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Comment by yterdy | Hacker News Reader

Not quite. As GGP mentioned, the necessity of keeping stock prices (and property values, and anything else securitized) high so as to not impoverish pension funds, 401Ks, IRAs, etc., is real. That is, if you care about Silent, Boomer, and Gen X retirees - who invested, but didn't save - being able to cover their myriad outlays. Millennials and younger need not apply, of course; we're just never going to be able to retire (Or afford a house. Or...). You are right about one thing: "get rich and then dip" is the mantra. Not just for executives, but for the elder half-ish of Americans in general.

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>As GGP mentioned, the necessity of keeping stock prices (and property values, and anything else securitized) high so as to not impoverish pension funds, 401Ks, IRAs, etc., is real.

I'm confused about how your model of the economy works. It sounds like you believe CEOs are selfish and greedy when it comes to workers, but when it comes to pension funds, they keep stock prices high out of the goodness of their hearts?

If liquidpele's thesis is true, and executives are looking to "get rich and dip", "company be damned in the long run", then we would expect this to be reflected in the company's stock price in the long run. The stock price is essentially the fair market value of the company. And the American stock market has been performing very well for a good long while.

This entire comment thread strikes me as populist pitchfork-waving with little grounding in economic reality. Here's a question: If you're truly pessimistic about American companies, do you hold any short positions or put options? At the very least, are you overweighting non-American countries in your portfolio? And if so, which ones?

CEOs are employed by the board, the board is made of major stockholders, those are pensions funds and other investors mainly interested in stock prices. No need for conspiracy theories or pitchfork waving, it's just all working exactly how it's openly designed to.

If you were a major shareholder in a company, would you favor a CEO who ran it into the ground?

For short term profit that I can walk away with? That is very different from building long term value. Both are profit. One profits from creation and has long term recurring benefits, the other profits from extraction, which only happens once. Both building a fire and building a house profit from a supply of wood. But they are pretty different in terms of long term pay off.

If I am a faceless pension fund that is going to earn short term on this much better, and be free to walk away and do the same thing to another company?

Sure.

This is exactly the same playbook as with private equity - the point is to make the shareholders richer as fast as possible, and long-term strategies do not pay out as fast while possibly introducing longer term risks.

If I am a major shareholder, I would prefer a quick profit because I can then invest it somewhere else and have higher overall profits.

Please see the story of Jack Welch CEO of GE.

Can you elaborate? Wikipedia says Welch took GE from a market cap of $12 billion to $410 billion over the course of 20 years.

He destroyed the Company in the long run.

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/01/1101505691/short-term-profits...

You guys keep saying pension funds. Where are the sources that financialisation sucking us dry is because pension funds need to get seeded? We’re living in a time of record profits and ceo to worker pay ratio through the roof and you guys are implying pension funds, the little to last thing workers have, as the issue?

Gee I’m wondering what we should all be thinking and doing about those pension funds and who that would actually serve.

Y’all get that most of us don’t have pension funds, right? They’ve been gutted long time ago. Defined benefit to defined contribution ring any bells?

But yes, let’s fight against the other plebs that have things we don’t, let’s blame pension funds and not the plethora of other issues.

I tell ya, we’re funding pensions alright but it ain’t the teachers kind.

CEO pay is certainly way too high, I agree.

But look at any big corporation, take the CEO's total compensation and divide it by the number of employees. The CEO of IBM earns an obscene $16.5 million per year - but divide that by IBM's 288,300 employees and it's $60 per employee per year. Wal-mart's CEO makes $25.31 million, but it's only $12 per employee per year.

Even if we redistributed the CEO's entire salary to workers, $60/year isn't going to do much to close the gap between rich and poor.

This is quite an arbitrary metric.

I find GP's metric useful.

It helps address the question: wouldn't the company perform better if we did other things with that excess money?

>wouldn't the company perform better if we did other things with that excess money?

