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GustavBahler
Posts: 41348
Alba Posts: 15
Joined: 7/12/2010
Member: #3186
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TPercy wrote:GustavBahler wrote:meloshouldgo wrote:GustavBahler wrote:meloshouldgo wrote:TPercy wrote:GustavBahler wrote:TPercy wrote:meloshouldgo wrote:TPercy wrote:meloshouldgo wrote:nixluva wrote:It's amazing how the Republicans have managed to keep people voting against their own best interests over and over again. This is just the final nail in the coffin that rich and big corps have been trying to put the Middle Class and Poor into for decades. They've managed to rig the system and push all the money to the top. Now they can suck the rest of the money from Social Security, Medicare and all social programs. I shouldn't be so shocked by the Craven and Cruel nature of these people but it still does have me shaking my head in disbelief. These people already have IT ALL and yet that's not enough. They've gotta take the crumbs too. They are sitting on over 2 Trillion in profits (2015 data - current #s would be a lot higher) and it was the measly 400B that was keeping them from creating jobs. FUCKING HYPOCRITES
And 50% of the country fall for this **** every time they vote - democracy is truly custom built for the STOOPID 
Whats this graph supposed to prove exactly? You do realize that high corporate tax rates incentivize buisness and investment overseas right? Talk about democracy truly being for the stupid. The above chart shows US companies are sitting on all time record profits - so one can logically conclude if they wanted to invest in wage growth and job growth and innovation they have all the means at their disposal to do so. Instead they have chosen to use their capital for stock buy backs to artificially raise share prices so the C-suite can keep getting 90% of all the growth. Corporations are sitting on over 3 trillion in profits and the real median wage has fallen. But it's the tax rate that's keeping them from investing here? Are you seriously this stupid? Now let's examine your right wing "talking point". Please go ahead and provide data that backs up its the "corporate tax rate" that has "incentivized overseas business and investment"
And when you do that make sure you articulate exactly what the fukk the tax rate has to do with anything and connect that up with actual taxes paid by corporations.
Yes but my point is that the location of these profits matters. Companies like Apple for example have 2 trillion dollars in companies overseas. My point is that with high corporate taxes here in the US, why exactly would they want to invest here? A lot of the big corporations don't pay anything in taxes because a lot of their operations are based overseas. Its been covered many times, but the effective rate, the rate they actually pay is closer to 18 percent.
Parking money oversees (a technicality) is being done primarily to reward top executives and the biggest shareholders. When a company stashes that much overseas, to avoid paying taxes in spite of record breaking proftis, you have to wonder how patiotic they are. Thats the problem with Shareholder capitalism vs old school Stakeholder capitalism. It leaves a corporation's responsibility to their community, their employees, and their country, out of the equation. Its just about the share price, and whatever you can do to pump it, goes. What a lot of people on the left have a hard time explaining to conservatives is that most of them aren't against capitalism. Its capitalism without any guard rails they object to. Because when there arent any, a lot of innocent people usually end up getting hurt, big time. We've seen more than enough evidence of that. Corporations only go the share buyback route when they are no investment opportunities. I do think that the balance between labor and shareholder is tipped a bit in the shareholders favor;however, the idea that all corporations live and die for their shareholders completely is untrue.The most sucessful ones don't buy into a pure shareholder value theory model especially if they want to see long run growth. BULL$HIT - GO AHEAD BACK THAT UP You probably can find this better than I can, but look at R&D investment over the years. Sure can't put it there. Not sure what you are saying here. Are you saying companies care mote about R&D than they do about shareholders? Our that of stock buybacks were legal over the years they would have still invested in other stuff? My bad, dont blame you for not getting my point. I was talking about R&D investment vs profits put into stock buybacks. Just one of the many better uses than buybacks. Like improving equipment, the physical plant, better wages, pension comtributions (remember them?) I remember this story about pensions. Lucent Technologies (once part of Ma Bell) told employees that the company's situation was dire, and the only thing that could save them was a cash infusion, namely the employees 400 million dollar pension plan needed to be cashed out. Employees reluctantly agreed. What did the top execs do? Gave themselves 400 million dollars in bonuses. Would like to see a chart that explains that away. Its greed pure and simple. You are using 1 example of corporate greed to represent the 1.7 million corporations out there. Come on man you know better. I know its one of many. Im going to repost this Meyerson article from the Washington Post. Some useful numbers. And one from the Financial Times chief economics writer. It isnt just the left that has a problem with this type of capitalism. Harold Meyerson: Shareholder capitalism vs. stakeholder capitalismSometimes, a throwaway sentence, a passage not intended to make a major point, ends up telling a great deal more than the author intended. One such passage popped up in a recent Wall Street Journal story that documented U.S. corporations’ scramble to buy overseas companies and thereby shift their legal residency abroad to benefit from lower tax rates. It noted that roughly 1,700 U.S.