduciary duties and exposed themselves to massive legal and reputational risks in their rush to reap short-term profits by servicing the fraudulent schemes of Enron and WorldCom. L. McDonald (2010) gives an insider’s account of the fall of Lehman Brothers and how a short-term focus can infuse an organization’s corporate culture.

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“Banks, Markets, and the Allocation of Risks,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 154: 328–351. ———. 2000. “On the Economics and Politics of Corporate Finance and Corporate Control.” In Corporate Governance, ed. X. Vives. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 95–134. ———. 2005. “Market Discipline, Information Processing, and Corporate Governance.” In Corporate Governance in Context: Corporations, States, and Markets in Europe, Japan, and the US, ed. K. J. Hopt, E. Wymeersch, H. Kanda, and H. Baum. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 379–402. ———. 2009. “Systemic Risk in the Financial Sector: An Analysis of the Subprime-Mortgage Financial Crisis.”

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Regulation would be easier to enforce if it were supported by policies allowing investors and supervisors to better monitor and control bankers’ risk taking. Making derivatives markets more transparent, for example by forcing many of them to public exchanges, would make it harder for bankers to hide the risks they are taking. Effective corporate governance is also important. If bank managers cannot be controlled by their boards and shareholders, their behavior can be particularly dangerous. Laws and regulations that promote responsible corporate governance can help reduce the conflict between those who make decisions within financial institutions and others in the economy who might be harmed but have no control. The Essential Element: Political Will Once the problems in the financial system are identified properly, much can be done to create a better system that supports the economy without subjecting all of us to excessive risks.

The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market by Philip Augar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business logic, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, family office, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hiring and firing, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, light touch regulation, loadsamoney, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Sloane Ranger, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, vertical integration, wikimedia commons, yield curve

By appointing Buxton as chief executive and chairman designate Barclays were defying the Cadbury Committee, an official inquiry into corporate governance, which had recently recommended that such roles be split. Buxton was warned that in due course Barclays would have to comply.11 Taylor’s successors at the Lex column regarded Buxton’s appointment as ‘perplexing’ and said he ‘must take a share of the blame for the lax cost control which has been a substantial part of Barclays’ problem.’12 Buxton did not hold both roles for long, though it was bad debts rather than corporate governance or poor cost control that precipitated further change. When the results for 1992 were released, the dividend to shareholders was cut to below the level paid in 1988 and bad debt provisions of £2.5 billion dragged the bank into loss.

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‘IN THE POO BY ’92’ From his Financial Times desk at Bracken House in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral and then his office in Fitzrovia, Taylor had been watching Barclays with bemusement for nearly twenty years. Thatcher’s free market economy was in full swing, institutional shareholders were demanding changes in corporate governance, yet as late as 1986, the penultimate year of Timothy Bevan’s time in the chair, Barclays seemed to be in denial. The challenges at this stage came in the corporate and retail bank rather than BZW. Competition, which had stepped up in the 1970s following the end of the cartel, intensified in the 1980s.

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Middleton, Barclays’ deputy chairman, who had seen his fair share of politics at the Treasury, took an office midway between the chairman and chief executive in an attempt to build bridges. In the end he found it easier to hold a separate weekly meeting with each one rather than have the three of them awkwardly together. Taylor liked to debate with people who would stretch him in the way that Hogg had done. For the corporate governance arrangements to work as envisaged by Cadbury, executives needed to reach out to the non-executives, and non-executives needed to commit sufficient time to understand the business. But at Barclays under Taylor and Buxton neither happened, in part because the business of banking had outgrown the means of managing it.

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B Stewart, Rachel Abrams

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, estate planning, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Michael Milken, power law, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, éminence grise

Within a year, Spreiser had clashed with Moonves, who didn’t consider her a “team player.” She and the other two women had quit, telling Shari they felt marginalized and ineffective. They felt frozen out. After their departure, CBS named five new board members, all men, and all handpicked by Sumner. Despite splitting Viacom, nothing had really changed when it came to corporate governance. * * * — Shari’s fundamental disagreement with him over Viacom, and her stubborn refusal to change her mind, remained a thorn in Sumner’s side. In an October 2006 interview on CNBC with former Disney chief executive Michael Eisner, Sumner said flatly that he had no intention of naming Shari to the chief executive position.

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(As the controlling shareholder of Viacom, National Amusements had the power to change Viacom’s and CBS’s bylaws at any time.) The rule change gave both Shari and Sumner veto power over any transaction. Viacom management was now up against its controlling shareholder. Folta denounced the move as “illegitimate” and “completely at odds with good corporate governance.” The bylaw change pretty much ended whatever chance Dauman had of selling a Paramount stake, for who would negotiate such a deal knowing that a Redstone would veto it? The likelihood of a deal had already cooled anyway, as the Chinese balked at Dauman’s $10 billion valuation and grew skeptical that Dauman had the authority to enter into a binding transaction.

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At a time when she felt she was being shunned by just about everyone, starting with the Viacom board, she was grateful to Moonves for taking her under his wing. Shari was especially pleased when Moonves gave the Los Angeles Times a statement praising her as “a terrific board member and a strong voice for good corporate governance throughout her tenure here at CBS.” Vanity Fair reported Shari had “taken center stage” at the conference and was “soaking up the spotlight.” * * * — While his mother was in Sun Valley, Tyler was deep in negotiations with Dauman. Without initially telling Shari, Tyler had opened a back channel to Dauman in early June.

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever by Robin Wigglesworth

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Brownian motion, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, index fund, industrial robot, invention of the wheel, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lockdown, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, money market fund, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, rolodex, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, transaction costs, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund

That attack eventually foundered on the spiky rocks of hard data. Evidence that index funds make markets more bubbly or fragile remains inconclusive at best. The newest and arguably most potent line of criticism is what the growing heft of passive investing means for corporate governance, and the implications of a strengthening industry oligopoly. The term “corporate governance” may seem dry and niche, something that only geeky lawyers might care about. But it is of vital importance. Companies enjoy immense clout in the modern world, and their biggest owners are often—and increasingly—the index funds provided by the likes of BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street.

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The main thrust of his incendiary letter was that corporate accountability has been declining for decades, and that the rise of index funds was exacerbating it.4 Whatever their investment merits, Singer argued that they constitute lazy, inattentive owners, who encourage corporate sloth and waste that in extremis might ultimately rob the broader economy of some of its dynamism. “As more and more investable money is managed without regard to research, evaluation, corporate governance, quality of management and an actual assessment of long-term prospects, and instead is delegated to the index-constructors and the purveyors of index products, what does that trend mean for capitalism? Growth? Innovation?” he asked rhetorically.* Historically, many investment groups have in practice outsourced much of the hard but dull, unglamorous work around corporate governance to a small club of consultancies known as “proxy advisors.” The biggest by far are Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services.

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This was largely applauded at the time, as an indexing company taking a strong stance on an important cornerstone of egalitarian shareholder democracy, with every stock being worth the same. However, it is a potent example of how S&P Dow Jones and its rivals exert de facto influence over core areas of corporate governance through their setting of standards. It may have been the right choice, yet one could argue that these are areas best left to lawmakers and regulators, not private companies. Another example is Unilever’s reversal of a decision to move its headquarters from London to the Netherlands. The venerable consumer goods conglomerate believed that its dual UK-Dutch structure, an odd historical legacy of a 1929 merger between a British soap maker and a Dutch margarine producer, was an unnecessary headache.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

They can be small and fully diversified—within as well as across industries. Or they can be large and partially diversified—not within but only across industries. We also exempt investors that opt to be purely passive (that do not engage in any corporate governance activities). Our approach can be stated as a simple rule: No investor holding shares of more than a single effective firm in an oligopoly and participating in corporate governance may own more than 1% of the market. The actual operationalization of this rule is subtle (e.g., how to define “oligopoly” and an “effective firm”). Questions concern how to address firms that operate in multiple markets, among many others.

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Because institutional investors appear to reduce competition among firms they own, they should not be permitted to own firms that are rivals within a single, concentrated industry—with exceptions where institutional investors are small or passive. Yet our policy affects issues other than competition, and we now consider its likely effects on these other areas. GOVERNANCE Beyond the competition benefits of our proposal, it would also greatly improve corporate governance. Commentators have noted that the current system of institutional-investor dominance harms corporate governances. In the words of law professors Ronald Gilson and Jeffrey Gordon: Institutional intermediaries compete and are rewarded on the basis of “relative performance” metrics that give them little incentive to engage in shareholder activism that could address shortfalls in managerial performance; such activity can improve absolute but not relative performance [of the institution].38 In other words, if a large investor spends time and resources improving the performance of Firm X, the higher stock price of Firm X benefits all owners of Firm X.

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Furthermore, our proposal could change the nature of competition between mutual funds.39 That competition at present centers primarily on fees, services, and the illusory ability of fund managers to “pick” stocks.40 If our proposal were put into effect, competition would instead focus on the quality of governance that institutional investors provide, leading to a market where competition between institutional investors would directly help solve the Berle-Means problem by holding institutional investors accountable for governing the companies they invest in to maximize returns. This is not to say that our proposal has no drawbacks for corporate governance. Some, though we would guess few, index funds might choose to opt out of governance entirely (as we allow and discuss further below), which could harm governance. By creating dominant, large, concentrated shareholders, our policy might disadvantage minority shareholders, a challenge that other reforms (including applying Quadratic Voting to corporate governance) would have to deal with. Our policy would likely make it slower and more cumbersome for institutional investors to switch the firms they invest in, which could beneficially check excessive stock picking but might also make the market somewhat less liquid (though again, other policies we advocate, like a COST, would help address this).

Deep Value by Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, financial engineering, fixed income, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, John Bogle, joint-stock company, low interest rates, margin call, passive investing, principal–agent problem, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Teledyne, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple

Business strategy related activism—for example, agitating to have an over-diversified company refocus by spinningoff non-essential assets—also generated significant returns in excess of the market of 4.37 percent. Activist campaigns with no stated goal other than improving shareholder value, efficiency, or simple undervaluation, generated a return of 4.99 percent over the market. Brav et al. found that campaigns targeting capital structure and corporate governance issues generated little excess return. However, other researchers have found that corporate governance reforms led to the largest premia in a sale of the company.62 This research examined activist strategies in the context of the ends sought, finding that the activists were on average successful in achieving their specific goals. For example, activist campaigns focused on business strategy produced profitable businesses, with revenue growth, increased margins, and improved returns on assets.

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Activism focused on the capital structure increased pay-out ratios by more than 10 percent and 160% 3% 120% 2% 80% 1% 40% 0% 0% Fi –40% 13 D t-1 t-1 t-1 t-1 t-1 t-2 –1% t-2 lli ng t+ 2 t+ 4 t+ 6 t+ 8 t+ 10 t+ 12 t+ 14 t+ 16 t+ 18 t+ 20 4% t-4 200% t-6 5% 0 t-8 240% 2 6% 4 280% 6 7% 8 320% 0 Abnormal Buy-and-Hold Return 8% Share Turnover Relative to (t-100, t-40) 179 How Hannibal Profits From His Victories Abnormal Share Turnover (Right) Abnormal Buy&Hold Return (Left) FIGURE 9.1â•… Excess Buy-and-Hold Returns Around Schedule 13D Filing Source: Alon P. Brav, Wei Jiang, Randall S. Thomas, and Frank Partnoy. “Hedge Fund Activism, Corporate Governance, and Firm Performance (May 2008).” Journal of Finance, Vol. 63, pp. 1729, 2008. reduced debt. Finally, corporate governance-related activism reduced agency costs as targeted companies tended to reduce assets compared to the average target. (Recall that Michael Jensen found that agency costs lead management teams to waste excess cash flow, growing assets at the expense of profitability.)

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Boyson and Robert M. Mooradian. “Corporate Governance and Hedge Fund Activism (June 1, 2010).” Review of Derivatives Research, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2011. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=992739. 59. April Klein and Emanuel Zur. “Entrepreneurial Shareholder Activism: Hedge Funds and Other Private Investors (September 2006).” AAA 2007 Financial Accounting & Reporting Section (FARS) Meeting Available at SSRN: http://ssrn .com/abstract=913362 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.913362. 60. Alon P. Brav, Wei Jiang, Randall S. Thomas, and Frank Partnoy. “Hedge Fund Activism, Corporate Governance, and Firm Performance (May 2008).”

The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer by Dean Baker

accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, corporate governance, declining real wages, full employment, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, medical malpractice, medical residency, money market fund, offshore financial centre, price discrimination, public intellectual, risk tolerance, spread of share-ownership

We know this because individuals form corporations, even though it means that they have to pay a corporate income tax in addition to the income tax paid by individual shareholders.3 As a condition of gaining corporate status, the government can and does set rules for corporate governance. (For example, there are extensive rules on the rights of minority shareholders.) Rules of corporate governance could easily include provisions that put a check on runaway CEO pay. For example, it would be relatively simple to require that pay packages be periodically subject to approval by a majority of shareholders, in an election in which only the shares that are actually voted count.

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(Most corporations count shares that are not voted as supporting the management’s position.) Whether or not such rules on corporate conduct are desirable is a debatable issue, but in a world where the government by definition sets the rules for corporate governance, any set of rules necessarily involves government intervention. The nanny state conservatives would like the public to believe that the current rules of corporate governance were part of the Ten Commandments and should never be altered. In a serious national debate over economic policy, these rules must be part of the discussion. 2 Limited liability means that the shareholders in a corporation cannot be personally held liable for the debts of a corporation.

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In effect, the rules placed on corporate conduct are part of quid pro quo involved in establishing a corporation. The reason that the government allows individuals to form corporations is that it wants to facilitate economic growth, but the government will be less effective in promoting this goal if it does not put in place the right set of rules for corporate governance. As it stands, there are already extensive sets of rules regarding corporate governance. The government imposes a long list of requirements on corporations regarding issues such as financial disclosure, elections of corporate boards, and protection of minority shareholders. Most of these rules are not controversial; they are seen as laying the groundwork for the effective operation of a modern market economy.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

The familiar refrain is that socialism threatens to revive the economic problems of the 1970s: union bosses and politicians using their control over inefficient corporations to hold the rest of society to ransom. Whilst this portrayal of 1970s Britain is something of a pastiche, it does have some truth to it. State ownership often did little to improve working conditions, corporate governance, or environmental objectives. Some of the largest state-owned enterprises in the world are also the most corrupt, extractive, and exploitative. Thankfully, the choice is not between corporations governed in the interests of shareholders or politicians. This is where the “democratic” in democratic socialism comes in — whether a company is nationalised, mutualised, or subject to any other form of collective ownership, workers must either be in charge of making decisions themselves, or rigorously holding other decision-makers to account.

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These pressures have been passed on to corporations via the stock market: with equities representing a significant chunk of the assets held by money managers, the pressure on corporations to meet shareholder needs for immediate returns increased.33 In some cases, rather than being responsible to a board of directors and a few disorganised shareholders, corporations have been held to ransom by “activist investors” demanding that their capital is used in the most efficient way possible. This change in corporate governance has also been reinforced and embedded by the emergence of a new ideology: shareholder value. Together, the increasing power of investors and the emergence of an ideology to support this power has led to the financialisation of the non-financial corporation: businesses are increasingly being used as piggy banks for rich shareholders.

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The reorganisation of the economy that took place in the 1980s had little to do with making the economy work better, and everything to do with changing who the economy worked for. Shareholder value became so dominant precisely because it benefitted those with the power. As a result, it quickly colonised management theory and practice, transforming corporate governance by changing managers’ incentives to ensure that they acted as reliable functionaries for the owners of capital. Contrary to the arguments of mainstream economists, this political reorganisation of the firm has made firms less efficient when it comes to their use of society’s scarce resources.

Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen

3Com Palm IPO, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, compound rate of return, computerized trading, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, equity premium, equity risk premium, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, fudge factor, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Ellison, law of one price, linear programming, Livingstone, I presume, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the rule of 72, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, VA Linux, value at risk, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Financial system structure What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of Japanese keiretsus? 17. Corporate governance “Globalization” means, among other things, more international trade, more direct competition among companies in different countries, and more multinational companies. Do you think that globalization will lead to a convergence in systems of corporate governance? Or do you think that international differences in corporate governance are “baked in” by history and differences in legal and financial systems? For a start in thinking about these questions, take a look at the following: R. Morck, ed., A History of Corporate Governance around the World, University of Chicago Press, 2005.

