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The Vampiric Nature of “Stakeholder” Capitalism

21 Thursday Jul 2022

Posted by Nuetzel in Capitalism, Human Welfare

≈ 1 Comment

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Bank of America, Blackrock, Capital Markets, Consumer Surplus, David Henderson, Don Boudreaux, ESG Scores, Fiduciary Laws, George Will, Mark Joffe, Michael C. Jenner, Producer Surplus, Reservation Wage, Semantic Infiltration, Shareholder Value, Stakeholder Capitalism, Theory of the Firm, Virginia Postrel

When so-called “stakeholders” are in charge of a company, or when non-owner “stakeholders” receive deference to their various goals from management, the actual owners have been displaced and no longer have control. That represents a kind of taking in which managers are complicit, failing to keep proper vigilance in their duty to maximize value for shareholders.

Ceding control to stakeholders represents a severe dislocation in the principle-agent relationship between owners and corporate management. Virginia Postrel is on-point in her discussion of the failures of “stakeholder capitalism”, but she might as well just say that it isn’t capitalism at all! And she’d be right!

Stakeholder capitalism represents a “theory” of the firm that accepts an array of different goals that often stand in conflict. This is the key point raised by Postrel. She cites Michael C. Jenner’s 2010 paper on stakeholder theory in which he notes the impossibility of maximizing any single-valued objective in the presence of a multi-dimensional corporate objective function. Thus, stakeholder objectives nearly always subvert management’s most important responsibility: maximizing value for owners.

And just who are these “stakeholders”? The designation potentially includes just about anyone and everyone: managers, customers and potential customers, suppliers and potential suppliers, employees, the pool of potential job applicants, union organizers, regulators, community members and organizations, local governing bodies, “underserved” populations, anyone with a grievance, environmental activists, and the children of tomorrow. Sure, owners are part of the broad set of stakeholders as well, but as Jenner more or less noted, who’s got time to maximize profits in the face of the myriad “claims” on company resources by the larger, blood-sucking hoard?

George Will aptly refers to stakeholder capitalism as “parasitic progressivism”. In fact, in his opening sentence, he notes that the very term “stakeholder” is a form of semantic infiltration, whereby the innocent (and ignorant) adoption of the term is a gateway to accepting the agenda. Will also notes that management deference to stakeholders violates fiduciary laws intended to protect owners, which include worker pensions and 401(k)s, as well as small investor IRAs, charitable organizations, and insurance companies funding life insurance policies and annuities.

This behavior is not merely parasitic — it is truly vampiric. Once bitten by the woke zombie corpses of stakeholder capitalism, either from within the organization or without, the curse of this deadly economic philosophy spreads. Human resource organizations impose diversity, equity, and inclusion training, rules, and hiring practices on operations. Suppliers might be imposed upon to not only deliver valued inputs, but to do so in a way that pleases multiple stakeholders. Woke fund managers, upon whom the firm might rely for capital, will insist on actions that promote social and environmental “justice”. It can go on and on, and no amount of appeasement is ever sufficient.

Unfortunately, there really are activist investors — actual stockholders — who encourage this misguided philosophy. If the majority of a firm’s owners wish to be accountable to the whims of particular non-owner stakeholders, that’s their right. Other investors would be wise to sell their shares… fast! Wastrels and incompetents have blown many a great and small fortune over the years, but capital markets are well-equipped to punish them, and eventually they will. Get woke, go broke!

The best way for a firm to maximize its contribution to society is to do its job well. That task involves producing a good or service that is valued by customers. By doing it well and efficiently, shareholders, customers, employees and society all win. This is the magic of mutually beneficial trade! Produce something that customers value highly while being mindful of tradeoffs that allow resource costs to be minimized. In general, the customers extract surplus value; shareholders extract surplus value; suppliers extract surplus value; and employees extract a surplus value because they receive wages at least as high as the lowest “reservation” wages they’d find acceptable. Here are some comments from Don Boudreaux on this general point:

“… regardless of how well or poorly managers are at running their companies in ways that maximize share values, there’s every reason to believe that managers will be much less competent at running their companies in ways that adequately satisfy ‘stakeholder’ interests. Not only is the definition of ‘stakeholder’ inherently open-ended and ambiguous, even the most skilled managers have no way to know how to trade-off the well-being of one set of ‘stakeholders’ for that of another set.”

