What matters is a) institutional shareholders (pension funds, investment trusts, etc.) who can actually amass sufficient power to hamstring the company (whether by short-termist outlooks, outright looting or simply making decisions that they are not competent to make). And b) creditors who are sufficiently big to do the same thing.

I actually think that this may be the mechanism I was looking for earlier: Between WWII and Ronnie Raygun, the investment trusts were fairly well suppressed, and the large banking consortiums were spayed and neutered.

With deregulation of the financial sector and the privatisation of pensions, money markets saw a rise of large, organised shareholders and large, organised creditors, who, however, did not have any idea about how to actually run the companies they were investing in/lending to. So they looted them instead - whether by accident or design.

This led to a breakdown of intra-corporate solidarity - a sense that with every man for himself, the only sensible thing to do was to strip as many assets as one could carry and leg it with the proceeds before anybody got wise to your operation.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.