The Structure of The Corporation — In Practice Part II In Part I, I explained the structure of the corporation in theory, but that’s not how it works in practice. In practice, the corporation is more like a monarchy with the CEO at its head. This is due to the…

Part I Since the 1990s headlines have blared about outrageous CEO pay. Politicians, Bill Clinton is one example, had pledged to “putting people first” to end it. All to no avail. Analysts and economists have criticized the ever-increasing corporate buybacks for a decade or so because of their role in…

If you are at all concerned about the cruel, rising inequality in our society, this is one of your must reads. Some writers, certainly not enough, have identified buybacks as the prime mechanism for the unconscionable level of the upward transfer of wealth since the 1980s. However, appeals to fairness…

The 1980s were a tipping point for economic inequality. Up to that point, there had been a fair distribution of the wealth that the workers of a nation created. On a single salary, an average family could afford a modest home and a car. But since the 1980s, although worker…

The lesson supposedly learned from the 2008 crisis is that the banks needed a larger reserves of capital (net assets) to weather the usual downturns in the business cycle, but also to have sufficient cash on hand to meet all demands for withdrawals immediately. Canadian banks did not need a…

It’s that time of year again. Public companies have sent out their financial statements ahead of their spring annual general meetings. Reporters are reading them, gasping at the continued enormity of CEO pay — as they have been doing for 40 years — then reporting them in tones of outrage. …

Superyacht Lady M owned by Alexei Mordashov Governments proudly take credit for instantly slapping powerful restrictions on Russian billionaires and their assets. But how did the governments know where these assets are? Ironically these governments knew of the assets in spite of those governments’ efforts to vigorously and viciously prosecute…

• The first part of this series describes the role of secret foreign ownership in driving up prices and the ineffectiveness of legislation that is supposed to disclose these investors, available here. A reader from Sacramento, wrote this to me last week: “The homelessness crisis here is worse than I…

No, spouses would not constitute a group. I doubt most people would think so. However, legislation such as this would contain a definition section for inclusions and exclusions. But that level of detail is not only mind numbing but outside a post.