financial times' "future of capitalism" - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 03-12-2009, 04:54 PM

In depth coverage of The Future of Capitalism from the Financial Times

the financial times has started a series on the future of capitalism, which they seem to want happen as a staging space for debates about quite fundamental issues that have emerged over the past months (for many folk--for others these are basic problems that are not suddenly surfacing--though the way in which this is happening and the speed of it is surprising)..you would think that in a situation such as this, in which very basic problems have come to the fore, in which older procedures are not applicable because to geography of capitalism has fundamentally changed away from the nation-state based forms that were dominant through the 1970s, in which basic political questions--on the order of who are we and what do we do and what does it mean to live a good life and what is a good society and how do we get there--are on the table as they've not been for a long time---you'd think that in such a context there'd be a debate--you know, a serious debate, in which descriptions were elaborated and pulled apart, alternatives outlined and discussed, the kind of thing democracy is supposed to be about.

not surprisingly, in the top-down pseudo-democracy of the united states with it's rigidly short-term press and reactionary lingua franca, nothing like that has really happened.

so it's interesting that the financial times has decided to set this into motion and to do so on the basis of a quite good sequence of pieces that outline the situation we're in.

i think this is separate from the main paper in that it's open access.
i think it'd be interesting to have a discussion here about the discussion there, maybe use this as a way of posing questions and talking in a maybe non-adversarial way about what is happening, what should be done, what goals are important and so forth.

if you look at the lead piece, the critique it outlines of american-style "free market" ideology is far more comprehensive than anything you see in the states--and this from a relatively conservative paper--but a sane conservative paper. a sane conservative position would see accurate information as important and would be flexible in the kinds of arguments about that data developed and open-minded about the conclusions reached--because the idea is to maintain something like the existing order, but modified, made more inclusive and functional. it is good to have sane conservative viewpoints because in there can be and should be disagreements about how to interpret information about the world--but on the basis of good information.

so the paper is talking about opening the space up to a wide range of viewpoints.
i think this is a most interesting development, and something that people in the states should read and think about not only for what's presented, but also as an indication of the degenerate state of the american press, it's narrowness.

anyway, read around and post stuff concerning what you find interesting.
point out things to others in the community that might be of interest to them.

The_Dunedan · 03-12-2009, 05:14 PM

Thanks for the tip, RB. Need to check this out...

roachboy · 03-13-2009, 06:21 AM

Quote:

Welch condemns share price focus

By Francesco Guerrera in New York

Published: March 12 2009 18:13 | Last updated: March 12 2009 18:13

Jack Welch, who is regarded as the father of the “shareholder value” movement that has dominated the corporate world for more than 20 years, has said it was “a dumb idea” for executives to focus so heavily on quarterly profits and share price gains.

The former General Electric chief told the Financial Times the emphasis that executives and investors had put on shareholder value, which began gaining popularity after a speech he made in 1981, was misplaced.

Mr Welch, whose record at GE encouraged other executives to replicate its consistent returns, said that managers and investors should not set share price increases as their overarching goal. He added that short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company.

“On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world,” he said. “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy . . . Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”

Mr Welch spoke before Thursday’s news that GE, which he left in 2001, had lost its triple A rating from Standard & Poor’s.

His comments, made in an interview for the FT’s series on the future of capitalism, come as the economic crisis has caused a radical rethinking by many leading executives and policymakers. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve and a high priest of laisser-faire capitalism, told the FT last month that the US might have to nationalise some banks on a temporary basis to fix the financial system.

The birth of the shareholder value movement is commonly traced to a speech that Mr Welch gave at New York’s Pierre hotel in 1981, shortly after taking the helm at GE.

In the speech, titled “Growing Fast in a Slow-Growth Economy”, Mr Welch did not mention the term but outlined his beliefs in selling underperforming businesses and cutting costs to increase profits faster than global economic growth.

GE “will be the locomotive pulling the GNP, not the caboose following it”, he was quoted as saying.

Mr Welch last week said he never meant to suggest boosting a company’s share price should be the main goal of executives.

“It is a dumb idea,” he said. “The idea that shareholder value is a strategy is insane. It is the product of your combined efforts – from the management to the employees”.