This is very nearly a restatement of Jenner’s conclusion, but Jenner’s applies even when managers know specifics about the tradeoffs. Generally they don’t! Remember too that the firm, its shareholders, suppliers, and its employees are all subject to taxes on their surplus values, so their contribution to society exceeds their own gain. Moreover, many firms are already regulated precisely because lawmakers believe government has an interest in protecting larger classes of “stakeholders”. But beyond meeting regulatory requirements, to further insist that firms devote less than their remaining energies and resources to doing their jobs well, and to ask them to focus instead on the varied interests of external parties, whomever they might be, is ultimately a prescription for social harm.

A monster child of stakeholder theory is so-called ESG scoring. ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance, and the scores are intended as “grades” for how well a firm is addressing these concerns. Proponents claim that high ESG’s are predictive of future returns, but that’s true only if lawmakers and regulators look upon these firms with favor and upon others with disfavor. ESG is basically a political tool. Otherwise, it is an economically illiterate notion foisted upon investors by political activists embedded in “woke” financial institutions like Blackrock and Bank of America. There be some real vampires! As David Henderson and Marc Joffe write, ESG fuels higher prices and obstructs economic growth. That’s because it formalizes the effort to serve “stakeholders”, thus raising the cost of actually producing and delivering the good or service one naturally presumes to be the firm’s primary mission. The shareholders pay the cost, as do customers and employees.

When I hear business people talk reverently about serving their “stakeholders” (and when I hear naive investment advisors wax glowingly about ESG scores), it sends up huge red flags. These individuals have lost sight of their valid objectives. They should be trying to run a business, not serving as a grab-bag for other interests. Serve your customers well and efficiently so as to maximize value for shareholders. Do so within the bounds of the law and ethics, but stick to your business mission and the parties to whom you are ultimately accountable!

ESG Scoring: Political Tool Disguised as Investment Guide

30 Wednesday Mar 2022

Posted by Nuetzel in Capital Markets, Corporatism, Environmental Fascism, Social Justice

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Access to Capital, Antitrust, Blackrock, Climate Action 100+, Corporatism, Diversity, Equity, ESG Fees, ESG Scores, Great Reset, Green Energy, Inclusion, John Cochrane, Mark Brnovich, Principal-Agent Problem, Renewable energy, Renewables, rent seeking, Shareholder Value, Social Justice, Stakeholder Capitalism, Sustainability, Too big to fail, Ukraine Invasion, Vladimir Putin, Woke Investors, Zero-Carbon

ESG scores are used to rate companies on “Environmental, Social, and Governance” criteria. The truth, however, is that ESGs are wholly subjective measures of company performance. There are many different ESG scores available, with no uniform standards for methodology, specific inputs, or weighting schemes. If you think quarterly earnings reports are manipulated, ESGs are an even more pliable tool for misleading investors. It is a market fad, and fund managers are using it as an excuse to charge higher fees to investors. But like any trending phenomenon, for a time, the focus on ESGs might feed-back positively to returns on favored companies. That won’t be sustainable, however, without legislative and regulatory cover, plus a little manipulative help from the ESG engineers and “Great Reset” propagandists.

It’s 100% Political, 0% Economic

ESGs are founded on prioritizing objectives that have little to do with shareholder value or any well-understood yardsticks of financial or operating performance. The demands on company resources for scoring highly on ESG are often nakedly political. This includes adoption of environmental goals such as fraudulent “zero carbon” impacts, the nebulous “sustainability” objective promoted by “green” activists, diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives, and support for activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

Concepts like “stakeholder value” are critical to the rationale for ESGs. “Stakeholders” can include employees, suppliers, and customers, as well as potential employees. suppliers, and customers. In other words, they can be just about anyone in the broader community, or more likely activists for “social change” whose interests have but the thinnest connection to the business’s productive activities. In essence, so-called stakeholder capitalism amounts to a ceding of control over corporate resources, and ultimately confiscation of wealth from equity owners.

Corporations have long engaged in various kinds of defensive actions, amounting to a modern-day trade in indulgences. No one will be upset about your gas-powered fleet if you buy enough carbon offsets, which just might neutralize the impact of the fleet on your ESG! On a more sinister level, ESG’s provide opportunities for cover against information that might be damaging to firms, such as the use of slave labor overseas. Flatter the right people, give to their causes, “partner” with them on pet initiatives, and your sins will be ignored and your ESG will climb! And ESGs are used in attempts to pacify leftist investors who see the corporation as a vessel for their own social objectives, quite apart from any mission it might have had as a productive enterprise.