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Gale, Comparing Financial Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). M. Aoki, G. Jackson, and H. Miyajima, Corporate Governance in Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). J. P. Krahnen and R. H. Schmidt (eds.), The German Financial System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). R. La Porta, F. Lopez-de-Silanes, and A. Shleifer, “Corporate Ownership around the World,” Journal of Finance 54 (April 1999), pp. 471–517. For excellent discussions of corporate governance, see: M. Becht, P. Bolton, and A. Röell, “Corporate Governance and Control” in G. Constantinides, M. Harris, and R. Stulz (eds.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2003), pp. 1–109.

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In each case, define “largest” or “smallest” as total value relative to GDP. 2. Financial system structure What is a keiretsu? Give a brief description. 3. Corporate governance Do Japanese investors play an important role in corporate financial policy and governance? If not, could they? 4. Corporate governance German banks often control a large fraction of the shareholder votes for German businesses. How do they get that voting power? 5. Corporate governance What is meant by the German system of codetermination? 6. Ownership form What is the most common form of ownership of corporations worldwide? 7.

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

United States: Embassy Pictures, 1968. Film; Kashner, Sam. “The Making of The Producers.” Vanity Fair, January 2004, 108–40; Tynan, Kenneth. “Frolics and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man.” New Yorker, October 30, 1978, 46–131. An excellent source for the corporate governance literature is Shleifer, Andrei, and Robert Vishny. “A Survey of Corporate Governance.” Journal of Finance 52, no. 2 (June 1997): 737–83. Some of the primary work on the agency problem includes Fama, Eugene F. “Agency Problems and the Theory of the Firm.” Journal of Political Economy 88, no. 2 (1980): 288–307; Jensen, Michael C., and William H.

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“Value Maximization, Stakeholder Theory, and the Corporate Objective Function.” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 14, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 8–21. For my take on recent developments in the capital markets and on corporate governance, see Desai, Mihir A. “The Incentive Bubble.” Harvard Business Review 90, no. 3 (March 2012): 123–29. Other sources cited in chapter 1 on moral hazard are excellent sources for corporate governance issues as well. An excellent textbook treatment of these issues is provided in Tirole, Jean. The Theory of Corporate Finance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. For an international perspective, see La Porta, Rafael, Florencio Lopez-De-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer.

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The fourth chapter considers what happens when the relationship between investors and the underlying productive assets they own is mediated by human beings with their own motivations. The resulting emphasis on the relationship between principals (shareholders) and agents (managers) is the problem of corporate governance—and arguably the central problem of modern capitalism. The principal-agent problem, as demonstrated by Mel Brooks’s The Producers and E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, is also a powerful frame for situations in our life when we are, consciously or unconsciously, behaving on behalf of others.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

International Monetary Fund, Oct. 2015. At http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2015/02/pdf/text.pdf. IMF, “German-Central European Supply Chain – Cluster Report.” IMF Country Report No. 13/263. International Monetary Fund, Aug. 2013. Isaksson, Mats, and Serdar Çelik, “Who Cares? Corporate Governance in Today’s Equity Markets.” OECD Corporate Governance Working Paper No. 8. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Apr. 2013. At http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5k47zw5kdnmp-en. Iwamoto, Masaaki, “Abandoned Homes Haunt Japanese Neighborhoods.” Bloomberg.com, July 10, 2015. At http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-09/abandoned-homes-haunt-japanese-neighborhoods.

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While our own research for this book has spanned more areas than we first imagined, we have often found that we have been drawn to some special communities of scholars. The work by Luigi Zingales, Raghuram Rajan, Chad Syversen, and their colleagues at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has been a source of knowledge and inspiration, especially their research on finance, corporate governance, and productivity. Edmund Phelps and his colleagues at Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society have provided us with thought-provoking research and opinions in the territory of economics and culture. Scholars at the George Mason University and its Mercatus Center have produced a vast reservoir of economic analyses of regulation.

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One can dispute their politics, but their insights into the economy are instructive for a contemporary student in that field. Similarly, when we have reread works by scholars like John Kenneth Galbraith, Alexander Gerschenkron, and Susan Strange, to name just three, we have been struck by their insights. Much of the recent literature on corporate governance, business development, and strategy that we have read has felt like a copy of the original thought derived from the works of Peter Drucker, Michael Porter, Henry Minzberg, Philip Kotler, and Igor Ansoff. There are several thinkers today that can be put in the same category. If you get bored by all those who just repeat the conventional wisdom about the economy and how it evolves, pick any work from these economic thinkers and you will immediately be reinvigorated: David Autor, Tyler Cowen, Deirdre McCloskey, Malcolm Gladwell, David Graeber, Deepak Lal, Joel Mokyr, Matt Ridley, Richard Sennett, Robert Solow, Lawrence Summers, Peter Thiel, and Martin Wolf.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Friedman, “A Friedman Doctrine.” 6. Francis Fukuyama. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. 7. “For Larry Summers, Milton Friedman Was a Devil Figure in His Youth.” Mostly Economics, August 17, 2010. 8. Ibid. 9. TBR: Statement on Corporate Governance, September 1997. https://cdn.the conversation.com/static_files/files/693/Statement_on_Corporate_Governance_Business -Roundtable-1997%281%29.pdf?1566830902. 10. Colin Mayer. Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 11. Leadership Next interview, Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt with Colin Mayer. 12.

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In “The Illusory Promise of Stakeholder Governance,” he stated that stakeholder capitalism was not real—that when faced with actual decisions, CEOs don’t have an incentive to give weight to other stakeholders and therefore won’t do it.5 In follow-on research published in 2021, he found that the companies that signed the Business Roundtable statement had made few if any changes to their corporate governance guidelines, corporate bylaws, proxy statements, director pay policies, or responses to shareholder proposals as a result. His conclusion? That the Business Roundtable statement was “mostly for show.” I decided to host a debate on the topic on Fortune’s podcast Leadership Next, with cohost Ellen McGirt, pitting Bebchuk against Harvard Business School’s Rebecca Henderson, a proponent of stakeholder capitalism and author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire.6 I gave Bebchuk the first chance to speak and asked him directly, “Why do you believe this is all hot air?”

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Bebchuk pointed out that most of the CEOs who signed the BRT letter didn’t even get board approval for their actions, raising questions about the seriousness of the effort. For Bebchuk, this was a telltale sign that the letter was “largely for show.” He added, “We reviewed all their board-approved corporate governance guidelines, that public companies all have on their website. And we found that companies that are Business Roundtable statement signatories, by and large, still have guidelines that are largely reflective of a commitment to shareholder primacy.” Then Henderson, who had been listening quietly, and who consults with many companies and sits on the board of Amgen, spoke up.

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

Stiglitz, Volume II: Information and Economic Analysis: Applications to Capital, Labor, and Product Markets, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 432–46. 29 The author was a participant in some of these battles. For a more extensive discussion of them, and their consequences, see J. E. Stiglitz, Roaring Nineties, New York, W. W. Norton, 2003. There were other later battles, for example concerning say in pay and other reforms in corporate governance. For a discussion of the kinds of reforms in tax and corporate governance laws that might make a difference, see J. E. Stiglitz, Rewriting the Rules, Hyde Park, NY, The Roosevelt Institute, May 2015. 30 T. Philippon and A. Reshef, ‘Wages and human capital in the US financial industry: 1909–2006’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 127, no. 4, 2012, pp. 1551–609. 31 D.

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It is not helpful to think of markets as pre-existing, abstract institutions which economic actors (firms, investors and households) ‘enter’ to do business, and which require them, once there, to behave in particular ways. Markets are better understood as the outcomes of interactions between economic actors and institutions, both private and public. These outcomes will depend on the nature of the actors (for example, the different corporate governance structures of firms), their endowments and motivations, the body of law and regulation and cultural contexts which constrain them and the specific nature of the transactions which take place. Markets are ‘embedded’ in these wider institutional structures and social, legal and cultural conditions.38 In the modern world, as Polanyi pointed out, the concept of a ‘free’ market is a construct of economic theory, not an empirical observation.39 Indeed, he observed that the national capitalist market was effectively forced into existence through public policy—there was nothing ‘natural’ or universal about it.40 The orthodox notion of competition between firms is equally misleading.

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Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 2001 [1944]. 40 As Polanyi put it: ‘The road to free markets was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism … Administrators had to be constantly on the watch to ensure the free working of the system.’ Ibid, p. 144. 41 R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2009. 42 W. Lazonick and M. O’Sullivan, ‘Maximizing shareholder value: a new ideology for corporate governance’, Economy and Society, vol. 29, no. 1, 2000, pp. 13–35. 43 W. Hutton, How Good We Can Be: Ending the Mercenary Society and Building a Great Country, London, Abacus, 2015. 44 Lawrence Summers, October 1991, when Chief Economist at the World Bank; cited by M. Ellman, ‘Transition economies’, in H.

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

Tax is never the individual states’ top attraction, though: Corporations paying no state taxes owe U.S. federal taxes. Two further lures have turned certain U.S. states into corporate havens. One involves usury; I will explore this in chapter 10. The other involves corporate governance, which is largely governed in the United States by state, not federal, laws. In both of these, Delaware plays a starring role. What ties all these different strands together—the tax, the secrecy, the usury specialties, and the corporate governance—is the political establishment of this tiny state, where everyone knows everyone else and Democrats and Republicans alike seem to share a uniform opinion that local laws must be shaped to satisfy corporate desires, to attract business for the state—and the rest of the world can take care of itself.

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Black, “Shareholder Activism and Corporate Governance in the United States,” New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law 3 (1998): 459–465, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=45100. 36.Senate Bill No. 58, An Act to Amend Title 10 of the Delaware Code Relating to the Court of Chancery, State of Delaware Division of Corporations, http://corp.delaware.gov/sb58.shtml. 37.Matthew Goldstein, “Special Report: For Some People, CDOs Aren’t a Four-Letter Word,” Reuters, May 17, 2010. 38.Madhav Mehra, “Are We Making a Mockery of Independent Directors?” World Council for Corporate Governance, http://www.wcfcg.net/ht130304.htm, accessed August 15, 2010.

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Britain and the Netherlands began to follow the U.S. lead.11 Just before the First World War, however, New Jersey’s governor Woodrow Wilson decided to check the rampant corporate abuses that had emerged as a result of these permissive incorporation laws and put in place progressive new antitrust laws and rules to make corporate managers more accountable to shareholders, investors, and other stakeholders. So corporations flocked to neighboring Delaware, which had already set the standard to be used by tax havens thereafter, by letting corporate managers effectively write their own corporate governance rules. By 1929 two-fifths of Delaware’s income came from corporate fees and taxes, and it led the United States in incorporations, a lead it has never lost. An article in the American Law Review in 1899 noted Delaware’s efforts to win the race to relax corporate standards and called Delaware “a little community of truck-farmers and clam-diggers . . . determined to get her little, tiny, sweet, round, baby hand into the grab-bag of sweet things before it is too late.”

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In some circles, so engrained did these schizophrenic attitudes to “fairness” become that early in the Great Recession an Obama administration official could say, with a straight face, that it was necessary to honor AIG bonuses, even for the officials who had led the company to need a $150 billion bailout, because of the sanctity of contracts; minutes later he could admonish autoworkers to accept a revision of their contract that would have lowered their compensation enormously. Different corporate governance laws (even modest ones, like giving shareholders some say in the pay of their CEO)40 might have tamed the unbridled zeal of executives, but the 1 percent didn’t—and still don’t—want such reforms in corporate governance, even if they would make the economy more efficient. And they have used their political muscle to make sure that such reforms don’t occur. The forces we have just described, including weaker unions and weaker social cohesion working with corporate governance laws that give management enormous discretion to run corporations for their own benefit, have led not only to a declining wage share in national income but also to a change in the way our economy responds to an economic downturn.

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Competitive forces should also limit disproportionate executive compensation, but in modern corporations, the CEO has enormous power—including the power to set his own compensation, subject, of course, to his board—but in many corporations, he even has considerable power to appoint the board, and with a stacked board, there is little check. Shareholders have minimal say. Some countries have better “corporate governance laws,” the laws that circumscribe the power of the CEO, for instance, by insisting that there be independent members in the board or that shareholders have a say in pay. If the country does not have good corporate governance laws that are effectively enforced, CEOs can pay themselves outsize bonuses. Progressive tax and expenditure policies (which tax the rich more than the poor and provide systems of good social protection) can limit the extent of inequality.

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If monetary authorities act to keep unemployment high (even if because of fear of inflation), then wages will be restrained. Strong unions have helped to reduce inequality, whereas weaker unions have made it easier for CEOs, sometimes working with market forces that they have helped shape, to increase it. In each arena—the strength of unions, the effectiveness of corporate governance, the conduct of monetary policy—politics is central. Of course, market forces, the balancing of, say, the demand and supply for skilled workers, affected as it is by changes in technology and education, play an important role as well, even if those forces are partially shaped by politics.

The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America by Warren E. Buffett, Lawrence A. Cunningham

book value, business logic, buy and hold, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, corporate governance, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, fixed income, George Santayana, Henry Singleton, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, junk bonds, large denomination, low cost airline, Michael Milken, oil shock, passive investing, price stability, Ronald Reagan, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Teledyne, the market place, transaction costs, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Cunningham Professor of Law Director, The Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Center on Corporate Governance Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Yeshiva University © 1997; 1998 Lawrence A. Cunningham All Rights Reserved Includes Previously Copyrighted Material Reprinted with Permission TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 PROLOGUE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 I. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A. B. C. D.

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It won't be too long before the query becomes: "What happens to this place if you don't get hit by a truck?" Such questions, in any event, raise a reason for me to discuss corporate governance, a hot topic during the past year. In general, I believe that directors have stiffened their spines recently and that shareholders are now being treated somewhat more like true owners than was the case not long ago. Commentators on corporate governance, however, seldom make any distinction among three fundamentally different manager/owner situations that exist in publicly-held companies. Though the legal responsibility of directors is identical throughout, their ability to effect change differs in each of the cases.

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But he notes that he benefited enormously from Graham's intellectual generosity and believes it is appropriate that he pass the wisdom on, even if that means creating investment competitors. To that end, my most important role has been to organize the essays around the themes reflected in this collection. This introduction to the major themes encapsulates the basics and locates them in the context of current thinking. The essays follow. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE For Buffett, managers are stewards of shareholder capital. The best managers think like owners in making business decisions. 8 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 19:1 They have shareholder interests at heart. But even first-rate managers will sometimes have interests that conflict with those of shareholders.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

The public, already suspicious of business ethics (if it doesn't consider the term an outright oxymoron), was not, I feared, prepared to accept revelations undercutting widely held beliefs about the way corporations were governed. Much of the corporate governance practices of myth have long since been displaced by the imperatives of a modern economy. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shareholders, in many instances controlling shareholders, actively participated in governing U.S. corporations. They appointed the board of directors, who in turn hired the CEO and other officers and, in general, controlled the strategies of the company. Corporate governance had the trappings of democratic representative government. But ownership diffused over the following generations, and the managerial and entrepreneurial skills of company founders were not always inherited by their offspring.

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Only rarely was the management of reasonably profitable corporations challenged. Imperceptibly corporate governance moved from shareholder control to control by the CEO. Aside from the outspoken concern of a few academics, the change occurred quietly and largely by default. As shareholders became ever less engaged, the CEOs began to recommend slates of directors to shareholders, who were soon rubber-stamping 424 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE them. Periodically this paradigm went astray when a company or its management got into trouble.

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But the discipline of the marketplace in the United States, for one, is sufficiently rooted in a rule of law to limit these aberrations. It is instructive that despite the egregious breaches of trust by some of America's business and financial leaders in recent decades, productivity growth, an important metric of corporate efficiency, between 1995 and 2002 accelerated. I will have more to say on corporate governance in chapter 23. What can history tell us about the stability of economic cultures over the generations? What does it suggest about culture's impact on future outcomes? Today, America's culture is much changed from what it was at our founding, though it remains rooted in the values of our Founding Fathers.

Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions by Elizabeth Ghaffari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Bear Stearns, business cycle, business process, cloud computing, Columbine, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark matter, deal flow, do what you love, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, follow your passion, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, high net worth, John Elkington, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Oklahoma City bombing, performance metric, pink-collar, profit maximization, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

Interestingly—and luckily—enough, the first big assignment they asked me to do at the start of 1998 was to manage some research into corporate governance. PW had won a contract to research and write a corporate governance book. At that time, Canada had some of the leading governance standards in the world, with the Dey Report.1 So the partners thought I would be perfect to undertake this international governance research project. In the end, we produced two books, Corporate Governance and the Board—What Works Best and the second edition of Audit Committee Effectiveness—What Works Best. We issued both books in 2000.

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That was not palatable because I really love working in the US—once I adapted to the different business culture. We moved to New Jersey at the start of 1995. ___________________ 1 The Dey Report, also known as The Toronto Report, is a study of Canadian corporate governance. It is completed by the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) committee, chaired by Peter Dey. The report contains fourteen recommendations to assist TSX-listed companies in their approach to corporate governance. Quite honestly, once I became more of an expert in governance, then I did have something original to say and contribute—something that other people weren't saying in meetings. So I became a lot more confident and comfortable with my contributions.

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Also, there were new rules from the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ that had a fundamental and transformational impact on boards of directors. As a result, there was a stronger case for me to make partner, focusing on corporate governance. In our firm, we don't view partnership as a promotion following a period of excellent service. Instead, it's an admission to the partnership. There needs to be a carefully articulated business case as to why someone should be a partner, what value they bring to the firm, and why they need to be a partner to bring that value forward. When I made partner, I made it with a corporate governance business case, which was unique. In many ways, I'm a bit of an unusual creature in that much of my business case related to enhancing PwC's thought leadership around governance, as well as building and improving high-value relationships with boards of directors and audit committees.

Palace Coup: The Billionaire Brawl Over the Bankrupt Caesars Gaming Empire by Sujeet Indap, Max Frumes

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, data science, deal flow, Donald Trump, family office, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, lockdown, low interest rates, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, NetJets, power law, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, super pumped, Travis Kalanick

They were accused of “maliciously and repeatedly” making “unfounded threats,” “bogus allegations,” and “false statements” meant to “bloody up” Caesars. Yet the most interesting aspect of the lawsuit was not the allegations, but rather the plaintiffs. The Caesars parent company, controlled by Apollo and TPG, naturally initiated the suit. But, surprisingly, the OpCo joined the lawsuit as well. Apollo and Paul, Weiss, now attuned to the corporate governance controversy surrounding Caesars, had just appointed Ronen Stauber and Steve Winograd as the first-ever independent directors to the OpCo board. Among their first acts, Stauber and Winograd began an investigation into the Caesars asset transfers to determine if there had been any fraud or misconduct.

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Ira had served a stint in the Antitrust Division in the Department of Justice in the early 1950s before landing at Weil, helping turn the once-Jewish firm into a powerhouse that competed toe-to-toe with the old-line WASP firms that represented Wall Street and Fortune 500 clients. Millstein counseled the likes of General Electric and Westinghouse. Like his contemporaries Marty Lipton and Joe Flom, Ira Millstein became a leading thinker and voice on corporate governance. And by the early 1980s, he was imposing enough to make life difficult for his son. Jim Millstein at first did not contemplate a career in law. After graduating from Princeton, he went to graduate school at Berkeley to get a PhD in political theory. But he soon discovered that even with his top-notch CV, the odds of getting a full-time faculty position were slim.

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Still, it was an attempt at independent fact-finding where all sides had the chance to make their case to Davis. And Davis, who had spent the previous year hearing Apollo’s version of events, ended up buying very little of it. The findings in the report were not just about Apollo and TPG selling casinos cheaply to themselves. Rather, Davis developed an intricate narrative about a massive corporate governance failure driven by Apollo. The Caesars OpCo, according to Davis’s analysis, had been insolvent since the end of 2008, the year the buyout closed. Once in this so-called “zone of insolvency,” the OpCo legally deserved a board of directors distinct and independent from the Caesars parent board—dominated by Apollo and TPG—to safeguard the interests of creditors.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

But once WeWork’s IPO prospectus landed, everything changed. Potential investors and even executives at Mubadala and Kazakhstan’s funds started to ask SoftBank pointed questions about Adam Neumann and WeWork’s corporate governance. “Every conversation would immediately digress into WeWork,” said one attendee of the fund-raising meetings. When employees of Kazakhstan’s fund started grilling advisers to the Vision Fund about WeWork’s corporate governance, they were disheartened. In these advisers’ view, the former Soviet republic’s own fund didn’t have much in the way of governance. Yet these employees of the Kazakhstan fund were so moved by WeWork that they felt a need to call out such flaws in a flashy American startup

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* * * — As Neumann’s staff was toiling to clean up the company over the spring and summer of 2019 to make it look appealing to public market investors, the CEO was effectively doing the opposite. He was obsessing over new tools that would give him more money and more power—tools that would ultimately act as repellents to investors. WeWork had already gained some notoriety for its lax corporate governance. Stories in The Wall Street Journal earlier in the year on Neumann’s ownership of buildings leased to WeWork and the company’s investments in his personal interests—like surfing and an elementary school—had painted a picture of a CEO who was prioritizing himself over the company. Grabbing even more power just wouldn’t be a good look.

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Neumann started to grow colder to her, gradually stripping away her duties overseeing operations, leaving her largely to focus on the IPO. As the S-1 drafts continued, staff frequently heard the two screaming at each other in his or her office, voices booming through the glass walls. She winced as Neumann pushed to weaken the already lax corporate governance she’d created for him. Very late in the game, she was waking up to the fact that what was good for Neumann wasn’t necessarily good for WeWork. She tried small-scale moves—to little effect. Berrent scheduled what she called “governance week” for the IPO team, hoping that Bruce Dunlevie and other board members would fly in to coax Neumann to back down from some of his more questionable moves.

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

The third problem with the skeptical response goes even deeper: The skeptics suggest that the only way government can change the distribution of income is through taxation and government benefits. This is a common view, yet also an extraordinarily blinkered one. Government actually has enormous power to affect the distribution of “market income,” that is, earnings before government taxes and benefits take effect. Think about laws governing unions; the minimum wage; regulations of corporate governance; rules for financial markets, including the management of risk for high-stakes economic ventures; and so on. Government rules make the market, and they powerfully shape how, and in whose interests, it operates. This is a fact, not a statement of ideology. And it is a fact that carries very big implications.

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In that year, the average CEO of the 350 largest publicly traded companies made more than $12 million per year.41 Once again, the standard story is that top executives earn what they earn because they are so much more valuable to companies than they once were. Government has been a bystander as market forces have benignly played out. Once again, however, the standard story is wrong. Executive pay is set in a distorted market deeply shaped by public policy. CEOs have been able to take advantage of a corporate governance system that allows them to drive up their own pay, creates ripe conditions for imbalanced bidding wars in which executives hold the cards, and prevents all but the most privileged insiders from understanding what is actually going on. These arrangements are no accident. Over the last generation—through both changes in public policy and the failure to update government regulations to reflect changing realities—political leaders have promoted a system of executive compensation that grants enormous autonomy to managers, including significant indirect control over their own pay.

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Defenders of American arrangements argue that they are in the best interests of shareholders.44 By negotiating with executives on behalf of the diffuse interests of those owning stock, this argument goes, boards of directors act as faithful defenders of shareholder value. Many of those who study how this process actually works are more doubtful. Looking at corporate governance in a number of rich democracies, the political economists Peter Gourevitch and James Shinn argue that a better description is “managerism,” a system in which managerial elites are in a strong position to extract resources.45 The financier John Bogle has contended that instead of an “ownership society” in which managers serve owners, the United States is moving toward an “agency society” in which managers serve themselves.46 Two of the nation’s leading experts on corporate compensation, Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried, provide many findings more consistent with a “board capture” view than a “shareholder value” perspective.

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

We are deeply grateful to her as well as to the participants in the seminar. For continuing discussion of macroeconomics, as well as the financial crisis and the extended recession, we thank Wendy Carlin, and also David Hope, very warmly. We are very grateful to Ciaran Driver for advice on innovation and corporate governance, as well as highly pertinent comments on advanced capitalism more generally. Economic geography plays a major role in the book, and we have been extremely fortunate to have interacted over some time with the exceptional group of economic geographers associated with the LSE, most notably Michael Storper, Simona Iammarino, Neil Lee, and Thomas Kemeny.

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When the threshold into a modern economy is passed, the mutually beneficial, and reinforcing, relationship between advanced capitalism and government takes the following form: Governments provide and/or underwrite an institutional framework which enables advanced sector companies to develop and carry forward their comparative advantages—we see the provision of the conditions in which advanced capitalism can flourish as a central function of advanced governments. This institutional framework covers a wide range of areas, which notably include education, vocational training and higher education, technology transfer and innovation systems, regulation of skilled labor markets and industrial relations, corporate governance and markets for corporate control, those aspects of the welfare state relevant to advanced capitalism (its insurance but not redistributive functions), trade, competition and intellectual property policy, and the macroeconomic regime. Politically, what sustains the equilibrium is a large electoral constituency of educated workers attaching importance to the competence of government parties in managing the institutions promoting successful advanced capitalism.

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The Puzzle of Varieties of Advanced Capitalism in an Age of Globalization A large literature, mainly in economics, has been devoted to the idea that there is a single optimal way—a best practice—of organizing economies to pursue growth or maximize GDP. At various stages, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, the OECD, the World Bank, and the IMF propagated these beliefs, sometimes referred to as the Washington Consensus.20 It might have been expected that advanced capitalist democracies would have seen convergence, especially in corporate governance, labor market rules, as well as institutions playing roles in training and in technology transfer. Moreover, advanced companies face broadly similar conditions in international product and financial markets, and with respect to overseas direct investment. But that has not generally been the case, despite major relaxation of government rules in the last quarter-century and despite the fact that companies are free to move (Hall and Soskice 2001).

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, carried interest, cloud computing, compensation consultant, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, family office, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, index fund, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Lean Startup, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Paul Graham, pets.com, power law, price stability, prudent man rule, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, VA Linux, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

So VCs will want to ensure that any such expansion is really likely to increase the value of the company as a way to offset the percentage ownership dilution they will feel in the short term. 4. Maintaining Compliance and Good Corporate Governance We are going to explore the various legal duties of board members in chapter 13, but recall that we talked earlier about how the directors and officers generally want to protect themselves from taking on personal liability for any legal mishaps of the company. That’s a good goal, but it requires that the board operate consistent with its legal duties and maintain good corporate governance. So an important role of the board is to simply meet on a regular and consistent basis to keep members informed of the business, enabling them to act in a manner that is consistent with their fundamental role of increasing long-term shareholder value for the common stock and, particularly in the case where the value doesn’t materialize, protect themselves against personal liability.

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So I’m sorry to throw a wet blanket on the heroic journey of starting a new company by kicking it off with a visit to your lawyer’s office, and by talking about things like tax and governance. But it’s critical to the health of your future company to understand how to set up your business. So let’s eat our broccoli together. The first part of this chapter is going to focus on some of the tax and corporate governance implications of how many entrepreneurs choose to set up their businesses. It is admittedly a US-centric view of these issues, so, in the interest of transparency for any non-US readers, you may want to consider whether this first section is relevant to your entrepreneurial journey. For the US audience, I offer no such hall pass.

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The selection process here calls for the independent to be approved by the other two board directors. If you take a step back, this is a pretty fair and even configuration of the board—the common shareholders are represented by the CEO, the preferred are represented by VCF1, and we have an ostensibly neutral third party who has no pecuniary interests in the company. Most corporate governance experts would view this as a balanced board. But this isn’t what the boards always look like. In more recent times, some founders have insisted on having what’s called a “common-controlled” board, meaning that there are more board members representing the common shareholders than other classes of shareholders.

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, business logic, Cass Sunstein, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, IBM and the Holocaust, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, new economy, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl

Though solutions to this problem must ultimately be democratically fashioned by "the people," not by a law professor sitting in front of his computer, I do want to conclude with some general thoughts about how we might move forward. To begin with, tinkering with corporate governance is not enough. Though post-Enron proposals for the reform of corporate governance and measures such as those found in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act are likely to strengthen managers and directors' accountability to investors, they will do little to improve corporate accountability to society as a whole. Broader reforms, such as tighter restrictions on acquisitions and mergers , representation of stakeholders (union representatives, for example) on boards of directors, and laws that permit or require executives to consider stakeholder interests in their business decisions (so-called constituency statutes), though desirable, are unlikely to strengthen corporations ' accountability to society in significant ways.

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Even modest reforms-such as, for example, a law requiring companies to list employee stock options as expenses in their financial reports, which might avoid the kind of misleadingly rosy financial statements that have fueled recent scandals '-seem unlikely from a U.S. federal government that has failed to match its strong words at the time of the scandals with equally strong actions. Though the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, signed into law in 2002 to redress some of the more blatant problems of corporate governance and accounting, provides welcome remedies, at least on paper,' the federal government's general response to corporate scandals has been sluggish and timid at best. What is revealed by comparing that response to the English Parliament's swift and draconian measures of 1720 is the fact that, over the last three hundred years, corporations have amassed such great power as to weaken government 's ability to control them.

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[and] most corporations did not have offices in Washington, did not have lobbyists here."32 Today, all major corporations have offices in the nation's capital, as do the numerous industry groups, think tanks, and lobby organizations that represent their collective interests. Another significant change in corporate-government relations since the 1970s has been the expanded role and influence of corporate donations within the electoral system. In the mid-1970s the Supreme Court extended First Amendment constitutional protection to corporate financing of elections, a decision that opened the door to corporations' near-complete takeover of the electoral process."

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive by Dean Baker

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, medical residency, patent troll, pets.com, pirate software, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, transaction costs

Millions of manufacturing jobs disappeared in the late 1990s and 2000s, even before the recession, as a result of a second surge in the value of the dollar starting in 1997. This has all had the effect of weakening unions – once heavily concentrated in manufacturing – and putting downward pressure on wages in major sectors such as the auto and steel industry. Corporate governance The rules on corporate governance also play an important role in the upward redistribution of income. As the practice stands now, the top management of major corporations is in a position to pick the board of directors, who then decide the salaries of top management. To ensure that directors will be loyal, they are offered annual compensation in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend four to eight meetings a year.

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It is unfortunate that the tax will also hit ordinary transactions by average people, but it’s hard to see why it is okay (in many states) to tax food but not to tax checking account fees or credit card penalties. Corporate governance, the much-overlooked cesspool It is remarkable that conservatives, who are inherently suspicious of governmental institutions, tend to pay little attention to the structure of corporate governance. Just as governments at all levels offer the opportunity for corruption, so do corporations. The big difference is that corporate managers – unlike their counterparts in government – operate largely in secret, control many of the rules under which they are re-elected, and make payoffs (in the form of directors’ fees) to the people who determine their salaries.

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(We may be concerned about corporate stakeholders other than shareholders as well, but it would be a big step forward to have a pay structure that at least protected shareholders.) But the boards that set pay are working for the CEOs, not the shareholders, and so outsized pay packages are likely to persist unless there are major changes in the rules of corporate governance.[97] The outlandish CEO pay packages of today are a relatively new development. While CEOs have always been well paid, the ratio of executive compensation to the average worker’s pay was in the range of 25 or 30 to 1 as recently as the 1970s, which would put CEO compensation in the area of $1.5-$2.0 million.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

After all, he argues, “Who is going to invest in a company that shows you what’s going on quarterly, compared to one that shows you what’s going on all the time?”67 Will investors demand triple-entry accounting to meet corporate governance standards? It’s not a far-fetched question. Many institutional investors, such as the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, have developed strict corporate governance standards, and will not invest in a company unless those standards are met.68 Triple-entry accounting could be next. Triple-Entry Accounting: Privacy Is for Individuals, Not Corporations Triple-entry accounting is not without skeptics.

