Stop the presses! Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren agree on something.
Each has argued this week that the U.S. economy would be stronger if we could alter the way our corporations are run.
Of course, the populists of the right and the left disagree vehemently about what the problems are and how to remedy those faults. But both agree — apparently — that one of the structural problems in the economy is that corporations aren’t maximizing long-term hiring or growth because they are focused too much on short-term results.
Trump expressed his concerns, of course, in a tweet, so we have limited understanding of exactly what he’s advocating and what his reasons are.
The president said retiring PepsiCo PEP, +0.30% CEO Indra Nooyi told him that if he wants to make the economy great, corporations should move away from reporting their financial results on a quarterly basis. Trump said he asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to study changing the reporting requirement to twice a year. The SEC requires quarterly reports, but many companies in Europe report only twice a year.
It’s not likely that the SEC will support Trump’s idea.
Trump’s tweet follows similar concerns expressed by CEOs Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway BRK.B, -0.13% and Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase JPM, -0.28% who argued in an op-ed that corporations should not provide quarterly financial guidance because such look-ahead guidance focused management too much on short-term fluctuations and not enough on growing their business for the long run.
The Business Roundtable, the premier advocacy group for CEOs, agrees.
Buffett and Dimon, unlike Trump, however, recommended that quarterly reporting of financial results should continue in interests of transparency.
There’s a lot of evidence that short-termism (propelled by executives who have a lot personally at stake in meeting or beating quarterly expectations) is harmful to the economy. Plenty of business leaders agree.
One study cited by my colleague Francine McKenna concluded that “investors’ short attention spans hurt long-term returns when company executives react to the clamor for short-term results by reporting too frequently and then attempting to meet heightened expectations by any means possible.”
Meeting short-term goals means that management doesn’t invest enough for the future, another study concluded. I’ve argued repeatedly that weak investment is one of our nation’s biggest economic problems.
Warren’s plan to save capitalismWe know a lot more about Sen. Warren’s proposals for fixing corporate governance, which go much further than Trump’s narrowly targeted “fix.”
Warren has written legislation and an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating that the U.S. corporate structure be radically reformed to reduce the power of speculators in the economy. (The average share on the New York Stock Exchange is held for less than a year.)
Instead of thinking of corporations as the sole property of shareholders, Warren’s proposal would return us to the days when corporations, as privileged legal creations of the American people, were thought to have responsibilities to the public welfare as well as to their shareholders.
Warren argues that the shift in corporate governance ideology since the 1980s, from one of public purpose to one of private gain, has impoverished our economy while enriching a small elite. Before, wages grew alongside productivity, making the United States both prosperous and relatively equitable.
But now, the emphasis on maximizing the extraction of “shareholder value” out of corporations has not only deprived workers of their just due, but has starved the U.S. economy of the long-term investments it needs to grow and compete in today’s world.
Her plan isn’t nearly as radical as her critics would have you believe. It’s not “nationalizing everything,” as The National Review’s Kevin Williamson says. Her plan is much closer to Germany than it is to Venezuela.
The Accountable Capitalism Act would require large corporations to obtain federal (rather than state) charters. They would open up their boards of directors to representatives of workers, as is common in large German corporations. (Germany still has a robust capitalist system, despite the warnings of Williamson and other apologists.)
Large corporations would be required to consider the interests of all stakeholders — workers, customers, the community — as well as shareholders’ interests. The hope is that considerations such as long-term investments, negative externalities and equitable growth would have a seat at the table along with those who have only their own short-term financial interests at heart.
Lenore Palladino has a fuller and much superior defense of these ideas in the Boston Review. Please read it.
No, Warren’s idea isn’t going to pass any time soon. And it wouldn’t fix everything that’s wrong in our economy. But it would be a small step in rebalancing the interests of the American people against the interests of the few.
Corporations were not created by God. They weren’t handed down to us by Jesus, Martin Luther, Adam Smith or Milton Friedman. American corporations are man-made institutions created by the people’s will to serve a public purpose in exchange for extensive legal privileges.
Their power is undeniable, and so is the notion that we the people have the right to alter those former systems of corporate governance if they are no longer serving their purpose. If that is treason against God’s capitalism, make the most of it.