Your ESG will shine if you do business that’s politically-favored, like renewable energy, despite its inefficiencies and significant environmental blemishes. But ESGs are not merely used to reward those anointed as virtuous by the Left. They are more forcefully used to punish firms in industries that are out of favor, or firms refusing to participate in buying off authoritarian crusaders. For example, you might be so berserk as to think fossil fuels and climate change represent imminent threats of catastrophe. Naturally, you’ll want to punish oil and gas producers. In fact, if you are in charge of ESG modeling, you might want to penalize almost any extraction industry, with certain exceptions: the massive extraction and disposal costs of renewables will pass without notice.

All these machinations occur despite the huge uncertainty surrounding flimsy, model-based predictions of warming and global catastrophe. Never mind that fossil fuels are still relied upon to provide for most of our energy needs and will be for some time to come, including base-load power generation when intermittency prevents renewables from meeting demand. The stability of the power grid depends upon the availability of carbon-based energy, which in fact is marvelously efficient. Yet the ESG crowd (not to mention the Biden Administration) seeks to drive up its cost, including the cost of capital, and these added costs fall most heavily on the poor.

ESG-guided efforts by activists to deny capital to certain segments of the energy sector may constitute antitrust violations. Some big players in the financial industry, who together manage trillions of dollars in investment funds, belong to an advocacy organization called Climate Action 100+. They coordinate on a mission to completely transform the energy industry via “green” investments and divestments of presumptively “dirty” concerns. These players and their clients have huge investments in green energy, and it is in their interest to provide cheap capital to those firms while denying capital to fossil fuel industries. As Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich writes at the link above, this is restraint of trade “hiding in plain sight”.

Manipulation

ESGs could be the mother of all principal-agent problems. Corporate CEOs, hired by ownership as stewards and managers of productive assets, are promoting these metrics and activities, which may not align with the interests of ownership. ESG’s are not standardized, and most users will have little insight into exactly how these “stakeholder” sausages are stuffed. In fact, much of the information used for ESGs is extremely ad hoc, not universally disclosed, and is often qualitative. The applicability of these scores to the universe of stocks, and their reliability in guiding investment decisions, is extremely questionable no matter what the investor’s objectives. And of course the models can be manipulated to produce scores that suit the preferences of money managers who have a stake in certain firms or industry segments, and who inflate their fees in exchange for ESG investment advice. And firms can certainly engage in deceptions that boost ESGs, as already discussed.

Like many cultural or consumer trends, investment trends can feed off themselves for a time. If there are enough “woke” investors, ESGs might well feed an unvirtuous cycle of stock purchases in which returns become positively correlated with wokeness. Such a divorce from business fundamentals will eventually take its toll on returns, especially when economic or other conditions present challenges, but that’s not the answer you’ll get from many stock pickers and investment pundits.

At the same time, there are ways in which the preoccupation with ESGs dovetails with the rents often sought in the political arena. Subsidies, for example, will be awarded to firms producing renewables. Politically favored firms are also likely to receive better regulatory treatment.

There are other ways in which firms engaging in wasteful activities can survive profitably, at least for a time. Monopoly power is one, and companies often develop a symbiosis with regulators that hampers smaller competitors. This is traditional rent-seeking corporatism in action, along with the “too-big-to-fail” regime. Sometimes sheer growth in demand for new technologies or networking potential helps to conceal waste. Hot opportunities can leave growing companies awash in cash, some of which will be burned in wasteful endeavors. ESG scoring offers them additional cover.

Cracks In the Edifice

John Cochrane notes a fundamental, long-term contradiction for those who invest based on ESGs: an influx of capital will tend to drive down returns in those firms and industries, while the returns on firms having low ESGs will be driven upward. Yet advocates claim you can invest for virtue and superior returns. That can’t outlast real market forces, especially as ESG efforts dilute any mission a firm might have as a productive enterprise.

Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has revealed other cracks in the ESG edifice. We now have parties arguing that defense stocks should be awarded ESG points! Also, that oil production by specific nations should be scored highly. There is also an awakening to the viability of nuclear power as an energy source. Then we have the problem of delivering on Biden’s promise to Europe of more liquified natural gas exports. That will be difficult given the way Biden has bludgeoned the industry, as well as the ESG conspiracy to deny it access to capital. Just watch the ESG hacks backpedal. Now, even the evangelists at Blackrock are wavering. To see the thread of supposed ESG consistency unravel would be enough to make you laugh if the entire conspiracy weren’t so grotesque.

Closing

The pretensions underlying “green” initiatives undertaken by large corporations are good mainly for virtue signaling, to collect public subsidies, and to earn better ESG scores. They are usually wasteful in a pure economic sense. The same is true of social justice and diversity initiatives, which can be perversely racist in their effects and undermine the rule of law.