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Inclusion Designing the Future PART II: Transformations CHAPTER 3: Reinventing Financial Services A New Look for the World’s Second-Oldest Profession The Golden Eight: How the Financial Services Sector Will Change From Stock Exchanges to Block Exchanges Dr. Faust’s Blockchain Bargain The Bank App: Who Will Win in Retail Banking Google Translate for Business: New Frameworks for Accounting and Corporate Governance Reputation: You Are Your Credit Score The Blockchain IPO The Market for Prediction Markets Road Map for the Golden Eight CHAPTER 4: Re-architecting the Firm: The Core and the Edges Building ConsenSys Changing the Boundaries of the Firm Determining Corporate Boundaries CHAPTER 5: New Business Models: Making It Rain on the Blockchain bAirbnb Versus Airbnb Global Computing: The Rise of Distributed Applications The DApp Kings: Distributed Business Entities Autonomous Agents Distributed Autonomous Enterprises The Big Seven: Open Networked Enterprise Business Models Hacking Your Future: Business Model Innovation CHAPTER 6: The Ledger of Things: Animating the Physical World Power to the People The Evolution of Computing: From Mainframes to Smart Pills The Internet of Things Needs a Ledger of Things The Twelve Disruptions: Animating Things The Economic Payoff The Future: From Uber to SUber Hacking Your Future for a World of Smart Things CHAPTER 7: Solving the Prosperity Paradox: Economic Inclusion and Entrepreneurship A Pig Is Not a Piggy Bank The New Prosperity Paradox Road Map to Prosperity Remittances: The Story of Analie Domingo Blockchain Humanitarian Aid Safe as Houses?

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Insuring Value and Managing Risk—protect assets, homes, lives, health, business property, and business practices, derivative products Using reputational systems, insurers will better estimate actuarial risk, creating decentralized markets for insurance. More transparent derivatives Insurance, risk management, wholesale banking, brokerage, clearinghouses, regulators 8. Accounting for Value—new corporate governance Distributed ledger will make audit and financial reporting real time, responsive, and transparent, will dramatically improve capacity of regulators to scrutinize financial actions within a corporation Audit, asset management, shareholder watchdogs, regulators blockchain would transform her business as the Internet transformed other industries: “I would take it about as seriously as you should have taken the concept of the Internet in the 1990s.

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

INDEX Adams, Gladstone 1 Alipoor, Javaad 1 Ant and Dec 1 Arts Council 1 Arts and Humanities Research Council 1 Ashcroft, Lord 1 associative mating 1 Atlas Shrugged (Rand) 1 Attlee, Clement 1, 2, 3 Bale, Tim 1 banking crisis (2008) 1 BBC coverage of EU referendum 1 diversity targets in 1 identity politics/wokeism in 1 middle-class dominance of 1 working-class representation in 1 Bevin, Ernest 1 Beyond the Red Wall (Mattinson) 1 Blair, Tony 1, 2, 3 Bloodworth, James 1, 2 Blue Labour 1 Bohonos, Jeremy 1 Bourdieu, Pierre 1, 2 Brahminisation of Social Democratic parties 1 Brecht, Bertolt 1 Brennan, Jason 1 British Library 1, 2 British Medical Journal 1 British Museum 1 British Social Attitudes Survey 1, 2 Brooks, David 1, 2, 3 Brown, Gordon 1, 2 Buerk, Michael 1 Burchill, Julie 1 Bush, Vannevar 1 Butler, Dawn 1 Cable, Vince 1 Cameron, David 1, 2, 3, 4 Carry On films 1 Cartoon Museum 1 Cass, Oren 1 Cedefop polls 1 Centre for Cities 1 Chamberlain, Joseph 1 Change UK 1 Channel 4 News 1 Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development 1 Churchill, Winston 1, 2 Class Ceiling, The (Friedman and Laurison) 1 Clegg, Nick 1 Clinton, Bill 1 community building 1 Conservative Party economic policies of 1 membership of 1 pro-worker politics 1 quango appointments 1 on social issues 1 values of 1 working-class support for 1, 2 corporate governance 1 Countryfile 1 Covid pandemic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Cowley, Tim 1 Cruddas, Jon 1 cultural capital 1 culture and cultural capital 1 and ‘four lads’ meme 1 and identity politics/wokeism 1 middle-class domination of 1 as national unifier 1 pro-worker policies 1, 2 representation of working class 1, 2 working-class values in 1 Davie, Tim 1, 2, 3 Davis, Andrew 1 Deneen, Patrick 1 dignity of work 1 Disraeli, Benjamin 1, 2, 3 Durham University 1 economics and corporate governance 1 and Covid pandemic 1 decline of skilled work 1 and dignity of work 1 impact of changes on working class 1 industrial policies 1 inevitability of change 1 investment in workers 1 and meritocracy 1 pro-worker policies 1, 2, 3 revival of manufacturing 1 and shareholder value theory 1 and social mobility 1 wage stagnation 1, 2, 3, 4 Economist, The 1 education and access to professions 1 David Skelton’s experience of 1 and identity politics/wokeism 1 pro-worker policies 1, 2 reinforcement of class divide after 1 universities in 1, 2 and vocational/technical education 1, 2 white working-class children in 1 working class let down by 1, 2 Eliot, T.

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Ensuring that government protects early-stage innovation and incentivises innovation in post-industrial areas. Making growth in median wages a core economic goal. Developing a network of strong and area-limited local banks. Repairing the dignity of work. Deepening the partnership between workers and businesses and institutionalising it in corporate governance. Putting vocation and skill at the heart of our education system. Building strong and active communities. 1. Prioritising Government Spending on Those Areas in Need of an Uplift and Placing the Resources of Whitehall at the Service of Local Communities A new economic settlement, harnessed within a strategy of levelling up and having the industrial capacity to be a global leader in advanced manufacturing, as well as the pursuit of a net-zero economy, should run through everything the government does, with the resources and the cohesive vision to go with it.

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Measures to increase the dignity of unskilled work, the sense of control that low-paid workers have over their working lives and the ability for all workers to progress should be an important part of a new economic settlement. 8. Deepening the Partnership Between Workers and Businesses and Institutionalising It in Corporate Governance An economic settlement that regards the economy as a partnership between workers, businesses and communities should mean that all jobs come with the kind of rewards and security that enable people to play a role in their local communities and spend time with their families. This should look to break the cycle where precarious employment also results in greater levels of stress and illness amongst low-paid workers.

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences by Steven G. Mandis

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Litterman, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business process, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, eat what you kill, Emanuel Derman, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, housing crisis, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, performance metric, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, value at risk

Appendix E Goldman’s History of Commitment to Public Service Figures E-1 and E-2 highlight key milestones demonstrating Goldman’s long-standing commitment to public service and corporate citizenship.1 FIGURE E-1 Goldman document listing its commitment to public service Source: Goldman Sachs, www.goldmansachs.com/investor-relations/corporate-governance/corporate-governance-documents/culture.pdf. FIGURE E-2 Goldman document showing a timeline of public service projects Source: Goldman Sachs, www.goldmansachs.com/investor-relations/corporate-governance/corporate-governance-documents/culture.pdf. Appendix F Key Goldman People Following is a list of key Goldman people who are mentioned in this book: the Weinbergs and others who formerly ran the firm, those currently running the firm, and other former executives.

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Goldman hired people who were accustomed to excelling, who had done so all their lives—in the classroom, on the playing field, in almost any endeavor they attempted. No one was used to failing. 41. Cohan, Money and Power, 225. 42. Ellis, The Partnership, 187. 43. Harper and Choudhury, “Sidney Weinberg.” 44. In Gatekeepers: The Professions and Corporate Governance (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006, 2, 3), John Coffee studied the role played by gatekeepers in corporate governance in acting as “a reputational intermediary to assure investors as to the quality of the ‘signal’ sent by the corporate issuer.” Gatekeepers include securities analysts, auditors, attorneys, investment bankers, credit rating agencies, and so on.

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I worked closely with partners and senior partners, and it was a relatively flat organization, so I doubt that the behavior or culture was much different at other levels. My interviews with partners, clients, and competitors, along with news articles at the time, support that view. Chapter 3 1. http://www.goldmansachs.com/investor-relations/corporate-governance/corporate-governance-documents/culture.pdf. 2. Interdependence exists within an organization when the actors are tied together in a meaningful manner. In Goldman’s case, there was financial interdependence among partners, who shared in one another’s profits and losses, trading risks, and reputation risks.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

The policies that I propose in The Price of Inequality follow directly from my diagnosis of the sources of inequality: at the top, excessive financialization, abuses of corporate governance that lead CEOs to take a disproportionate share of corporate profits, and rent seeking; in the middle, the weakening of unions; at the bottom, discrimination and exploitation. Creating good financial regulations, better systems of corporate governance, and laws that curb further discrimination and predatory lending practices would all help. So too would campaign-finance and other political reforms that would curb opportunities for rent seeking by those at the top.

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There should have been tougher enforcement of antitrust laws. Banks were allowed to grow to be too big to fail—or too big to be managed. And such banks have perverse incentives. When it’s heads I win, tails you lose, too-big-to-fail banks have incentives to engage in excessive risk taking. Corporate governance laws, too, are partly to blame. Regulators and investors should have been aware of the risks that the peculiar incentive structures engendered. These did not even serve shareholder interests well. In the aftermath of the Enron and WorldCom scandals, there was much discussion of the need for reform, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act represented a beginning.

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Investments in infrastructure and technology will stimulate the economy in the short run and enhance growth in the long run. 4. Restore confidence through regulatory reform. Underlying the problems are banks’ bad decisions and regulatory failures. These must be addressed if confidence in our financial system is to be restored. Corporate governance structures that lead to flawed incentive structures designed to generously reward CEOs should be changed and so should many of the incentive systems themselves. It is not just the level of compensation; it is also the form—nontransparent stock options that provide incentives for bad accounting to bloat up reported returns. 5.

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

‘When superiors put substantial pressure on their subordinates to achieve aggressive goals, and don’t check up on just how those subordinates accomplish those goals, something sinister can happen,’ he suggested. ‘News International should be seen as a rogue organization, not an organization with rogue reporters buried deep inside.’22 Suzanne Young, a management scholar at La Trobe University, agrees. Taking responsibility for underlings’ actions is ‘Corporate Governance 101,’ she said. ‘As anybody with a basic understanding of corporate governance will tell you, the buck ultimately stops with the chairman and chief executive.’23 And yet, by calling News Corp a rogue organization, the implication is that the system that surrounding it is not rogue, that it’s this particular company that is dysfunctional and not the system itself.

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The parliamentary select committee’s report, released a year later, suggested that Murdoch Sr had displayed ‘wilful blindness to what was going on in his companies and his publications.’ In scathing language, the report concluded that his failure to investigate obvious signs of criminality ‘speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International. We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.’2 The press response seemed unanimous. The Atlantic suggested Murdoch ‘might not survive this latest episode in the UK tabloid hacking scandal.’

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At one level, there’s the way that the main head honcho – the ‘MMIC,’ as traders in the City of London used to refer to the guy with the widest pinstripes back when pinstripes were fashionable – walked away unscathed.18 At another level, there’s the way that even when executives are found to have breached corporate governance duties indemnities protected them from any personal financial loss. At an even deeper level, as the dolls shrink smaller from sight, there are taboo topics that become strangely harder to perceive or to discuss openly even when their negative social implications become more apparent, there is the question of Elisabeth’s privilege, and the way that nepotistic links to her father, as the lawsuit alleged, helped to net her a considerable fortune.

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Beyond the creation of ever more esoteric and opaque financial instruments, these long-standing trends included the rise of the “shadow banking system,” a sprawling collection of nonbank mortgage lenders, hedge funds, broker dealers, money market funds, and other institutions that looked like banks, acted like banks, borrowed and lent like banks, and otherwise became banks—but were never regulated like banks. This same chapter introduces the problem of moral hazard, in which market participants take undue risks on the assumption that they will be bailed out, indemnified, and otherwise spared the consequences of their reckless behavior. It also addresses long-standing failures of corporate governance, as well as the role of government itself, though we do not subscribe to the usual contradictory explanations that the crisis was caused by too much government or too little. The reality, we argue, is much more complicated and counterintuitive: government did play a role, as did its absence, but not necessarily in the way that either conservatives or liberals would have you believe.

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Yes, traders were greedy—and arrogant and foolish too—but that alone would not have triggered the financial equivalent of a nuclear meltdown had the bonus system not become the dominant kind of compensation in the financial sector. In theory, the firms’ shareholders should have put an end to these practices. In reality, corporate governance failed long before the entire financial system did: conflicts of interest were rife among the boards of directors charged with minding the store. This was nothing new, but the financial system that emerged in the late twentieth century was particularly opaque and impenetrable. In the process, the interest of shareholders and the interests of the bankers, traders, and managers who were the agents of those shareholders diverged.

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It’s reassuring but wrong: while the housing bubble rested in part on subprime mortgages, the problems were more pervasive and widespread. Nor were these problems of recent origin; they were rooted in deep structural changes in the economy that date back many years. In other words, the securitization of bad loans was but the beginning; long-standing changes in corporate governance and compensation schemes played a role too. Government also shoulders some share of the blame, most obviously the monetary policies pursued by Alan Greenspan. So too do decades of government policies favoring home ownership. In the end, however, the significance of government intervention was dwarfed by the significance of government inaction.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It) by Elizabeth S. Anderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, declining real wages, deskilling, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, means of production, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit motive, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen

In particular, we need to revive the concept of private government. Private Government: The Very Idea Most modern workplaces are private governments. By this, I do not mean merely that they are in the so-called private sector, and have some internal structure of authority—as specified, for instance, in the rules for corporate governance. I refer rather to a particular sort of constitution of government, under which its subjects are unfree. The notion of private government may seem a contradiction in terms. In the impoverished vocabulary of contemporary public discourse, and to a considerable extent in contemporary political philosophy, government is often treated as synonymous with the state, which, by supposed definition, is part of the public sphere.

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Its powers may be checked in certain ways by other governments, by social norms, and by other pressures. Note that the privacy of a government is defined relative to the governed, not relative to the state. The notion of governments that are kept private from the state is much more familiar: we speak of corporate governance, church governance, and so forth, in referring to legal entities that are private in relation to the state. That notion of private government abstracts from the people who are governed and their relation to these governments. It focuses only on the fact that the state is kept out of decision-making in these governments.

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If they receive an employee handbook indicating such limits, the inclusion of a simple disclaimer (which is standard practice) is sufficient to nullify any implied contract exception to at-will employment in most states.18 No wonder they are shocked and outraged when their boss fires them for being too attractive,19 for failing to show up at a political rally in support of the boss’s favored political candidate,20 even because their daughter was raped by a friend of the boss.21 What, then, determines the scope and limits of the employer’s authority, if it is not a meeting of minds of the parties? The state does so, through a complex system of laws—not only labor law, but laws regulating corporate governance, workplace safety, fringe benefits, discrimination, and other matters. In the United States, the default employment contract is employment at will. There are a few exceptions in federal law to this doctrine, notably concerning discrimination, family and medical leave, and labor union activity.

When the Wolves Bite: Two Billionaires, One Company, and an Epic Wall Street Battle by Scott Wapner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, deal flow, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, multilevel marketing, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, price discrimination, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Tim Cook: Apple, unbiased observer

But do those gains come at a cost? Leo E. Strine, the influential Chief Justice for the Delaware Supreme Court, wrote about activist hedge funds in February 2017’s Yale Law Journal in his 133-page paper titled “Who Bleeds When the Wolves Bite? A Flesh-and-Blood Perspective on Hedge Fund Activism and Our Strange Corporate Governance System.” “There is less reason to think (activists) are making the economy much more efficient, and more reason to be concerned that they are perhaps pushing steady societal wealth on a riskier course that has no substantial long-term upside,” he suggested. Distinguishing between so-called human investors—those of us who save for college or retirement—and the “wolf packs” of activist hedge funds who attempt to instill change in a corporation, Strine argued, What is commonly accepted about activist hedge funds is that they do not originally invest in companies they like and only become active when they become dissatisfied with the corporation’s management or business plan.

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Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.42 “We launched this contest to make sure Target is never known in the future as a once-great company,” he told the room before the results were revealed. When the official numbers came out, 70 percent of shareholders had voted to keep the incumbent board members, handing Ackman a sweeping and resounding defeat. The corporate governance expert Claudia Allen told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that the vote was a milestone for the company, if not for activism itself. “It’s a referendum on the strategic direction of the company,” she said, “and management and the board obviously made a more compelling case.” After the vote, the headline in the hometown paper blared, “Shareholders: Target 4, Ackman 0.”

