or as Jeremy Grantham succinctly put it in his latest newsletter:
The Longest Quarter Ever
In the last 20 years, corporate ownership began to look odd. The nominal owners – stockholders – typically traded every few months and took on the part of institutions, with little or no interest in corporate affairs, with the result that corporate officers appeared to own the companies and behaved accordingly. Stock option programs transferred ownership from shareholders to managers in giant dollops and were awarded on short-term results. One consequence of this was a distorted incentive that encouraged leverage and other forms of going for broke with other people’s money. Boards of Directors demonstrated little timely intervention and typically only found their claws in situations of complete disaster, when it was too late. Total remuneration in the U.S. for senior officers, unopposed by typical boards, rose as a percentage of the average worker’s pay from 40 times in Eisenhower’s era to over 600 times today, with no indication of any general improvement in talent. Few rewards were carefully related to long-term results.
Pretax income inequality rose in most countries and was offset by tax adjustments in very few. In the U.S., oddly, the tax changes accentuated the shift. Such an increase in inequality was caused by all of the benefits of the substantial productivity flowing to a few, while the average hour’s pay stayed unprecedentedly unchanged for 40 years!