Is short-termism wrecking the economy?
Dans une entrevue sur la BBC (ici), Le chef économiste de la Banque d’Angleterre (Andy Haldane) a livré une belle critique du court-termisme invoquant le fait que les sociétés devraient investir davantage dans le futur plutôt que verser des dividendes en argent aux actionnaires ou de racheter leurs actions. Très intéressant à lire !
Morceaux choisis :
Last Friday on Newsnight the Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane sought to kick-start a debate on how companies run themselves. He told me that companies risk « eating themselves » as shareholders and management were gripped by a form of short-termism. Instead of investing in their futures firms are choosing to pay out too much of their cash to shareholders in the form of dividends or by buying back their own shares. (…)
It’s perfectly possible that shareholders might be too powerful and too disinterested. The issue could be that management is too focussed on short-term shareholder returns and so prioritises returning cash to them and increasing the share price in the short term, even if that isn’t in the company’s long-term interest. (…)
To understand how this situation might have arisen over the last few decades, one only needs to look at two trends. As Haldane argued last week – shareholding periods have fallen. There are fewer and fewer investors willing to take a long-term view. And secondly the trend has been to increasingly tie top management payment to share price performance. In other words, whatever the long-term benefits of investment in machinery, research or training five or six years down the line, we may have a system in which the rational thing to do is to focus on the next six months, not the next six years. The possible fixes to this situation are many and varied – from embracing a Germanic system of stakeholder capitalism (in which the workforce as well as the owners have a role in decision making), to looking again at executive compensation or maybe to an intermediate situation – perhaps ordering directors to act in the interest of a theoretical « perpetual shareholder », rather than existing (often short-term) investors. None of those options are a quick fix, all involve reform of the Companies Act, which is a mammoth bit of legislation. (…)
This is a big agenda and a big debate. On one level it could even be described as an attempt to save capitalism from capitalists, an argument that the ultimate owners of capital have stopped working in their own long-term interest. But, perhaps in those terms, it sounds too radical. On a more micro level this is a debate about economic incentives. It may simply be that the incentive structure in Anglo-Saxon capitalism has become skewed towards rewarding short-term behaviour.
À la prochaine…
Ivan Tchotourian