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In another missive sent to Yahoo and publicly released, Loeb wrote: We urge the Board to stop wasting valuable company resources and drop its resistance to placing the Third Point nominees on the Board.… We are prepared to join immediately. Once on the Board, our first tasks will be to work with the remaining Board members to find Yahoo! a new leader with the qualifications and integrity to lead the Company and install best practices of corporate governance. The Company can ill afford to continue this misguided fight with its largest outside shareholder while it has so many other fires to put out. There has been enough damage already. Eleven days later, Thompson, who’d been irreparably damaged by the embellishment, resigned.18 That same day, Loeb and Yahoo settled, with the financier getting three board seats: one for himself and one each for Harry Wilson, the CEO of the restructuring firm Maeva, and Michael Wolf, CEO of the media consulting firm Activate.

Built on a Lie: The Rise and Fall of Neil Woodford and the Fate of Middle England’s Money by Owen Walker

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brexit referendum, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, fixed income, G4S, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, liquidity trap, lockdown, mass affluent, popular capitalism, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Winter of Discontent

‘There has been a need for a change in leadership on the board and Avril fits that role perfectly,’ Woodford said at the time. With Palmer-Baunack becoming executive chairman, Tinkler now reported to his deputy, an odd set-up that was bound to introduce tension. The appointment also contravened the UK’s corporate governance code, which argued chairmen should be independent. While Woodford had been praised by corporate governance experts for his role in the Kay Review on long-term investing just a few months earlier, he was now testing their patience by forcing through an unpopular management structure. Woodford reserved some of his ire for those politicians he felt were interfering unnecessarily in the industries in which he invested.

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One of Woodford’s colleagues at the time was Andrea Leadsom, who would go on to become a Conservative MP and challenge Theresa May as the future prime minister. She also later served as business secretary. In her pitch to lead the country, Leadsom boasted about her prominent role at Invesco Perpetual, which she described as ‘senior investment officer and head of corporate governance’. The job title was grandiose and gave the impression she had managed money and policed the companies that Invesco Perpetual invested in. Along with other claims, about being a banker and the youngest ever director at Barclays, her CV implied she was a leading figure in the UK’s financial services sector.

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His reputation as the UK’s leading investor had never been stronger. So much so that he was asked to appear as a star witness in a ground-breaking government review into how effective the equity markets were in promoting long-term decision making. For several years, policymakers, academics and corporate governance experts had grown concerned about the lack of accountability in financial markets. The rise of institutional investors and intermediaries, combined with the increasing number of foreign investors in UK companies, had widened the gulf between the British public, whose pension savings were the backbone of the UK economy, and the bosses of the companies that depended on the capital.

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet by Jane Gleeson-White

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, British Empire, business cycle, carbon footprint, corporate governance, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, full employment, Gordon Gekko, income inequality, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahbub ul Haq, means of production, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, source of truth, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile

The ‘audit expectations gap’ refers to the discrepancy between the common but wrong public belief that auditors guarantee the rectitude of accounts, that they thoroughly check every detail of corporate accounts and certify them, and the reality, that in fact auditors are required merely to check the accounts enough to assure themselves they are okay. Auditors express an opinion only; they guarantee nothing. The other problem is with company directors being charged with corporate governance—which means they must oversee the accounting of their own firms. Ross says that cases like that of ABC Learning raise questions about how able directors are to carry out their corporate governance roles, given the complexity of contemporary business structures and operations, and the range of accounting approaches it is possible to adopt. He argues that ‘what it comes down to is accounting policy choice and this is where you can get differences in interpretation’.

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Although Enron’s accounting practice was arguably no more devious than that of many of its contemporaries, it was ‘the straw that broke the corporate camel’s back’—Enron was possibly too big and allegedly too well connected with Congress and the Bush administration to ignore. Its collapse, followed so soon by WorldCom’s and several other accounting scandals, led to the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 which introduced major changes to the regulation of financial practice and corporate governance, as well as a public company accounting oversight board to oversee the auditors of public companies. Section 1102 of the Act outlines fines and prison terms for those who tamper with the transactional records of a firm. Enron’s chief operating officer Jeffrey K. Skilling was sentenced to 24 years under its terms.

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Australia committed to the international financial reporting standards (IFRS) in a 2005 Australian version—although according to a KPMG survey of Australian insurance companies, two-thirds of the respondents believed this commitment would increase the risk of inaccuracy in financial reporting. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has not yet committed to IFRS, continuing to require only GAAP standards. But it is believed that in the long term the SEC will also accept IFRS standards. While the post-2000 push for tighter corporate governance might suggest a new era in regulation, arguably these episodes are little more than replays of responses to the many instances of scandalous corporate behaviour that have occurred over the past one hundred and seventy or so years. Current concern about the usefulness of financial statements for revealing corporate wealth and progress is very similar to that expressed a century ago.

Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, El Camino Real, Gordon Gekko, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, index card, off-the-grid, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, transfer pricing, union organizing

This was a huge problem that every business person in Russia was obsessed with, and because I’d developed a reputation after my fight with Sidanco, in early January 2000 I was invited by the American Chamber of Commerce in Moscow to give a presentation to the local business community about corporate-governance abuse. It seemed as though I was the only person in Moscow crazy enough to speak publicly about the misdeeds of the Russian oligarchs. I decided to use the Yukos oil company as my case study. I could have picked any Russian company, but Yukos was attractive because it had had so many minority-shareholder scandals. I called my presentation “The Armed Forces of Corporate Governance Abuse” to describe the many ways that the oligarchs went about ripping off their minority shareholders.

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Our lunch took place a week later at a Swedish restaurant called Scandinavia, just behind Tverskaya Street near Pushkin Square. The meeting was slightly uncomfortable because neither of us knew what the other person’s agenda was. I supposed she expected me to talk to her about Russian business, Yukos, and corporate governance, and she was clearly confused when I started asking more personal questions, all of which she artfully declined to answer. By the middle of the meal we both understood that we were operating on different wavelengths, but even so, my persistence began to pay off. She didn’t open up entirely, but by the time the bill came I’d learned that Elena was not merely beautiful but incredibly smart.

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Her lipstick was redder than before, and her black dress was simultaneously tighter and classier than anything I’d seen her in before. She wasn’t just beautiful. She was sexy. It was clear that for her, this was really our first date. We sat and had dinner. We didn’t talk about Russian oligarchs or corporate governance or business practices; we just talked about our families and our lives and our aspirations—what everyone talks about when they’re getting to know someone. It was great. Before we said good-bye that night, I grabbed her around the waist and pulled her toward me, and without any resistance we shared our first real kiss.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Yet I acquired a growing interest in the workings of the global economy and an enduring concern about the ethical basis of capitalism. These are subjects that I pursued in my subsequent career in journalism, which was later to be informed by practical experience as, among other things, a non-executive director and chairman of a quoted company, and pro bono work on corporate governance around the globe for the World Bank Group and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. This book contains the fruits of that experience. It explores current discontents in a historical context, looking at many of the great debates about money, business and markets not just through the eyes of economists and business people, but through the views of philosophers, politicians, novelists, poets, divines, artists and sundry others.

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A central feature of incorporation was that it increased the scope for fraud, because the people running the bubble companies had access to other people’s money. In the modern jargon, there was a principal–agent problem. The agents, or managers, were not properly accountable to the principals, or stockholders, because corporate governance was rudimentary. Trading in the shares was frenetic and often fraudulent, as Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, explained in a tract entitled The Anatomy of Change-Alley, in which he said: There is not a man but will own ’tis a complete system of knavery; that ’tis a trade founded in fraud, born of deceit, and nourished by trick, cheat, wheedle, forgeries, falsehoods, and all sorts of delusions; coining false news, this way good, that way bad; whispering imaginary terrors, frights, hopes, expectations and then preying upon the weakness of those whose imaginations they have wrought upon, whom they have either elevated or depressed.32 When the South Sea Company collapsed, fraud was revealed on the part of directors, who had corrupted members of the cabinet, using shares in the company as bribes.

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So while bonuses have been going up as these people seize their brief window of opportunity, business investment as a percentage of GDP has been on a persistent declining trend in the US and UK.219 This is a travesty of shareholder value, the supposed objective of modern managers who run publicly quoted companies. It reflects a huge and egregious corporate governance vacuum – another profound imbalance at the heart of modern capitalism. Institutional investors have done little to prevent a pattern of behaviour that damages the long-term value of their investments. This is because, as we saw in Chapter Seven, they are mere proxy capitalists, driven by perverse incentives that ensure that their own interests are misaligned with those of the pension fund beneficiaries and other savers they are supposed to serve.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Whatever the truth, there is simply no credible evidence for the thesis that CEO pay has risen because of corporate governance failures (which is not to say that such failures never happen). And it turns out, the inequality critics never really try to offer evidence for this thesis. Instead, they claim that the academic literature can’t fully explain CEO pay trends in terms of market forces and then go on to treat the corporate governance hypothesis as the default explanation for this gap. Piketty, for instance, argues that: The most convincing proof of the failure of corporate governance and of the absence of a rational productivity justification for extremely high executive pay is that when we collect data about individual firms . . . it is very difficult to explain the observed variations in terms of firm performance.

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In fact, we observe just the opposite: it is when sales and profits increase for external reasons that executive pay rises most rapidly.40 Some of the problems with Piketty’s claims are fairly technical. But the most glaring error is treating the fact that “it is very difficult to explain the observed variations in terms of firm performance” as evidence for “the failure of corporate governance.” There are countless other explanations, which Piketty doesn’t even acknowledge. It could be that Piketty’s study was simply poorly designed. (In our view, trying to tease out “marginal productivity” from messy empirical data is a dubious exercise.) It could be that Piketty’s interpretation is not the only one consistent with the data.

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In a free society, the right to make decisions about pay rests with the owners—owners who bear the consequences of those decisions and therefore have every incentive to make good decisions. Even if it were true that top incomes were being increased beyond an amount that was justified by executive productivity as the result of corporate governance failures, this would be a problem a free market could and (eventually) would solve. But the inequality critics have absolutely no basis for their confident assertions that rising pay at the top is being fueled by CEOs finding a way to get paid more than they’re worth. The critics have not been convinced by the evidence.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

He was a man of a certain age, with white curly hair and sporting a colorful bowtie. His beef was that “people like you” imagine that issues like climate change, human rights, and the like are part of the corporate governance agenda, he told me. Not so, he insisted. THE OLD STORY Well maybe not then, or not with that particular lawyer and his particular practice. But my understanding then was—and still is—that corporate governance is, to quote the Lexicon, “the way a company is managed at the highest level.” In effect by the people who occupied the top floor we found ourselves on that day. If such people ignore new types of risk, whatever their logic, they potentially betray their key stakeholders, including their shareholders.

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These may be positive, but they may also be negative, creating problems for people, for other economic actors, and for the planet. These problems may result in various forms of Liability, undermining the future prospects of a business or market. To understand such risks better, growing numbers of businesses use Materiality tests as part of their corporate Governance processes. The reason why we have left Stranded Assets to last—and this was the only term in the list not covered by the FT Lexicon when consulted—is that it provides a natural bridge to the subject of wicked and super wicked challenges. So, as seems fitting, we start with Purpose. 1.

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If such people ignore new types of risk, whatever their logic, they potentially betray their key stakeholders, including their shareholders. Even Milton Friedman might have balked at that. NEW STORIES Today the situation has changed very significantly, in the wake of numerous major reviews of the ethical, social, and environmental aspects of corporate governance, including the Cadbury Code, launched in Britain in 1992. As a result, issues once seen as peripheral have stormed their way into boardrooms and C-suites. As I was drafting this section, the globetrotting Carlos Ghosn, still (just) chairman of Renault, Nissan, and Mitsubishi, was languishing in a Japanese prison, accused of various financial misdemeanors.49 By the time the book was finished, Ghosn had escaped Japan.

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

In some countries this is achieved through public banks, such as the Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau (KfW) in Germany. KfW was intimately involved in Germany's post-war recovery and economic growth, lending more than €1 trillion since its founding in 1948.37 Most of the countries that have public banks tend to follow a stakeholder model of corporate governance, for example by having workers on company boards. Of course, no form of corporate governance is perfect - as the recent Volkswagen (VW) ‘dieselgate' scandal proves. The car maker boasted several attributes which agency theorists consider helpful for far-sighted investment and honest practice, widening the shareholder base and extending its interests beyond short-term profit.

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By this he meant that funding investment in infrastructure and innovation (capital development) ought to be done by public utilities, public banks or co-operatives which direct public funds towards medium- and long-term growth rather than short-term returns. But rent-seeking is not limited to the financial sector. It has pervaded non-financial industries as well - through the pressures that financial-sector profitability, exaggerated by monopoly power and implicit public guarantees, place on the corporate governance of non-financial firms. If investors can expect a certain return by putting their money into a fund, spreading the risks across a wide range of money-making instruments, they will only sink the same funds into one industrial project if it offers a much higher return. The return on financial-sector investment sets a minimum for the return on ‘real' fixed investment, a floor which rises as financial operations become more profitable.

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Their role should lead to better distribution of productive resources and make better use of resources already employed: for example, drawing on agency theory, a positive link has been made between institutional ownership and innovation.16 But these assessments often seem to neglect the broader picture. It is no coincidence that the case for shareholder activism and supervision often accompanies palpable breakdown of corporate governance: witness the string of corporate scandals such as Enron and WorldCom in the US, Sports Direct in the UK and Volkswagen cheating on diesel engine emissions. Shareholders are not the only gatekeepers. Others include auditors, rating agencies, government regulators, the media and equity analysts -specialists who assess companies for investors.

Financial Statement Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide by Martin S. Fridson, Fernando Alvarez

Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, corporate governance, credit crunch, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fixed income, information trail, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, negative equity, new economy, offshore financial centre, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Thaler, shareholder value, speech recognition, statistical model, stock buybacks, the long tail, time value of money, transaction costs, Y2K, zero-coupon bond

Taking into account all of Krispy Kreme's accounting practices, Camelback gave the company an F for earnings quality, a designation the research firm customarily awarded only to companies with three characteristics: 1. Flat or declining fundamentals, providing a motivation to prettify the financials. 2. Visible evidence of unusual or improper accounting or transactions. 3. Evidence of weak corporate governance. The Heat Goes Up Vickrey's criticisms proved astute. Krispy Kreme's chief operating officer resigned less than a month later, a top-level executive change that analyst Skip Carpenter of Thomas Weisel Partners viewed as a sign of more problems to come.26 A major earnings disappointment followed later the same month.

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Such infrequent convening of the audit committee meant it was “nonexistent, for all practical purposes,” according to Columbia University accounting professor Itzhak Sharav.28 Other reasons existed for questioning whether HealthSouth's board was sufficiently independent to fulfill its watchdog responsibilities. “There has been so much sleeping on the job at the HealthSouth board that it could rise to gross negligence,” asserted Paul Lapides, head of the Corporate Governance Center.29 Particularly troubling were directors’ transactions with HealthSouth and Scrushy. One director earned $250,000 a year in consulting fees from the company, and another received a $5.6 million contract to install glass at a hospital constructed by HealthSouth. Another director bought a $395,000 resort property in conjunction with Scrushy.

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Six directors and a seventh's wife were participants (in some instances through related entities) in an online medical supply venture to which HealthSouth directed more than $174 million in business. Moreover, for several years, a single board committee oversaw both corporate audit and compensation. Corporate governance experts could find no parallel at another major company for this arrangement, which was especially problematic considering that the audit failure fattened Scrushy's pay package. Early Warning Signs In 1999–2000, when Scrushy instituted an assembly-line-like process to move patients through the system more swiftly, operating earnings skyrocketed by 143 percent.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bretton Woods, corporate governance, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, ghettoisation, Howard Zinn, informal economy, land bank, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, reserve currency, special economic zone, spectrum auction, stem cell, The Chicago School, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

Though the Tatas have been involved with corporate philanthropy for almost a hundred years now, endowing scholarships and running some excellent educational institutes and hospitals, Indian corporations have only recently been invited into the Star Chamber, the Camera stellata, the brightly lit world of global corporate government, deadly for its adversaries but otherwise so artful that you barely know it’s there. What follows in this essay might appear to some to be a somewhat harsh critique. On the other hand, in the tradition of honoring one’s adversaries, it could be read as an acknowledgment of the vision, flexibility, sophistication, and unwavering determination of those who have dedicated their lives to keeping the world safe for capitalism.