Ultimately, we must recognize that the best contribution any producer can make to society is to create value for shareholders and customers by doing what it does well. The business world, however, has gone far astray in the direction of rank corporatism, and keep this in mind: any company supporting a sprawling HR department, pervasive diversity efforts, “sustainability” initiatives, and preoccupations with “stakeholder” outreach is distracted from its raison d’etre, its purpose as a business enterprise to produce something of value. It is probably captive to outside interests who have essentially commandeered management’s attention and shareholders’ resources.

When it comes to investing, I prefer absolute neutrality with respect to out-of-mission social goals. Sure, do no harm, but the focus should remain squarely on goals inherent in the creation of value for customers and shareholders.

Tragic Atlanta Shootings and The Drive To Divide

20 Saturday Mar 2021

Posted by Nuetzel in Critical Race Theory, racism

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Tags

Atlanta Shootings, Blackrock, Californians for Equal Rights, China Virus, Critical Race Theory, David Solomon, GoldmannSachs, JO Morgan, Model Minority Myth, President Trump, Pseudo-Reality, Robert Aaron Long, Sex Addiction, Uncle Tom, University of San Diego, Wells Fargo, Wenyuan Wu, White Adjacency, White Suoremacy

The shooting of eight people at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area last week has become a lightning rod for those who bemoan racism against Asians. Except that the shooting had absolutely nothing to do with racism! The killer, Robert Aaron Long, describes himself as deeply religious but a sex addict. He said his actions were retaliation against establishments that had tempted him. The victims included six women of Korean extraction and two whites, one of the latter a male who was apparently a passer-by. A Latino woman was injured.

Andrew Sullivan describes the adoption of a pseudo-reality by the media based on critical race theory: Asians have struggled against prejudice in the West. The killer was white and most of the victims were Asians. Ergo, white supremacy must lie at the heart of this monstrosity:

“Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate storiesabout the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti–Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the ‘ real’ motives. Today, the NYT ran yet another full-on critical theory piece disguised as news on how these murders are proof of structural racism and sexism — because some activists say they are.”

Make no mistake: there are racists against Asians in this country, as I discuss below, but this was the work of an individual unable to control his sex drive, deeply ashamed of it, and a psychopath to boot. Yet the urge to virtue signal is so strong that people who should know better immediately ascribed racist motives to the killer. Corporate America is only too eager to endorse the pseudo-reality: the CEO’s of Goldman Sachs, Blackrock, J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, and many other corporate leaders issued statements tying the Atlanta shootings to racism against Asians.

The Goldman CEO, David Solomon, posted a statement on LinkedIn (which I’m now unable to locate) that was interesting in several respects: it came shortly after the release of a damaging survey of junior bankers, not a few of whom are Asian, who complained of 100-hour work weeks and frequent verbal abuse by managers. Nevertheless, a number of Goldman employees, including a number of Asians, posted adoring responses to the post. One woman was indignant because she felt the shootings illustrated racism manifest in the stereotyping of Asian women as sex objects. Of course I know of men who seem particularly attracted to Asian women, but can that really be construed as racism? I’m not the least bit convinced.

Equally unconvincing are claims that obvious criticisms of the Chinese government are racist, or that they encourage violence against Chinese americans or people of Chinese extraction. That includes President Trump’s references to the “China virus”, as well as the ridiculous charges against Tom Smith, a law professor at the University of San Diego.

As I noted above, racism against Asians is real, but who harbors it? We know that a number of elite academic institutions are actively discriminating against Asians in their admissions practices, and critical race theorists are only too eager to ascribe the academic and economic success of Asians as “white adjacency”. In this context, they’ve also been willing to exploit Asians as a so-called “model minority” in something of a variation on “Uncle Tom” epithets. As for violent crimes against Asians, Andrew Sullivan provides some statistics at the link above. Asians are victimized by whites, blacks, Latinos, and other Asians, but blacks, who represent about 13% of the U.S. population, account for a disproportionately high 27.5% of violent crimes against Asians. Is that racism or mere criminal opportunism? Of course, the pattern is a legitimate area of inquiry.

I implore my Asian friends to reject the baited narrative that the Atlanta shootings were motivated by white racism. Let’s be honest about calling mental illness what it is, and naming things accurately when we see them. Here are some closing words from Wenyuan Wu, Executive Director of Californians for Equal Rights:

“Conflating an attack on Asian Americans with claims of ‘white supremacism’ and systemic racism is dangerous. It seeks to foster a victimhood mentality among all Americans of Asian descent, eroding social solidarity and trust. At a minimum, choking up all present and past injustices to racism, while proselytizing the model minority myth for Asians, is dishonest.”

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