A defining moment   It may be that we are living a defining moment for the future of capitalism and for humanity. For the last 200 years entrepreneurial prowess enabled by financial capital has powered a long surge of economic growth. Over the major innovation cycles, the capitalist system has been resilient enough to absorb the effects of the crashes caused by pure speculation and turn them to its advantage. Production capital took the lead over financial capital and real value over paper value, as Carolta Perez has so brilliantly demonstrated.   Fast forward to today, and the picture is not so happy. Financial capital is in the driving seat. Eight years on, the world […]

The devastating effects of overblown short-termism and profit maximization are increasingly recognized as key issues for our societies at large and their importance and urgency is felt by all stakeholders. There is a fundamental issue though – most commentators and experts would strongly agree on the diagnosis, but nobody has yet come up with a viable alternative model that would be broadly accepted.   The agency theory (as conceived by Jensen and Mecking) that spawned the shareholder value model conveys the illusion of a scientific type of approach; it provides a fact based analytical model to make rational investment decisions into corporations with clear indicators providing the basis for current and future performance assessment. It […]