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35 Over the years, as people witnessed some of the genuinely good work the foundations did (running public libraries, eradicating diseases)—the direct connection between corporations and the foundations they endowed began to blur. Eventually, it faded altogether. Now even those who consider themselves left wing are not shy to accept their largesse. By the 1920s US capitalism had begun to look outward for raw materials and overseas markets. Foundations began to formulate the idea of global corporate governance. In 1924 the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations jointly created what is today the most powerful foreign policy pressure group in the world—the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which later came to be funded by the Ford Foundation as well. By 1947 the newly created CIA was supported by and working closely with the CFR.

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The World Bank issued a 2007 assessment from Washington saying the movement would “dovetail” with its “good governance” strategy.47 (In 2008 Anna Hazare received a World Bank Award for Outstanding Public Service.)48 Like all good Imperialists, the Philanthropoids set themselves the task of creating and training an international cadre that believed that Capitalism, and by extension the hegemony of the United States, was in their own self-interest. And who would therefore help to administer the Global Corporate Government in the ways native elites had always served colonialism. So began the foundations’ foray into education and the arts, which would become their third sphere of influence, after foreign and domestic economic policy. They spent (and continue to spend) millions of dollars on academic institutions and pedagogy.

The Unusual Billionaires by Saurabh Mukherjea

Albert Einstein, asset light, Atul Gawande, backtesting, barriers to entry, Black-Scholes formula, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Checklist Manifesto, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate governance, dematerialisation, disintermediation, diversification, equity risk premium, financial innovation, forensic accounting, full employment, inventory management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Peter Thiel, QR code, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, work culture

Thus, the process of running a company involves balancing relationships and interests between the board, the promoters, the management, minority shareholders, auditors as well as other stakeholders like employees and the government. This intricate balancing act is called corporate governance. For a listed company to be viewed positively by the broader stock market, it should adhere to the highest standards of corporate governance. For example, since minority shareholders have no say in how a company is run, the board should protect their interests. Often this isn’t the case as promoters can coerce the board to take decisions that benefit them at the cost of minority shareholders—for example, indulging in transactions with unlisted companies owned by the promoters.

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Maruti’s stock price declined by over 8 per cent on the day of the announcement of the project (28 January 2014) and in the months that followed, institutional investors opposed the proposal. By now, I am sure you are wondering, ‘How do I know that a company is following high standards of corporate governance?’ The answer is simple: Start from the annual report. It includes the director’s report, the auditor’s report, the profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow statements, and also a section on corporate governance. At Ambit, my colleagues have spent a considerable amount of time and resources in establishing the link between accounting quality and shareholder returns. In companies where minority shareholders are being short-changed, the financial statements will be rosier than the underlying performance of the business.

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He was a government-appointed executive trustee in UTI when he was appointed as chairman and managing director of Axis Bank. As Hemant Kaul told me, ‘We were surprised when we initially heard that Nayak is joining as CMD.’ On hindsight, Nayak was the right man at the right time for the right job. At a time when Axis Bank was struggling with serious concerns on corporate governance due to the quality of its corporate lending, the appointment of Nayak came as a big boost to the bank’s image, given Nayak’s reputation as a man of high integrity. Axis Bank’s share price nearly tripled in two months (the period between 30 November 1999 and 4 February 2000), based purely on the news of Nayak taking charge (see Exhibit 78).

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Capital has become ‘disconnected’ from established institutions and systems of business, thus making employment short-term and precarious. Ian Clark has developed the argument further by stressing the advantages of financialization for private equity holders.67 These arguments have drawn on the voluminous literature on ‘shareholder value’ and corporate governance, which has been a permanent subtext in the financialization debates, as is clear from the survey above. The issue of corporate governance and control is of long standing in economic theory, and will be considered in chapters 6 and 7 in connection with capital markets, shareholding and income distribution. Influential in the financialization literature has been the work of William Lazonick and Mary O’Sullivan arguing that the ideology of ‘shareholder value’ has led to company ‘downsizing’ and thus to problematic investment outcomes among US corporations.

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Lordon similarly sees the crisis as the result of a confluence of forces characteristic of financialization, and proposes a list of deep reforms to control finance; Frédéric Lordon, ‘Après la crise financière: “regular” ou refondre?’, Revue de la regulation 5, 2009. 21 Michel Aglietta, ‘Shareholder Value and Corporate Governance: Some Tricky Questions’, Economy and Society 29:1, 2000, pp. 146–59; see also Michel Aglietta and Régis Breton, ‘Financial Systems, Corporate Control and Capital Accumulation’, Economy and Society 30:4, 2001, pp. 433–66. 22 Michel Aglietta and Antoine Rebérioux, Dérives du capitalisme financier, Paris: Albin Michel, 2004.

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(eds), Financialization at Work, London: Routledge, 2008; Mike Savage and Karel Williams (eds), Remembering Elites, London: John Wiley and Sons, 2008. 67 Paul Thompson, ‘Disconnected Capitalism’, Work, Employment and Society 17, 2003, pp. 359–78; and Ian Clark, ‘Owners and Managers: Disconnecting Managerial Capitalism?’, Work, Employment and Society 23: 2009, pp. 775–86. 68 William Lazonick and Mary O’Sullivan, ‘Maximizing Shareholder Value: A New Ideology for Corporate Governance’, Economy and Society 29:1, 2000. See also William Milberg, ‘Shifting Sources and Uses of Profits: Sustaining US Financialization with Global Value Chains’, Economy and Society 37:3, 2008; and William Milberg and Deborah Winkler, ‘Financialisation and the Dynamics of Offshoring in the USA’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, 2010. 69 Masahiko Aoki, Information, Incentives and Bargaining in the Japanese Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; Masahiko Aoki, ‘Toward and Economic Model of the Japanese Firm’, Journal of Economic Literature 28, 1990; Masahiko Aoki, ‘The Japanese Firm as a System of Attributes: A Survey and Research Agenda’, in The Japanese Firm: Sources of Competitive Strength, ed.

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

See, for example, ‘Austerity is Undermining Europe’s Grand Vision’, The Guardian, 3 July 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/03/austerity-europe-grand-vision-unity. 55. Karl Brenke, Ulf Rinne, Klaus F. Zimmermann, ‘Short-Time Work: The German Answer to the Great Recession’, IZA Discussion Paper 5780, June 2011, http://ftp.iza.org/dp5780.pdf. 56. See Government Commission of the German Corporate Governance Code, ‘German Corporate Governance Code (as amended on 18 June 2009), http://www.corporate-governance-code.de/eng/kodex/1.html. 57. Reinhart and Rogoff, This Time is Different, p. 224. Note that these data are for annual GDP per head at purchasing power parity, rather than GDP. The difference should not be large for these high-income countries with relatively slowly growing populations.

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Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds’, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 18315, August 2012. www.nber.org. Gorton, Gary B. Misunderstanding Financial Crises: Why we Don’t See them Coming (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Government Commission of the German Corporate Governance Code. ‘German Corporate Governance Code (as amended 18 June 2009)’, 2009. http://www.corporate–governance–code.de/eng/kodex/1.html. Gov.uk. ‘Help to Buy: Home Ownership Schemes’, 2013. https://www.gov.uk/affordable-home-ownership-schemes/help-to-buy-equity-loans. Greenspan, Alan. ‘Testimony of Dr Alan Greenspan to the House of Representatives Committee of Government Oversight and Reform’, 23 October 2008. http://www.clipsandcomment.com/2008/10/23/text-alan-greenspan-testimony-congress-october-23.

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The evidence at present is that high-income countries are no longer able to absorb the savings that would be generated by their private sectors if their economies were running at something close to full capacity and were also not experiencing an unsustainable credit expansion.46 This is why activity has been persistently weak and real interest rates low. Whether this is inevitable or the result of rising inequality and failures in corporate governance is unclear: probably a bit of all of these. The condition of excess private-sector savings still exists. So, if these excess savings are not to be absorbed in the fiscal deficit (to which we will return in the next section), the only alternatives are to eliminate them via a depression or export them.

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, book value, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, Claude Shannon: information theory, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Henry Singleton, impact investing, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, NetJets, Norman Mailer, oil shock, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, shared worldview, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Teledyne, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, value engineering, vertical integration

In fact, he believed investor relations was an inefficient use of time, and simply refused to provide quarterly earnings guidance or appear at industry conferences. This was highly unconventional behavior at a time when his more accommodating peers were often on the cover of the top business magazines. Teledyne Versus Sarbanes-Oxley Teledyne’s iconoclasm extended to today’s hot-button topic of corporate governance. The company’s board would fail miserably by the current standards of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Singleton (like many of the CEOs in this book) was a proponent of small boards. Teledyne’s board consisted of only six directors, including Singleton, half of them insiders. It was an exceptionally talented group, however, and each member had a significant economic interest in the company.

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Buffett has developed a worldview that at its core emphasizes the development of long-term relationships with excellent people and businesses and the avoidance of unnecessary turnover, which can interrupt the powerful chain of economic compounding that is the essence of long-term value creation. Buffett and Sarbanes-Oxley Buffett’s approach to corporate governance is also unconventional, contradicting many of the dictates of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Buffett believes that the best boards are composed of relatively small groups (Berkshire has twelve directors) of experienced businesspeople with large ownership stakes. (He requires that all directors have significant personal capital invested in Berkshire’s stock.)

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See also divestitures —Anders and, 66–67, 68 —Graham and, 117 —Malone and, 100 —outsider CEOs and, 10–11 —Smith and, 162, 164 —Stiritz and, 139–140, 141 AT&T, 85, 96, 97, 98, 106, 202 auctions, 30, 134, 143, 157–158, 164, 189 Bain & Company, 62 Barron’s, 204 Bath Iron Works, 71, 79 Beane, Billy, 4 Beatrice Foods, 138 Beck, Bob, 154, 161 Bell Atlantic, 95 Bell Labs, 85 Berkshire Hathaway, 167–195 —acquisitions by, 172, 173–176, 185–189, 189t, 202, 212 —Buffett’s purchase of, 168–169, 171–172 —capital allocation at, xiii, 57, 181–183, 211–212 —cash flow at, 172, 174, 178, 181 —corporate governance at, 194 —debt used at, 178 —decentralized approach at, 57, 190–191 —dividend policy of, 57 —investor relations at, 57, 192–193 —Munger’s partnership in, 14, 45, 172, 174, 180, 189, 192, 193, 194–195, 202 —stock performance at, 170–171, 171t, 177–178, 177f, 181, 182, 183 —stock repurchase programs of, 185 —stock splits at, 57, 193 Berlin, Isaiah, 5 Bernstein, Carl, 112 BET channel, 94 Beuth, Phil, 26 beverage industry, 150, 152–153, 156–157, 162, 164, 166, 175 Bierbusse, John, 144, 146 Black, Leon, 157 Black Entertainment Television (BET), 94 Bluhdorn, Charles, 53 boards of directors —Anders and, 77 —Buffett and, 194 —General Cinema and, 154, 161 —Graham and, 111, 112, 113, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124 —Malone and, 85, 98 —outsider approach and, 217 —Ralston Purina and, 130, 133, 135, 142 —Singleton and, 45, 50, 51, 54 Bollinger, Judy, 60 Bradlee, Ben, 112, 113, 123, 126 Bresnan, Bill, 93 Buffett, Warren, 129, 167–195 —acquisitions by, 78, 172, 173–176, 185–189, 189t, 202, 212 —Anders and, 70 —background and education of, 169 —Berkshire Hathaway purchase by, 167–169, 171–172 —capital allocation and, xiii, 57, 181–183, 211–212 —capital allocation test of, 225, 226t —cash flow and, 172, 174, 178, 181 —corporate governance and, 194 —debt used by, 178 —decentralized approach of, 57, 190–191 —dividend policy of, 57 —early investment career of, 169–171, 171t —on extraordinary CEOs, vii, 1–2, 7, 37 —float used by, 10, 58, 172, 178, 179, 180–181 —Graham and Dodd’s investing principles and, xiv–xv, 169, 170, 172–173 —Graham at the Washington Post and, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 175 —institutional imperative and, 5–6, 192 —insurance business and, 178–181, 180f —investment philosophy of, 57, 170, 171, 172–173, 174, 186–187 —investor relations and, 57, 192–193 —long-term perspective of, 184–185 —Munger’s partnership with, 14, 45, 172, 174, 180, 189, 192, 193, 194–195, 202 —Murphy and, 13, 19, 21, 31–32, 174, 189 —nuts and bolts of approach of, 178–195 —portfolio management by, 183–185, 186–187 —on Singleton, 37 —Singleton compared with, 56–58 —stock performance under, 170–171, 171t, 177–178, 177f, 181, 182, 183 —stock repurchase programs of, 185 —stock splits and, 57, 193 —Welch compared with, 190, 191t —worldview of, 193–195 Buffett Partnership, 171–172, 171t, 181, 184 Burke, Dan, 13, 15, 17–20, 21, 23–27, 28, 32, 33, 118, 125 Burke, Jim, 17 Burke, Steve, 33 Burlington Industries, 182 Burlington Northern Santa Fe, 176, 182, 188, 193, 212 Bush, Wes, 81 BusinessWeek magazine, 7, 53 buyback programs.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

The idea is a familiar one in British culture, in that critics such as Thorstein Veblen and Corelli Barnett have sought to attribute various aspects of the United Kingdom’s relative economic decline to the persistence of outmoded institutions, from systems of elite education and technical training to the structure of capital markets and corporate governance. In some cases, careful scholarship casts doubt on these claims. For example, David Edgerton’s histories of postwar Britain point out that the country’s institutions were much friendlier to technology and industry than pundits casually suppose.40 There is a risk of observing a bad outcome and assuming that a given institution is outmoded and therefore must be the cause.

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Simple investment strategies such as index funds and value investing allow laypeople to achieve a return on investment that often outperforms that of highly paid fund managers. Shareholder value management, the management fad of running businesses to maximise returns to stockholders, for better or for worse simplifies the complex business of corporate governance. Inflation targeting provides clear and simple rules to judge the success of central banks. Unfortunately, these useful simplifying features do not work well when it comes to financing intangible-intensive businesses. In this chapter we look at a range of features of finance and monetary policy, examining how they break down in an intangibles-rich economy, the problems they cause, the barriers to change, and some possible solutions.

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But in a world where good businesses stay good and bad ones stay bad, poor due diligence is more costly, giving banks another reason to reduce their business lending. Shareholder Value Management in an Age of Spillovers and Synergies Another element of complexity in financial capitalism is corporate governance. Managing a company involves a whole set of complex trade-offs and value judgments. And if that company is publicly held, then its owners—its shareholders—will be a different set of people from the managers who are actually making the decisions. This situation leads to a number of well-studied problems.

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

German manufacturing orders have bottomed, and exports benefitted from the Greek crisis in the monetary union. British house prices are increasing. And rising commodity prices are buoying confidence in Latin America and Africa. This book will examine the outlook for 2011 and beyond from a variety of regional perspectives. It will also examine new developments in tax policy, corporate governance, climate change, and communications. The goal of this compendium is to provide original insights from a diverse mixture of independent analysts and forecasters. The contributors include the founder of the Hong Kong currency board, the former prime minister of Peru, the former research director of the central bank of Botswana, the founder of a Mexican fund management group, economic analysts in Hong Kong, a former director of the Davos World Economic Forum, and many other distinguished authors.

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She notes that the crisis has led institutions to reduce their headcounts in compliance and ethics departments. She views this as a negative development because the crisis itself resulted from a breakdown of compliance and ethics at leading banks and brokerage houses. She believes that governments will have a critical role to play in promoting improved corporate governance. She also believes that the public can play an important role by creating more ethics and compliance programs in business schools, law schools, and other institutions. The US government itself has been less effective at prosecuting the financial criminals in the recent crisis than it was in the past.

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Extending FDIC protection to accounts of up to $250,000 corrects for erosion by inflation of the previous $100,000 cap. Provisions to prevent “shopping around” for rating agencies can prevent abuses. Increasing the ability to sue those agencies will add accountability and multiply costly nuisance suits. Trading many derivatives on exchanges will increase transparency. Corporate governance provisions create the impression that shareholders have more of a say on executive pay and other matters, but the provisions will have minimal practical effect. Collectively, these provisions will create modestly higher costs for financial firms that will ultimately translate into a higher cost of capital.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

A well-designed market generally develops tools and systems that serve to mitigate the effects of risk, thereby encouraging participants to engage in more interactions. TOOLS FOR GOVERNANCE: LAWS, NORMS, ARCHITECTURE, AND MARKETS The literature on corporate governance is vast, especially in the field of finance. However, platform governance involves design principles that traditional finance theory overlooks. The single most heavily cited article on corporate governance is a literature survey that considers only “the ways in which suppliers of finance to corporations assure themselves of getting a return on their investment.”17 The focus here is on the information asymmetry arising from the separation of ownership and control—a critical element of governance design, but far from sufficient.18 Information asymmetry between the community of users and the firm also matters, and their interests too must be aligned.