-based companies currently are holding $1.5 trillion offshore rather than bringing it home and paying taxes on it. “But that,” the story said, “has left the bulk of their funds for paying dividends or buying back shares effectively out of reach.” Actually, those funds locked away abroad could be put to more uses than buying back shares or paying dividends if those companies brought them home. They might fund more research and development, or start a new product line, or even give employees a raise. But the Journal story has it right. American big business these days is in the business of rewarding shareholders (a group that very much includes chief executives), to the exclusion of any other activity that might help companies flourish. They’re in the business of raising their dividends and buying back stock, practices that effectively raise the value of outstanding shares but do nothing to enhance a company’s long-term value. But long-term value is a diminishing factor in many CEOs’ calculations, as they come under pressure from extortion artists — the euphemism is “activist investors” — who demand bigger dividends, and as the CEOs’ own fortunes are linked to share value as well. As The Post’s Steven Pearlstein recently ntoed, 80 percent of the companies listed on the S&P 500 bought back shares last year, spending $477 billion on raising share values by diminishing the number of shares outstanding. The S&P 500 spent 30 percent more on dividends and stock buybacks than they did on capital expenditures. Worse yet, most of these buybacks were funded by these corporations taking on debt. Indeed, of the $3.4 trillion in debt that U.S. non-financial corporations have incurred since 2009, nearly 87 percent has gone to stock buybacks and dividend payments. The next time a corporate CEO chastises the federal government for taking on debt to meet current expenses, tell him to clean up his own house first. Shareholder capitalism in the United States has reached the point of absurdity. More than three decades ago, economist Milton Friedman argued that a company’s sole obligation should be to its shareholders. But even Friedman didn’t argue that companies should cut back on everything else or plunge themselves deep into debt just to raise their shareholders’ rewards. Nevertheless, that — as that Wall Street Journal so succinctly illustrated — is what shareholder capitalism has become today.
That’s why an increasing number of top business reporters and commentators have turned against shareholder capitalism. Two years ago, writing in the Harvard Business Review, that magazine’s editorial director, Justin Fox, and Harvard Business School professor Jay Lorsch argued that shareholders performed none of the three basic tasks that, theoretically, justified their claim on corporate profits: They didn’t normally provide the companies with capital (which corporations usually get through retained earnings and borrowing), they didn’t provide a barometer of the company’s value (unless you believe that the share price is always accurate) and they didn’t provide a check on management — save to feather their own nests. In a recent issue of the American Prospect, a magazine I help edit, Pearlstein delivered his own withering critique of shareholder capitalism. And last week, Martin Wolf, the chief economics writer for the Financial Times — the most venerable and respected journal for investors — argued that shareholder capitalism had become so dysfunctional that “we need to rethink ownership and control” of corporations. Wolf’s point is that shareholders are far from the major risk-holders in the modern corporation. That distinction goes to the firm’s employees, who have “firm-specific skills.” And yet, he continued, “employees have no voice in what happens to a company to which they might have devoted their lives, while the shareholder of ten seconds does.” The alternative model to which Wolf implicitly points is the kind of stakeholder capitalism that exists in Germany, where workers, and sometimes public representatives, take half the seats on corporate boards and have a real voice in company decision-making. Changing corporate structure in the United States will require an epochal political battle, but it’s long past time that that battle began. From Martin Wolf. This is the conservatism before shareholder capitalism. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/inclusive-capitalism/martin-wolf-should-compan_b_7559972.html THE BLOG 06/11/2015 07:18 am ET Updated Jun 11, 2016
Martin Wolf :Should Companies Maximize Shareholder Value?By Inclusive Capitalism
What is a company? What is its purpose? Who owns it? What should be its goal? These are four closely related questions. The answers society gives will determine the future of capitalism. Those answers are also hard to find, because the limited liability company, though an extraordinarily successful institution, is a hybrid institution: it is in the market economy, but not of it. So what is a company? As the late Ronald Coase, a Nobel laureate in economics, taught, if one wants to organise production and sales of complex products and services, a (semi)-permanent institution will outperform an array of small businesses forced to deal with one another through market contracts. Companies exist because hierarchies — ‘command and control’ — beat markets. The genius of the company is to import the hierarchical structure of older institutional forms — bureaucracies and armies — into the market economy. The advantage companies possess is the mirror image of the costs of creating and monitoring a vast number of detailed contracts under uncertainty about future requirements. Organising economic processes successfully often requires the scale of an army and the longevity of a tortoise. A life insurer is of little use if it will not meet its obligations 80 years hence. A maker of jet engines is of little use if it will be unable to service and replace its engines over their lifetime. A car manufacturer is of little use if it is unable to use what it has learned from today’s models to build tomorrow’s. A company is built upon a set of relational, or implicit, contracts. These say something like the following: ‘we will purchase your services for a more or less indefinite period; we will look after you; and, in return, you will do what we tell you’.