Of course. That's not what CEO pay/employee does, though; it trivializes the massive (over)compensation by putting it in seemingly-small terms. What we need to be analyzing CEO pay in terms of is 1) How much a person needs in order to live decently and with dignity in one's particular area, and 2) How much better than the "average" CEO any give one performs (to determine incentive pay). Certain entities, institutions, and groups have cartel-ized executive positions as a class and bid up their compensation, decoupled from real value.

Another view: $60/employee doesn't seem like a lot, but if you remove the employees making over the median, or $100k, or some other resaonable cut-off, something tells me that the lowest-paid employees would see a meaningful increase in their take-home. GGP is purposely being reductive in a way that makes rethinking the issue more silly than it actually is.

You aren't wrong, but it's not reasonable to hold such a strong opinion without experience. I spent 15 years working in high-tech manufacturing, at Sanmina, which - like many peers - also offshored the majority of capacity. What remains in the US is mostly manufacturing for regulated industry (military, medical).

Take a look at this, re institutional ownership: https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s.... 95% of outstanding stock is owned institutionally, which is pretty normal in manufacturing. For decades, this has been a core investment sector for pensions and other institutional funds, and remains so, even if it's just to balance investments in tech, biotech/pharma, retail/CPG, financial services, the military industrial complex and transportation. Moreover, if you attend quarterly results calls, you typically end up with a few analysts from banks and at least one from some pension fund, who ask questions. We young people may not care about pensions as almost none of us will have one, but they still exist and still influence large pieces of our economy.

Pension funds is shorthand for pension funds and other bulk investments for other people vehicles like BlackRock and Vanguard. A common complaint from people is that there's under ten entities that owns almost all of the major public firms. Matt Levine has very funny and informed takes on this sort of thing, ZeroHedge et al have conspiratorial ones, but it's a real thing.

Nope. CEO's tend to be on the board of each others companies, making sure that there is never any argument over CEO compensation.

Institutional shareholders with large portfolios care about stock performance for their market plays, not about the company.

And they happen to have large influence on choice of CEO and who said CEO is going to try to please.

> The stock price is essentially the fair market value of the company

That is something some people choose to believe to be true. The same way some people choose to believe that God (or a number of Gods) exist.

While there is a spike at buy-out it is still more or less true. Try to buy a company for far less than the stock market price and tell me how that works out for you.

you think the stock market works well? look up the fail to deliver rate, infinite liquidity of market makers, and how the SEC said themselves that 95% of retail trades are happening off lit markets in dark pool. Price discovery has been broken for a long time and without, there is no legitimate market.

IMO it's top vs bottom, not generation vs generation.

The vast majority of us are working class.

Intersectionality.

Saving is futile with a 3% loss on your money each year. Unless you invest it you are losing it.

FYI, your account might be shadow banned. I vouched for this comment, but most of yours are dead.

Investments come with risks. The trade-off of cash losing its value over time is that it’s relatively less risky. You split your assets into cash and investments to achieve an overall combined risk profile. In that sense, cash is just another investment with a certain risk-return ratio (even when the return is negative).

Your cash over time is guaranteed to lose almost all its value. While, if you invest in something, it could be even gold or silver, could be a house, could be a global market cap index fund, it holds more of its value than a fiat currency does. So no, fiat currencies lose everything and even with risks involved with other investments, the risks are still less than cash. Cash over time is one of the worst investments.

It depends on your time horizon. Over a period of say ten years, cash is unlikely to lose almost all of its value, whereas for stocks the likelihood can be higher. The stock market may crash (like it has in the past) at an inconvenient moment where you’ll then be happy to have some cash on hand.

In 10 years, at 3% inflation, cash loses about 26% of its value, and at 5% inflation, about 40% of its value.

Not "almost all", but that bucket is quite leaky.

It's precisely those investments which cause those losses. Those investments are nothing but roundabout ways to provide loans to people and businesses. Loans inject massive amounts of money into the economy. Massive money injections directly cause inflation by increasing the amount of money in circulation, inflating the money supply and devaluing the currency of anyone who didn't participate in the scam by saving money instead of investing it.

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