finance sociale et investissement responsable Gouvernance Normes d'encadrement
Too Many Corporations Act For The Short-Term. That Should Change
Ivan Tchotourian 6 septembre 2018 Ivan Tchotourian
As long-term investors, we want corporations to be thinking about the future. Unfortunately, from our vantage point, short-term thinking has become endemic on Wall Street. While CEOs publicly profess their commitment to the long-term interests of shareholders, too often we see how their actions directly contradict their words.
First, let’s consider a major factor of short-termism: stock buybacks. The immense buyback boom of 2018 is truly staggering. This year, S&P 500 companies are on pace to spend a record-breaking $1 trillion on stock buybacks, according to an analysis by Bloomberg. While executives often pitch these buybacks as a “return of capital” to shareholders, plenty of research suggests the truth is more complicated for long-term investors.
When executives choose to spend shareholder cash on buybacks, it’s a rather simple process: A company executive decides that “extra” cash on the balance sheet is better off being spent repurchasing shares. Without the input of shareholders—and often without any rigorous explanation to shareholders—CEOs then buy up stock, which drives up EPS, which, in turn, helps drive up the stock price. That’s the short-term view.
In the long-term, however, companies that spend billions on buybacks—like GE, Cisco, Oracle, and IBM to name a few—they effectively siphon money away from innovation, research and development, worker training, and reinvestment into new lines of business.
(…) In general, over the next few years, we anticipate seeing a wave of shareholder activism—through proposals and campaigns that align with the interests of long-term shareholders and target short-term mindsets. This isn’t just about buybacks, either. We expect long-term shareholders to fight for corporate issues surrounding fossil fuels, board diversity, worker pay, and so on.
Many of these fights have already begun, and that’s a positive development. Shirley Westcott, a senior vice President at Alliance Advisors LLC, recently noted that proposals are indeed on the rise. “Calls for various types of climate action have resonated strongly with investors as have social initiatives on gun violence, sexual misconduct and the opioid epidemic,” M. Westcott writes. “Pay programs have faced more frequent rebukes and even auditors, in isolated events, have been challenged over independence and performance.”
Corporate democracy may seem like an oxymoron in today’s top-down corporate structures, but the truth is that in a healthy economic system, corporate directors listen to and respond to feedback from all shareholders. Very often, we’ll see that conversation being dominated by short-term-minded activist hedge funds, whose managers buy up large positions in a stock, and then push management into short-term decisions that drive the stock up—but leave little left for reinvestment that create value over the long-term.
“Armed with their huge war chests,” writes Bill Lazonick, an economist at UMass, “these new-style corporate predators use a corrupt proxy-voting system, “wolf pack” hook-ups with other hedge funds, and once-illegal engagement with management to compel corporations to hand over profits that the hedge funds did nothing to create.”
True, but we believe activist hedge funds will have an increasingly major force to contend with: Major institutional shareholders, long-term investors, and, especially, pension funds.
