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Stray thoughts on the rise of shareholders

by Robert Teitelman | Published April 13, 2012 at 12:19 PM

A post earlier in the week about a Gretchen Morgenson column in The New York Times continues to bug me. Morgenson was once again thumping the tub for "say on pay," that is the ability of shareholders to have a greater say on corporate compensation schemes. The big takeaway here, to me, is that Morgenson and the corporate governance crowd continue to believe that some day, somehow, shareholders will take up their democratic responsibilities as owners and actively participate in corporate monitoring. I'm skeptical on empirical grounds, but whatever. More interesting is a stray thought that wandered through the post. From a certain perspective, governance arrangements -- today that means shareholder hegemony -- take on a kind of foundational importance, just as in democratic politics the constitution serves as a kind of governance operating system or source code. Rising from that model should theoretically flow a variety of either virtues or sins: alignment or misalignment of incentives; rough equality or inequality of pay; efficient or inefficient use of resources; good results or bad, which are then reflected in rising or falling shares; and, ultimately, in an economy that provides mobility, job creation and innovation -- or the opposite.

Historically speaking, we saw a shift somewhere in the '70s from an earlier model that emphasized stakeholder interests -- workers (often unions), communities, customers and shareholders -- and that was embodied in a class of relatively large and stable corporations that dominated the landscape. This is often viewed as the bad old days of governance; and stakeholder governance, with its agency issues and separation of ownership and control, is the defective model that current governance theory has long defined itself against. The question then is a simple one, reflective of a complex historical situation: Why were many of the virtues we now seek -- relative equality, lower CEO pay (relatively and objectively), global competitiveness, nearly full employment, considerable innovation (a difficult subject to pin down, of course, though there was little talk of technological stagnation in the '60s, which stagnationists like Tyler Cowen look back on with nostalgia) -- more associated with that era of retrograde stakeholders than, say, the shareholder model of today? In short, if CEOs and boards used stakeholders to entrench themselves so effectively, why didn't their pay go through the roof?

Again, these are complicated and dynamic historical circumstances. It's very true that American corporations existed in a kind of protected and hegemonic position in the three decades after World War II. With the rest of the industrial world trying to recover from the war, American corporations could do nearly anything they wanted. Globalism existed for American multinational companies, but it was relatively limited, hedged in by protectionism at home and abroad and restrictive regulations, particularly on the flow of capital and credit. It was also the last decades of high industrialism: Economies of scale prevailed, which allowed efficient output and plentiful jobs at relatively large and dominant companies. Even innovation was viewed as something best done on an industrial scale: It was the age that recalled not the Manhattan Project, but it was the heyday of Bell Laboratories which Jon Gertner lays out so well in his new book. It was also an era that came to a sudden and wrenching end with the stagflation of the '70s. Still, while all those factors help explain relative equality and the dominance of large companies, they don't begin to explain compensation and the destructive practices that are supposed to flow from "entrenched" management.

So it's intriguing. But now, like a dog chasing a stick, we head a little deeper into the weeds. Earlier this week, JW Mason, who normally posts on his own econoblog, The Slack Wire, wrote an essay as a substitute for Mike Konczal at Rortybomb. Mason explored the tensions and contradictions between two causal explanations of the financial crisis: the notion that the Federal Reserve had spawned the mispricing of assets (like mortgages) by keeping interest rates too low, and the argument, often made, Mason points out, by the very same economists, that global trade imbalances (well, mostly China) flooded the developed world with too-cheap capital. The post is well worth reading carefully, but what piqued my interest was Mason's provisional conclusion that the real problem might not have been either of those phenomenon, but rather that the crisis represented a failure of the private financial system to optimally match up savings and useful investment ideas. Near the end of a fascinating comment discussion, Mason refers back to an earlier post on The Slack Wire on the subject of nonfinancial corporations and intermediation, that is banking.

That post, in October 2011, opens up with one of the more fascinating graphs I've seen lately. It tracks nonfinancial corporate after-tax profits, dividends and total payouts from 1950 to 2011. I'll let Mason lay it out: "In the neo-liberal era, up until 1980 or so, nonfinancial businesses paid out about 40% of their profits to shareholders. But in most of the years since 1980, they've paid out more than all of them. In 2006, for example, nonfinancial corporations had after-tax earnings of $800 billion, and paid out $365 billion in dividends and $565 [billion] in net stock repurchases. In 2007, earnings were $750 billion, dividends were $480 billion and net stock repurchases were $790 billion." Mason goes on to compare what those numbers suggest about corporations to homeowners using residences as piggy banks: that is, a steady disinvestment has taken place. He then goes on to make a series of political arguments that you can accept or not.

(A side note: Mason's graph also casts a light on all the handwringing about companies hoarding cash after the crisis. In fact, while profits did plunge, the total payout mostly remained above that level -- and for a time in 2009 the two ran together. Those very cries that companies must pay out more may suggest how far we've come in terms of shareholder expectations. It also points up the split between shareholder interests and workers. Companies were continuing to pay out to shareholders, not using the cash to rehire.)

But what are the numbers really saying? Well, clearly something has changed (we should also be careful to note that the period 1950 to 1980 was not exactly "normal," if normal means anything in this context). Here we take refuge not in economics as much as in economic history. If there's any powerful trend that defined the shift in finance that was first strikingly evident in the '70s, it was the rise of institutional shareholders, accompanied by the cult of performance and portfolio management. The historical context here is complex too -- and it undermines some of the more reductionist arguments of the neo-liberal critique from the left -- but it does trace a remarkable shift from equity markets that are sideshows for individual investors to institutionally dominated equity markets that have, since the '70s, made a series of demands and arguments for their own prescience, efficiency, rationality and supremacy. The shift of governance from stakeholders to shareholders is only the most obvious sign of this demand for hegemony by shareholders. The track of rising corporate payouts is another piece of evidence.

The question all this stirs up I'm in no position to answer: Are we better or worse off economically, socially and politically with shareholders in that pre-eminent a role? Is there a balance point? Have we, in a world of activist hedge funds and high-frequency trading, overshot that point? Has the cult of share performance, once such a tonic to a closed, inefficient and cartel-like Wall Street, devolved into rampant speculation? Is there -- God forbid -- a role for stable, even entrenched managers at, say, companies like Facebook or Google? (Felix Salmon goes after an entrenched Google floating an "evil" two-class share scheme here.) Have we gotten corporate governance wrong?

It's easy to ask these questions but difficult to answer them. That said the ascendancy of the shareholder is a topic worth pondering. - Robert Teitelman

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