Authors:

  • John C. Coates

Excerpt

2024, Paper: "This essay outlines foundations of the current moment facing corporations and politics, which I have characterized as a new “problem of twelve”—that is, the concentration of power in the hands of a small number of index and private equity fund spon sors.1 Through the middle of the twentieth century, public compa nies dominated the U.S. economy and government. They owed their dominance to having been socially legitimated coming out of the Great Depression, a legitimation built on their affirmative war efforts and on the negative constraints of securities law, pro gressive taxation, labor unions, and operational regulation. From 1970 on, however, they changed and were dramatically changed by politics and economics. American corporate leaders used poli tics to liquidate most of their New Deal constraints, simplifying governance of public companies, only to face a new political con straint in the form of the institutional investors, and new eco nomic constraints in the form of globalization, automation and the “technology” of hostile takeovers and private equity."