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The single most heavily cited article on corporate governance is a literature survey that considers only “the ways in which suppliers of finance to corporations assure themselves of getting a return on their investment.”17 The focus here is on the information asymmetry arising from the separation of ownership and control—a critical element of governance design, but far from sufficient.18 Information asymmetry between the community of users and the firm also matters, and their interests too must be aligned. Additionally, platform governance rules must pay special heed to externalities. These are endemic in network markets, since, as we’ve seen when examining network effects, the spillover benefits users generate are a source of platform value. Understanding this forces a shift in corporate governance from a narrow focus on shareholder value to a broader view of stakeholder value. Market designer and Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin Roth described a model of governance that uses four broad levers to address market failures.19 According to Roth, a well-designed market increases the safety of the market via transparency, quality, or insurance, thereby enabling good interactions to occur.

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It’s possible to argue that, rather than eliminating regulation altogether, we need to design political, social, and economic systems that reduce the likelihood of regulatory capture—for example, through laws that restrict the “revolving door” between business and government. Economist Andrei Shleifer, a scholar in the areas of corporate governance and government regulation, points out that there are strong differences in the prevalence of regulatory capture across countries. When governments are relatively unchecked by their citizens, strong regulation often leads to high levels of corruption and expropriation by government officials.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Food sovereignty, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, late capitalism, means of production, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, Philip Mirowski, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, shareholder value, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, young professional, zero-sum game

Sometimes this insistence reaches new heights of tautological reasoning. Consider this from Pierre-Yves Gomez and Harry Korine, two management specialists writing about democracy and governance: “One can discern a process of transformation in corporate governance that accompanies economic development over time. We show that this process can be understood as the democratization of corporate governance. Our ref lection is based upon the observation that, in modern liberal society, the governance of human beings tends, over time, to democratize: the more the entrepreneurial force becomes concentrated in ever larger corporations, the greater the need for social frag- 274 notes mentation to maintain the legitimacy of governance — so as to ensure that corporations are governed according to the liberal spirit.”

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Our ref lection is based upon the observation that, in modern liberal society, the governance of human beings tends, over time, to democratize: the more the entrepreneurial force becomes concentrated in ever larger corporations, the greater the need for social frag- 274 notes mentation to maintain the legitimacy of governance — so as to ensure that corporations are governed according to the liberal spirit.” Entrepreneurs and Democracy: A Political Theory of Corporate Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 8–9. In this remarkable book, the authors argue that what they call the “democratization of corporate governance” and the growth of economic performance depend upon a natural fragmentation of power that they regard as indigenous to entrepreneurial and democratic societies. 17. See Wendy Brown, “We Are All Democrats Now . . . ” in Giorgio Agamben, et al., Democracy in What State?

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There is no settled definition of governance, and scholars differ significantly in their understanding and use of it.15 Some emphasize the departure it signifies from the centrality of the state in organizing society and human conduct. Others use it to indicate novel processes 122 u n d o in g t h e d e m o s of governing. Still others highlight the new norms it circulates. Fifteen years ago, R. A. W. Rhodes already had identified at least six distinct uses of governance: “As the minimal state, as corporate governance, as the new public management, as ‘good governance’, as a sociocybernetic system, as self-organizing networks.”16 However, almost all scholars and definitions converge on the idea that governance signifies a transformation from governing through hierarchically organized command and control — in corporations, states, and nonprofit agencies alike — to governing that is networked, integrated, cooperative, partnered, disseminated, and at least partly self-organized.

Ethics in Investment Banking by John N. Reynolds, Edmund Newell

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, discounted cash flows, financial independence, Glass-Steagall Act, index fund, invisible hand, junk bonds, light touch regulation, margin call, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, two and twenty, zero-sum game

Susan Strange (1986), Casino Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell). 4. Goldman Sachs, Code of Business Conduct and Ethics (Amended and Restated as of May 2009). 162 Notes 163 5. http://www2.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/our-people/business-principles.html, accessed 8 March 2011. 6. http://www2.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/investors/corporate-governance/ corporate-governance-documents/revise-code-of-conduct.pdf, accessed 8 March 2011. 7. http://www.morganstanley.com/company/governance/pdf/codeofethicsweb version.pdf, accessed 8 March 2011. 8. http://www.nomuraholdings.com/company/basic/ethics.pdf, accessed 8 March 2011. Chapter 4 1. Katinka C. van Cranenburgh, Daniel Arenas, Celine Louche, Jordi Vives (2010) From Faith to Faith Consistent Investing (3iG). 2.

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Nevertheless, the criticisms levelled at investment banking as a result of the financial crisis are legitimate, and many of them raise profound ethical issues. 4 Ethics in Investment Banking Ethics and the financial crisis The causes of the financial crisis are complex, but include ethical failings by investment banks (among others). The US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission blamed failures in regulation; breakdowns in corporate governance, including financial firms acting recklessly; excessive borrowing and risk by households and Wall Street; policymakers ill-prepared for the crisis; and systematic breakdown in accountability and ethics.1 The UK’s Independent Commission on Banking cited factors including “global imbalances, loose monetary policy, light-touch regulation, declining under-writing standards, widespread mis-pricing of risk, a vast expansion of banks’ balance sheets, rapid growth in securitized assets”.2 The UK economist Roger Bootle diagnosed the crisis in a more straightforward way in his 2009 book The Trouble with Markets: “greedy bankers and naive borrowers, mistaken central banks and inept regulators, insatiable Western consumers and over-thrifty Chinese savers”.3 Others have also directly cited bankers’ greed.

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Within the Anglican Communion, the Church of England has a general statement on the ethics of its own investments of about £5 billion, issued by its Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG), in its “Statement of Ethical Investment Policy”.4 This specifically covers the Church’s own investments, rather than forming advice to investors or businesses. As well as summarising sector-specific investment policies (notably investment exclusions), it lists five areas against which companies are monitored: responsible employment practices, best corporate governance practice, conscientiousness with regard to human rights, sustainable environmental practice and sensitivity towards the communities in which business operates. The Methodist Church Methodism, which emerged out of Anglicanism in the eighteenth century through the activities of John Wesley and others, has throughout its history maintained a keen awareness of ethics in business and economic 54 Ethics in Investment Banking life.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Other countries with relatively transparent SWFs include Chile and South Korea, both of which hire external fund managers to oversee a large majority of their assets. Singapore’s Temasek and funds in Australia and New Zealand are rated as transparent as Norway’s. Temasek, though state-owned, is formally a private corporation governed by the same company law that applies to the private sector.e The United States has no federal sovereign wealth fund, but the states of Alaska, Alabama, New Mexico, and Wyoming started down this track more than a generation ago. Other funds operate with a little more secrecy. Most analysts consider the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) to be the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund.27 It is wholly owned by the ruling al-Nahyan family of Abu Dhabi, the largest and wealthiest of the United Arab Emirates.

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id=91435&sectionid=351020205. 6 Lionel Laurent, “Beware an Abu Dhabi Exposé,” Forbes, Aug. 27, 2009, http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/27/davidson-abu-dhabi-markets-econ-censorship.html. 7 Catrina Stewart, “Russian Regional Governor Said ArcelorMittal Could Lose Coal Mines,” Breaking News 24/7, July 10, 2009, http://blog.taragana.com/n/russian-regional-governor-said-arcelormittal-could-lose-coal-mines-105670. 8 Working Group on Privatization and Corporate Governance of State Owned Assets, “State Owned Enterprises in India: Reviewing the Evidence,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Jan. 26, 2009, based on work by Professor Ram Kumar Mishra. 9 Ibid, p. 6. 10 Fortune Global 500, 2009, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2009/full_list. 11 Fareed Zakaria, “Meeting with World Leaders at the United Nations,” CNN, Sept. 28, 2008, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0809/28/fzgps.01.html. 12 David Lague, “China Corners Market in a High-Tech Necessity,” New York Times, Jan. 22, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/business/worldbusiness/22iht-rare.html?

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articleID=2069&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1. 2 The phrase “rise of the rest” was popularized by Fareed Zakaria in The Post-American World (New York: Norton, 2008). 3 Karl-Heinz Büchemann, “The ‘Dumbest Idea in the World’: Jack Welch, the Figurehead of Shareholder Value, Disowns His Doctrine,” Atlantic Times, Apr. 2009, http://www.atlantic-times.com/archive_detail.php?recordID=1716. 4 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Principles of Corporate Governance, May 1999. 5 Welch rejected the approach in an interview with the Financial Times, Mar. 12, 2009: “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy.” 6 President Hoover was petitioned by more than a thousand leading U.S. economists of the time not to sign the Smoot-Hawley Act. Compared to the previous 1922 Tariff Act (which itself had led to dramatic increases in earlier levels), Smoot-Hawley increased tariffs for 890 groups of goods while decreasing them for 235.

State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, centre right, corporate governance, demand response, Doha Development Round, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, Hernando de Soto, information asymmetry, liberal world order, Live Aid, Nick Leeson, Pareto efficiency, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

The divergence between individual and organizational interests led to a major branch of theory under the heading of principal-agent relationships that is 48 state-building today the overarching framework for understanding governance problems. Berle and Means (1932) recognized long ago that the divorce of ownership from management in modern corporations creates significant corporate governance problems. The owners, or principals, designate managers, or agents, to look after their interests, but the agents often respond to individual incentives that differ sharply from those of the principals. This is a problem with all forms of hierarchical organization and can exist at multiple levels of the hierarchy simultaneously.

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These costs included the costs of monitoring agent behavior and bonding the agent and the residual losses that occurred when the agent acted in ways contrary to the interests of the firm. Jensen and Meckling assumed that it was primarily the residual risk-bearers or owners who did the disciplining and on this basis developed a sophisticated theory of capital structure and its relationship to corporate governance. Fama (1980) argued, however, that the residual risk-bearers were not the only source of agent discipline. Managers or agents monitored and disciplined each other’s behavior because agency relationships involved repeated interactions and there was a competitive market for managerial talent in which these evaluations would be important.

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This perspective thus tends to emphasize conflicts of interests between members of the group (that is after all what principal-agent problems are all about) and to underplay concepts like group identity, socialization, leadership, and so forth. It is certainly worthwhile to try to understand problems of corporate governance or public corruption in principal-agent terms and to use this framework to design institutions that try to bring divergent incentives back into alignment. However, there are at least three basic reasons why there can be no optimal specification of formal institutions and thus no optimal form of organization, particularly for public sector agencies.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

., 2006, The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Played the Free Market Game, London, Penguin, p. 107. 8. El Paso Corporation, Shareholder Litigation, 2012, Del. Ch 41 A.3d 432. 9. Goldman Sachs Code of Business Conduct and Ethics. Last accessed: 31 July 2014, http://www.goldmansachs.com/investor-relations/corporate-governance/corporate-governance-documents/revise-code-of-conduct.pdf. 10. Cohan, W. D., 2012, Money and Power, London, Penguin. 11. Summers, L., 2000, Remarks of Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers to the Securities Industry Association, Office of Public Affairs, 9 November. 12. Transcript of investor conference call, 9 August 2007, reported on Bloomberg.com, 25 November 2008. 13.

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Louis Review, February, 68 (2), pp. 22–37. Goff, S., and Parker, G., 2011, ‘Diamond Says Time for Remorse Is Over’, Financial Times, 11 January. Goldman Sachs Code of Business Conduct and Ethics, 2014. Last accessed: 31 July 2014, http://www.goldmansachs.com/investor-relations/corporate-governance/corporate-governance-documents/revise-code-of-conduct.pdf. Goodman, A., 2013, ‘Top 40 Buffett-isms: Inspiration to Become a Better Investor’, Forbes, 25 September. Greenspan, A., 1999, ‘Financial Derivatives’, speech to the Futures Industry Association, Boca Raton, FL, 19 March. Greenspan, A., 2008, Statement to the House, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Hearing, 23 October (Serial 110–209).

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Stewardship does require securing the succession of competent managers to senior executive roles, ensuring that business strategy is properly developed and subjected to critical scrutiny, and – a role rendered necessary by the effects of financialisation – preventing senior executives enriching themselves at the expense of other shareholders. Stewardship involves rather more than the box-ticking approaches of the proxy services that have become integral to corporate governance – although smaller investment intermediaries, with more holdings than they can themselves effectively monitor (itself an indicator of a problem), may need to use these agencies. Effective stewardship, however, is integrated with investment management: there is no such thing as good governance of a bad business.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

Siegel, Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns and Long-Term Investment Strategies (New York, 2000). 9 Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Stanton, Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns (Princeton, 2002). 10 Paul Frentrop, A History of Corporate Governance 1602-2002 (Brussels, 2003), pp. 49-51. 11 Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, 2007), p. 178. 12 Frentrop, Corporate Governance, p. 59. 13 On the ambivalence of the Calvinist capitalist Dutch Republic, see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1997 [1987]). 14 John P.

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Shelton, ‘The First Printed Share Certificate: An Important Link in Financial History’, Business History Review, 39, 3 (Autumn 1965), p. 396. 15 Shelton, ‘First Printed Share Certificate’, pp. 400f. 16 Engel Sluiter, ‘Dutch Maritime Power and the Colonial Status Quo, 1585-1641’, Pacific Historical Review, 11, 1 (March 1942), p. 33. 17 Ibid., p. 34. 18 Frentrop, Corporate Governance, pp. 69f. 19 Larry Neal, ‘Venture Shares of the Dutch East India Company’, in William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (eds.), The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets (Oxford, 2005), p. 167. 20 Neal, ‘Venture Shares’, p. 169. 21 Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, p. 349. 22 Ibid., p. 339. 23 Neal, ‘Venture Shares’, p. 169. 24 Frentrop, Corporate Governance, p. 85. 25 Ibid., pp. 95f. 26 Ibid., p. 103. Cf. Neal, ‘Venture Shares’, p. 171. 27 Neal, ‘Venture Shares’, p. 166. 28 Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, p. 178. 29 Ibid., pp. 179-83.

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In a tract entitled The Necessary Discourse (Nootwendich Discours), published in 1622, an anonymous author lamented the lack of transparency which characterized the ‘self-serving governance of certain of the directors’, who were ensuring that ‘all remained darkness’: ‘The account book, we can only surmise, must have been rubbed with bacon and fed to the dogs.’24 Directorships should be for fixed terms, the dissenters argued, and all major shareholders should have the right to appoint a director. The campaign for a reform of what would now be called the VOC’s corporate governance duly bore fruit. In December 1622, when the Company’s charter was renewed, it was substantially modified. Directors would no longer be appointed for life but could serve for only three years at a time. The ‘chief participants’ (shareholders with as much equity as directors) were henceforth entitled to nominate ‘Nine Men’ from among themselves, whom the Seventeen Lords were obliged to consult on ‘great and important matters’, and who would be entitled to oversee the annual accounting of the six chambers and to nominate, jointly with the Seventeen Lords, future candidates for directorships.

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

“Critics,” Daniel Lee wrote, “called us puppies who did not fear a tiger.” The Republic of Samsung, for both good and bad, was on the ascendant. Henry Cho recounted, “They treated me like a god.” Dynasty Ascendant “I THINK THEY [SAMSUNG] are mimicking exactly the old ways,” Jisoo Lee, a corporate governance lawyer who’d tussled with Samsung at shareholder meetings, told me over coffee after I’d first talked with Henry. He gave me a comparison that Koreans often make. “If you look at the first king of [Korea’s] Yi dynasty, Taejo, he had eight sons, and there was this battle between the fifth and the youngest son,” he said.

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All have been pardoned by the president, often without serving prison time. Three of them, including Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, have been pardoned twice. From January 2015 to February 2016, the outside members of Samsung Electronics’ board of directors—who were supposed to be independent, as a check on corporate governance—unanimously approved every proposal put forward by the company, except the two times a director was absent. Imagine the heirs of the Carnegies and Rockefellers being so powerful and revered that The New York Times would self-censor its coverage out of deference. Imagine a White House pardoning the heirs of Sam Walton or Ray Kroc, as they ran the operations of Walmart or McDonald’s from their prison cells.