The corporate form was a brilliant innovation. But, like many innovations, it has created new challenges. In order to work, such entities need vast amounts of capital. In the beginning, these funds are mainly provided by shareholders. Thereafter, they mostly come from retained earnings and further borrowing. In return for providing risk capital, shareholders are entitled to the stream of corporate profits, whether paid out as dividends or share buy-backs, or retained within the company. If things go well, shareholders have a profitable investment. Under limited liability, if things go badly, they will lose their investment, but no more than their investment. What is the goal of a company? It is an institutional mechanism for adding economic value. This is the social function of any and all companies, subject to an important proviso: the company should not add value by inflicting negative externalities, such as environmental degradation. Society has given the corporate form important privileges. In return, society has a right to expect obedience to the law and a measure of decency: even if it is not illegal, dumping toxic waste or rigging one’s affairs so as to pay minimal taxes to the jurisdictions that provide the environment within which the company can generate its profits is indecent. It is freeloading. A company adds value by organising its array of assets — skills, knowledge, values, traditions and loyalties — into an effective and flexible whole. It is succeeding if it prospers in a competitive market. It fails if it does not. It is almost always possible for a company to make higher shortterm profits by sacrificing investments that allow it to prosper in the long run. But companies were created in order to endure. Ownership can change hands, be fragmented, or re-unified, without significant impact on the company itself. Caring about its future is part of a company’s raison d’être. Who owns and controls a company? The formal answer of economists has been that shareholders own and control a company. This is simplistic. Shareholders do not own companies in the normal sense of ownership. They cannot walk into the property they ‘own’ and demand that ‘their’ employees do certain things, as they could in a shop or a farm that they owned. Indeed, all they can do — and, for the most part, only with difficulty — is to help change management by voting or selling their shares. This is a highly qualified form of ownership. A closely related question is whether shareholders should control companies. In the English-speaking countries, the answer is immediate and unambiguous: yes. Almost anywhere else, it is, to a greater or lesser extent, no. The difference is more intellectual and cultural than legal. In Germany or Japan, for example, shareholders have a right to consideration, but not to control. Control rests, instead, with management, whose responsibilities are to the company as an enduring entity. In such countries, the answer to the question of who owns a limited liability company is that nobody really does, any more than someone can own, say, a university. Is it clear who is right? No, because, as noted above, the limited liability company is a hybrid entity. The arguments in favour of shareholders’ control rights are two: first, shareholders are the residual claimants and so bear the residual risks; second, somebody has to have the capacity to evict management. If it is not the shareholders, who should it be? The advantage of an Anglo-Saxon shareholder-governed company is that fundamental shifts in management and direction are relatively simple to make. The argument against this view is that in a shareholder-controlled company some valuable implicit contracts — for example, willingness to undertake unpleasant and inconspicuous tasks in the hope of reward in subsequent employment, or willingness to invest heavily in one’s ability to work within a specific team — will not be made. The explanation for this difficulty is that contrary to the normal view, shareholders do not bear the largest proportion of the uninsurable risk in a company. Shareholders can diversify their portfolios and usually do, thus insuring themselves against company-specific risk. The people who cannot do this are those who make large investments in company-specific skills, knowledge and relationships, protected, they hope, by the implicit contracts that justify the corporate form. This category may include both long-serving workers and dedicated suppliers. Without a measure of control, such implicit contracts are unlikely to prove worth the paper they are not written on. If those who are called upon to invest in implicit contracts know they have limited, if any, influence on those who control the company, they must then also know that opportunistic default is possible and, in the right circumstances, certain. They will rationally not make those investments. In such cases, shareholder control actually undermines corporate success. Finally, what should the operational goal of a company be? Should it be to maximise shareholder value, defined, as it should be, as ‘maximising the present value of free cash flows from now until infinity, discounted at a rate that reflects the risks of these cash flows’? The answer is yes if and only if two conditions hold. The first is that the prices of the goods and services (including labour services) that a company buys and sells reflect their true social costs and benefits. The second is that the goal can be made operational in a beneficial rather than a perverse way. Neither is plausible. The biggest difficulty with the first of these conditions lies in the labour market. The social costs of lay-offs are not internalised by the company. But that can be dealt with by imposing a regulation or tax. A far greater difficulty is the second. Shareholders do not know what policies will maximise the present value of a company’s free cash flow to infinity. In fact, they have virtually no idea. Most of them also have no incentive to invest in the relevant knowledge either. Unless they own a large share of the company, they will suffer from the collective action problem described by the late Mancur Olsen: the costs of investment in knowledge is borne by each of them, but the benefits are shared amongst all. As a public good, knowledge is always undersupplied in the market. This is, note, not the same as saying stock markets are inefficient in their ability to evaluate the prospects of one company vis-à-vis another (though they are certainly inefficient at the aggregate level). That is because shareholder ignorance is likely to shape what the company does. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Martin Wolf is Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator, Financial Times |
12/5/2017 11:49 AM
