I'm confused about how your model of the economy works. It sounds like you believe CEOs are selfish and greedy when it comes to workers, but when it comes to pension funds, they keep stock prices high out of the goodness of their hearts?
If liquidpele's thesis is true, and executives are looking to "get rich and dip", "company be damned in the long run", then we would expect this to be reflected in the company's stock price in the long run. The stock price is essentially the fair market value of the company. And the American stock market has been performing very well for a good long while.
This entire comment thread strikes me as populist pitchfork-waving with little grounding in economic reality. Here's a question: If you're truly pessimistic about American companies, do you hold any short positions or put options? At the very least, are you overweighting non-American countries in your portfolio? And if so, which ones?
And they happen to have large influence on choice of CEO and who said CEO is going to try to please.
Gee I’m wondering what we should all be thinking and doing about those pension funds and who that would actually serve.
Y’all get that most of us don’t have pension funds, right? They’ve been gutted long time ago. Defined benefit to defined contribution ring any bells?
But yes, let’s fight against the other plebs that have things we don’t, let’s blame pension funds and not the plethora of other issues.
I tell ya, we’re funding pensions alright but it ain’t the teachers kind.
Take a look at this, re institutional ownership: https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s.... 95% of outstanding stock is owned institutionally, which is pretty normal in manufacturing. For decades, this has been a core investment sector for pensions and other institutional funds, and remains so, even if it's just to balance investments in tech, biotech/pharma, retail/CPG, financial services, the military industrial complex and transportation. Moreover, if you attend quarterly results calls, you typically end up with a few analysts from banks and at least one from some pension fund, who ask questions. We young people may not care about pensions as almost none of us will have one, but they still exist and still influence large pieces of our economy.
But look at any big corporation, take the CEO's total compensation and divide it by the number of employees. The CEO of IBM earns an obscene $16.5 million per year - but divide that by IBM's 288,300 employees and it's $60 per employee per year. Wal-mart's CEO makes $25.31 million, but it's only $12 per employee per year.
Even if we redistributed the CEO's entire salary to workers, $60/year isn't going to do much to close the gap between rich and poor.
Sure.
This is exactly the same playbook as with private equity - the point is to make the shareholders richer as fast as possible, and long-term strategies do not pay out as fast while possibly introducing longer term risks.
That is something some people choose to believe to be true. The same way some people choose to believe that God (or a number of Gods) exist.
The vast majority of us are working class.