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The former financial executive, Kim Seon-jeong, who was involved in some of the succession planning, told me that a tranche of high-level executives were involved in drawing up plans for the sensitive inheritance process, exploiting legal loopholes, cash gifts, and financial tools like convertible bonds and bonds with warrants. “That was the perfect tool for the succession plan,” corporate governance lawyer Jisoo Lee told me. The plans got under way in early 1995, when Chairman Lee gave a gift of money to his children, which they used to buy shares in unlisted Samsung holdings at what seemed like bargain prices. The companies went public a few months later; share prices jumped on the open market.

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

If you want more and better markets, you have to have more (and better) governance. Markets work best not where states are weakest, but where they are strong. Second, capitalism does not come with a unique model. Economic prosperity and stability can be achieved through different combinations of institutional arrangements in labor markets, finance, corporate governance, social welfare, and other areas. Nations are likely to—and indeed are entitled to—make varying choices among these arrangements depending on their needs and values. Trite as they may sound as stated, these ideas have enormous implications for globalization and for democracy, and for how far we can take each in the presence of the other.

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“Unlike the economic nationalism of the thirties,” Ruggie writes, the regime “would be multilateral in character; unlike the liberalism of the gold standard and free trade, its multilateralism would be predicated upon domestic interventionism.”7 The considerable maneuvering room afforded by these trade rules allowed advanced nations to build customized versions of capitalism around distinct approaches to corporate governance, labor markets, tax regimes, business-government relations, and welfare state arrangements. What emerged, in a phrase coined by the political scientists Peter Hall and David Soskice, were “varieties of capitalism.”8 The United States, Britain, France, Germany, or Sweden were each market-based economies, but the institutions that underpinned their markets differed substantially and bore unmistakably national characteristics.

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Emerging market economies need “good institutions” that promote property rights “such as the rule of law, constraints on government expropriation, and absence of corruption.” They also need institutions that promote an efficient financial system, such as “financial regulation to encourage transparency, good corporate governance, prudential supervision to limit excessive risk taking, and good enforcement of financial contracts.” These reforms in turn require extensive legal and political transformations to relax the grip of incumbents in the system and open it to competition.6 What is striking in arguments such as these is how extensive and imprecise—simultaneously—the list of prerequisites can be.

Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, diversified portfolio, emotional labour, equity risk premium, estate planning, eurozone crisis, family office, financial innovation, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, information asymmetry, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, liberal capitalism, mega-rich, mobile money, offshore financial centre, prudent man rule, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, web of trust, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Gerard Hanlon, “Institutional Forms and Organizational Structures: Homology, Trust and Reputational Capital in Professional Service Firms,” Organization 11 (2004): 205. 2. Eliot Freidson, Professionalism: The Third Logic (London: Polity, 2001), 128. 3. Doreen McBarnet, “After Enron: Corporate Governance, Creative Compliance and the Uses of Corporate Social Responsibility,” in Justin O’Brien, ed., Governing the Corporation: Regulation and Corporate Governance in an Age of Scandal and Global Markets, 205–222 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2005). 4. Tim Bartley, “Institutional Emergence in an Era of Globalization: The Rise of Transnational Private Regulation of Labor and Environmental Conditions,” American Journal of Sociology 113 (2007): 298. 5.

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Manish Bhansali, Deepti Sharma, and Vijay Raina, “Epigastric Heteropagus Twins: 3 Case Reports with Review of Literature,” Journal of Pediatric Surgery 40 (2015): 1204–1208. 80. Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations, 34. 81. Ibid., 30. 82. Doreen McBarnet, “After Enron: Corporate Governance, Creative Compliance and the Uses of Corporate Social Responsibility,” in Justin O’Brien, ed., Governing the Corporation: Regulation and Corporate Governance in an Age of Scandal and Global Markets, 205–222 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2005). 83. Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations, 73. 84. Adam Hofri, “Professionals’ Contribution to the Legislative Process: Between Self, Client, and the Public,” Law & Social Inquiry 39 (2014): 96–126. 85.

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Jens Beckert, “Political and Social Interests in the Transfer of Property,” Archives of European Sociology 46 (2005): 359–368. 46. Thomas Piketty, “On the Long-Run Evolution of Inheritance: France 1820–2050,” Working Paper, Paris School of Economics, 2010. 47. Randall Morck, Daniel Wolfenzon, and Bernard Yeung, “Corporate Governance, Economic Entrenchment, and Growth,” Journal of Economic Literature 43 (2005): 655–720. 48. Jens Beckert, Inherited Wealth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 18. 49. Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 53. 50. Federico Cingano, “Trends in Income Inequality and Its Impact on Economic Growth,” OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers 163, 2015. 51.

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

Small ones were privatised or closed, while larger ones were turned into more major corporations and merged into large industrial groups. The government decided to retain ownership of between 500 to 1,000 large SOEs and allow smaller SOEs to be leased or sold. In 1997, the 15th Party Congress approved plans to convert some SOEs into shareholding corporations, and in 2000, the Shanghai Stock Exchange issued China’s first corporate governance guidance principles, later drafted into legal requirements by the China Securities Regulatory Commission.21 By 2001, 86 per cent of all SOEs had been restructured and roughly 70 per cent had been fully or partially privatised.22 The employment consequences of SOE reforms were considerable, though the private sector absorbed a lot of the slack created.

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Most of the remainder are in social services, education and health, sports, real estate and other sectors.15 China is becoming increasingly active in fortifying the role that SOEs play in advanced manufacturing and the new industries in which it hopes to develop global leadership. The 2013 SOE reform proposals nourished hopes that the raison d’être for state ownership would become more transparent, and that they would mandate a marked improvement in corporate governance. Yet, very little of substance really emerged from the four agencies supposed to be responsible for SOE reform, perhaps partly because their agendas were full of contradictions. The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC), which manages around a hundred SOEs under the supervision of the central government (as opposed to the many more under the supervision of local governments), wanted to build globally competitive SOEs.

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Since 2015–16, China has experienced a stock market rout, a mini currency crisis, corruption and risk management scandals in the financial sector, a new round of rising non-performing loans, and the exposure of excessive leverage in the finance sector and among SOEs and local governments. All in all, these events add up to a serious problem not just of weak regulation, which is now being partially addressed, but also of weak corporate governance and operational management which are not only being inadequately addressed but are being exacerbated because of new political interference. As I have suggested here, China could become embroiled in a debt crisis arising from the increase in the burden of debt and the decline in capacity to shoulder it, but this does not seem a likely outcome.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Dalio foresees one of two outcomes: Either we “re-engineer the system so that the pie is both divided and grown well” or else “we will have great conflict and some form of revolution that will hurt most everyone and will shrink the pie.” Dalio proposes the system be reengineered not by stopping hedge funds and other big investors like him from forcing companies to squeeze out every ounce of profits, typically by pushing down wages and by abandoning workers and communities; not by changing corporate governance to give workers more say or giving them more ownership of the companies they work in; not by busting up giant Wall Street hedge funds and banks—not, in short, by doing anything that could possibly threaten Dalio’s own considerable wealth and power. Instead, he suggests convening a “bipartisan commission.”

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Millions of Americans overcame their cynicism and began to mobilize. In order to reverse the vicious cycle in which we now find ourselves, it’s important to understand how it began and how it has maintained its momentum. Three big systemic changes over the last forty years have reallocated power upward in the system. They are (1) the shift in corporate governance from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, (2) the shift in bargaining power from large unions to giant corporations, and (3) the unleashing of the financial power of Wall Street. Each of these power shifts began when a few clever people discovered ways to exploit the system. They succeeded by using their wealth and power to alter laws and rules that had previously prevented such exploitation.

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I hope you now see that the only way to do the admirable things you advocate in your public pronouncements—ensure that the needs of all our citizens are being met, lift middle-class incomes, fulfill the promise of equal opportunity, and end climate change—is to do something you have shown no interest in doing: Give up your power and get your colleagues at the Business Roundtable and other members of the American oligarchy to do the same. Then support systemic changes that ensure that no one can ever again siphon off so many of the economic gains for themselves while undermining so much of our democracy. As I’ve said, we need to change corporate governance so workers and communities have a larger voice in corporate decision making. Although your Business Roundtable now appears receptive to this idea, I very much doubt you and your fellow CEOs are prepared to sacrifice share prices (as well as all your pay that’s tied to those share prices) to achieve it—which is what it will require.

Quantitative Value: A Practitioner's Guide to Automating Intelligent Investment and Eliminating Behavioral Errors by Wesley R. Gray, Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, backtesting, beat the dealer, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, compound rate of return, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, intangible asset, Jim Simons, Louis Bachelier, p-value, passive investing, performance metric, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical model, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, The Myth of the Rational Market, time value of money, transaction costs

It makes some intuitive sense that insiders with high conviction about the relative undervaluation of the stock would buy more of it, and that such trades would signal greater subsequent outperformance. This signal was reduced, however, when the trade was large in relation to the size of the stock, indicating that the market may be wary of trades that result in free-float reduction and possible deterioration in corporate governance. Giamouridis, Liodakis, and Moniz also find that the recent history of purchases is a key driver of outperformance. Insiders' trades in stocks where there have been many purchases over the preceding three months outperform. Notably, stocks that announce a buyback where insiders simultaneously purchase stock have a significant incremental outperformance, perhaps indicating that the insiders' purchases give credence to management's view that the company is undervalued.

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The authors find market-beating returns upon the announcement of potential activism in the range of 5 to 7 percent, with no return reversal during the subsequent year (see Figure 9.5). FIGURE 9.5 Abnormal Returns around 13D Filings Source: Alon P. Brav, Wei Jiang, Randall S. Thomas, and Frank Partnoy, “Hedge Fund Activism, Corporate Governance, and Firm Performance.” Journal of Finance 63 (May 2008): 1729; ECGI Finance Working Paper No. 139/2006; Vanderbilt Law and Economics Research Paper No. 07-28; FDIC Center for Financial Research Working Paper No. 2008-06. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=948907. In a 2009 paper, April Klein and Emanuel Zur15 examined “confrontational activism campaigns” by “entrepreneurial shareholder activists” and concluded that such strategies generate “significantly positive market reaction for the target firm around the initial Schedule 13D filing date” and “significantly positive returns over the subsequent year.”

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Daniel Giamouridis, Manolis Liodakis, and Andrew Moniz, “Some Insiders Are Indeed Smart Investors,” July 29, 2008. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1160305 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1160305. 14. Alon P. Brav, Wei Jiang, Randall S. Thomas, and Frank Partnoy, “Hedge Fund Activism, Corporate Governance, and Firm Performance.” Journal of Finance 63 (May 2008): 1729; ECGI Finance Working Paper No. 139/2006; Vanderbilt Law and Economics Research Paper No. 07-28; FDIC Center for Financial Research Working Paper No. 2008-06. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=948907. 15. April Klein and Emanuel Zur, “Entrepreneurial Shareholder Activism: Hedge Funds and Other Private Investors.”

Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

There are strong incentives—and enormous opportunities—to shape political processes and the economic system in ways that generate profits for some at the expense of the many. Open, democratic processes can circumscribe the power of special interest groups. We can bring ethics back into business. Corporate governance can recognize the rights not only of shareholders but of others who are touched by the actions of the corporations.10 An engaged and educated citizenry can understand how to make globalization work, or at least work better, and can demand that their political leaders shape globalization accordingly.

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When I was chief economist of the World Bank, we had an intense debate about those privatizations. I was among those who worried that rapid privatizations not only generated lower revenue for governments desperately in need of money but undermined confidence in the market economy. Without appropriate laws concerning corporate governance, there might be massive theft of corporate assets by managers; there would be incentives to strip assets rather than to build wealth. I worried too about the huge inequality to which these privatization could give rise. The other side said: Don’t worry, just privatize as rapidly as possible; the new owners will make sure that resources are well used and the economy will grow.

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At the same time, the central government moved away from micromanaging every detail of the economy to managing the overall economic framework, including ensuring a supply of finance for the development of infrastructure. As China’s transition evolved, the government realized that continued success would require stronger laws concerning corporate governance. It realized too that, in the zeal to strengthen the market, areas such as rural education and health had been left behind. The 2006 five-year plan sets out to redress these imbalances. The list of potential arenas for government action is large. Today, nearly everyone agrees that government needs to be involved in providing basic education, legal frameworks, infrastructure, and some elements of a social safety net, and in regulating competition, banks, and environmental impacts.

Commodity Trading Advisors: Risk, Performance Analysis, and Selection by Greg N. Gregoriou, Vassilios Karavas, François-Serge Lhabitant, Fabrice Douglas Rouah

Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, compound rate of return, constrained optimization, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, discrete time, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, iterative process, linear programming, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, transaction costs, value at risk, zero-sum game

Ali previously worked for several years as a finance lawyer in Sydney. He is also a coauthor of Corporate Governance and Investment Fiduciaries (Sydney: Lawbook Co., 2003), which examines the corporate governance aspects of managed investment products. Mark Anson is the Chief Investment Officer for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). He has complete responsibility for all asset classes in which CalPERS invests, including domestic and international equity and fixed income, real estate, corporate governance, currency overlay, securities lending, venture capital, leveraged buyouts, and hedge funds.

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Anson is a member of the New York and Illinois State Bar associations and has earned accounting and financial designations. He is the author of four books on financial markets and has published over 60 research articles on the topics of corporate governance, hedge funds, real estate, currency overlay, credit risk, private equity, risk management, and portfolio management. Dr. Anson is on the editorial boards of five financial journals and sits on Advisory Committees for the New York Stock Exchange, the International Association of Financial Engineers, AIMR’s Task Force on Corporate Governance, the Center for Excellence in Accounting and Security Analysis at Columbia University, and the Alternative Investment Research Centre at the City University of London.

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U. (2000) “Unbundling Credit Risk: The Nature and Regulation of Credit Derivatives.” Journal of Banking and Finance Law and Practice, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 73–92. Ali, P. U. (2002) “Individual Share Futures in Australia.” Company and Securities Law Journal, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 232–235. Ali, P. U., G. Stapledon, and M. Gold. (2003) Corporate Governance and Investment Fiduciaries. Rozelle, New South Wales: Lawbook Company. Amenc, N., and L. Martellini. (2003) “The Brave New World of Hedge Fund Indices.” Working Paper (February), Edhec Risk and Asset Management Research Centre, Lille, France. Amenc, N., L. Martellini, and M. Vaissié. (2003) “Benefits and Risks of Alternative Investment Strategies.”

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

Just as the colonial corporations were bound by written charters that specified limits on the power of officeholders and guaranteed the rights of members, so was the new nation. The Constitution was America’s charter, its founding document, and the Constitution’s shape and scope reflected the Framers’ experience with corporate governance. Indeed, as we have seen, democracy and constitutionalism were intimately tied up with the corporation from the very beginning. America was founded by the Virginia Company, fundamentally shaped by the colonists’ experience with the Massachusetts Bay Company, and inspired to Independence by the East India Company.

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Nor would it have been completely outrageous for Binney to argue that a corporation was a citizen of a particular state—the type of citizenship at issue in diversity cases under the Judiciary Act and Article III. Then and now, a corporation is incorporated in one state and must follow that state’s laws on issues of corporate governance, such as the fiduciary duties of officers and the voting rights of stockholders. As in Binney’s day, Americans today might speak of a Delaware corporation or a New York corporation.24 Even if corporations could arguably be seen as citizens for legal purposes, Binney understood how difficult it would be for him to win with this argument.

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“In fine,” the Nation observed, “directors do not direct.”27 Had the policyholders somehow overcome their collective action problem, they faced a series of other hurdles created by the recent corporate law reforms. The “race to the bottom” that began when New Jersey loosened its laws to lure reincorporation by large corporations, like Standard Oil and American Tobacco, translated into increasingly lax rules of corporate governance. Older rules that held managers liable for negligent decision-making were replaced by the “business judgment rule,” which effectively immunized management from liability for bad decisions so long as those decisions were made in good faith to serve the business. Shareholders saw their legal right to inspect the books and records diminished.

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values by Sharon Beder

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, junk bonds, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Powell Memorandum, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Torches of Freedom, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, young professional