FT.com / Companies / Industrials - Welch condemns share price focus

this appeared in the main paper this morning--i think it's linked to the future of capitalism page as well, but in case it's not, i've pasted it here.

this is interesting for several reasons:

first it amounts to a wholesale rejection of one of the basic tenants of milton friedman's view of what a corporation does. so it cuts to the heart of one of the central ways of thinking and acting that's come to characterize neoliberalism. thing is that neoliberalism was both a general ideology--a set of basic assumptions about markets and so forth---and a set of particular understandings within these general views concerning priorities (defining variables, setting up relations between them and providing weights that enable these relations to function dynamically are all aspects of ideology---and if you think about it, the translation for static relations to assumptions that can function dynamically is central, without that, an ideology is just a bunch of sentences on paper).

so in this case, what's being thrown out the window is the exclusive orientation of shareholder returns as *the* guage of corporate performance. not only is it being thrown out the window, but on the way out it's labelled insane, not a strategy.

what's this cut to?
it's a rejection of the notion that a firm can be understood through it's stock alone---on the basis of its quarterly balance sheets alone---which is in turn a rejection of one of the main illusions that neoliberalism generated, which is that capital is autonomous and that wealth is generated by the circulation of capital. this runs in two directions: first toward a reinsertion of the social functions and responsiblities associated with value creation, which is now relinked to what a firm does in the world--what it produces. secondly, it links to a the obvious argument that in order to be successful, firms have to be able to think in longer term ways about what they're doing. neoliberal assumptions opened onto the shortest of short term thinking, making strategy very difficult except insofar as it was maximizing shareholder returns.

this thinking has ben fundamental to the modes of operation in the financial sector and thinking about it goes a long way toward explaining how it was possible for i-banks and others to get to tightly involved with derivatives.

i think welch is correct in characterizing this viewpoint on capitalist firms--and capitalism more generally--as insane.

but think about how deeply this cuts into the socio-economic ideology that's been dominant in the united states since the reagan period. think about who's talking in this article, what his role was in the legitimation of this nutty ideology. and then you start to get an idea of just how far and how fast the crumbling is moving.

what do you make of this?

03-12-2009, 04:54 PM	#1 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	financial times' "future of capitalism" In depth coverage of The Future of Capitalism from the Financial Times the financial times has started a series on the future of capitalism, which they seem to want happen as a staging space for debates about quite fundamental issues that have emerged over the past months (for many folk--for others these are basic problems that are not suddenly surfacing--though the way in which this is happening and the speed of it is surprising)..you would think that in a situation such as this, in which very basic problems have come to the fore, in which older procedures are not applicable because to geography of capitalism has fundamentally changed away from the nation-state based forms that were dominant through the 1970s, in which basic political questions--on the order of who are we and what do we do and what does it mean to live a good life and what is a good society and how do we get there--are on the table as they've not been for a long time---you'd think that in such a context there'd be a debate--you know, a serious debate, in which descriptions were elaborated and pulled apart, alternatives outlined and discussed, the kind of thing democracy is supposed to be about. not surprisingly, in the top-down pseudo-democracy of the united states with it's rigidly short-term press and reactionary lingua franca, nothing like that has really happened. so it's interesting that the financial times has decided to set this into motion and to do so on the basis of a quite good sequence of pieces that outline the situation we're in. i think this is separate from the main paper in that it's open access. i think it'd be interesting to have a discussion here about the discussion there, maybe use this as a way of posing questions and talking in a maybe non-adversarial way about what is happening, what should be done, what goals are important and so forth. if you look at the lead piece, the critique it outlines of american-style "free market" ideology is far more comprehensive than anything you see in the states--and this from a relatively conservative paper--but a sane conservative paper. a sane conservative position would see accurate information as important and would be flexible in the kinds of arguments about that data developed and open-minded about the conclusions reached--because the idea is to maintain something like the existing order, but modified, made more inclusive and functional. it is good to have sane conservative viewpoints because in there can be and should be disagreements about how to interpret information about the world--but on the basis of good information. so the paper is talking about opening the space up to a wide range of viewpoints. i think this is a most interesting development, and something that people in the states should read and think about not only for what's presented, but also as an indication of the degenerate state of the american press, it's narrowness. anyway, read around and post stuff concerning what you find interesting. point out things to others in the community that might be of interest to them. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

03-12-2009, 05:14 PM	#2 (permalink)
The_Dunedan Junkie	Thanks for the tip, RB. Need to check this out...