Grantham: Capitalism has no sense of ethics or conscience

The following is excerpted from Jeremy Grantham’s latest GMO Quarterly Letter. To read the full letter, click here.

In the last 20 years, corporate ownership began to look odd. The nominal owners – stockholders – typically traded every few months and took on the part of institutions, with little or no interest in corporate affairs, with the result that corporate officers appeared to own the companies and behaved accordingly.

Stock option programs transferred ownership from shareholders to managers in giant dollops and were awarded on short-term results. One consequence of this was a distorted incentive that encouraged leverage and other forms of going for broke with other people’s money. Boards of Directors demonstrated little timely intervention and typically only found their claws in situations of complete disaster, when it was too late. Total remuneration in the U.S. for senior officers, unopposed by typical boards, rose as a percentage of the average worker’s pay from 40 times in Eisenhower’s era to over 600 times today, with no indication of any general improvement in talent.

Few rewards were carefully related to long-term results. Pretax income inequality rose in most countries and was offset by tax adjustments in very few. In the U.S., oddly, the tax changes accentuated the shift. Such an increase in inequality was caused by all of the benefits of the substantial productivity flowing to a few, while the average hour’s pay stayed unprecedentedly unchanged for 40 years! This risks making economic progress both slower and bumpier as the stressed average worker reaches for debt and then, in a crisis, is forced to retrench.

This far from exhaustive list is still impressively long but it seems to me to be basically business as usual, and most of it worse in the U.S. than in other capitalist countries. Scandinavian countries, for example, seem to struggle with their set of problems reasonably satisfactorily. Presumably, economists will slowly digest the lessons of the last few years and will develop realistic and useful theories. We can at least hope. Trial and error, reform, and common sense seem reasonably likely to be a match for all of these problems eventually. They are irritating and debilitating problems today but they will not bring us to our knees.

Capitalism has gone through a Darwinistic series of trials and errors, which still continues. For the time being, capitalism has tuned itself to rapid growth at almost any cost. Circumstances such as the hydrocarbon revolution and the ensuing population explosion have allowed for both high growth and high profit margins to sustain the growth. Sustained high margins have in turn trained capitalists – or corporate executives if you prefer – to set high hurdles for all investments. The 14% hurdle for discount rates that was considered a minimum in the late 1990s, for example, halves the future value of a dollar every 5 years, so that in 10 years today’s dollar is worth 25¢; in 20 years 6¢; and in 50 years one tenth of one cent! It is hardly surprising that any event out that far is ignored.

For example, let us say that a firm’s current actions are going to cost society at large a billion dollars’ worth of harm in 50 years. Further, let us agree that all of the costs will definitely be imposed on the company. The company would feel that pain today as equivalent to only a mere $1 million hit to earnings. Why should they care?

In contrast, the income of typical individuals is likely to compound at most at 1.5% a year, their risk-free investments at an imputed zero % (today’s 30-year bond minus inflation), and an equity investment at perhaps 4%, net of inflation and tax. To take the highest of these three rates, the billion dollar pain at a 4% discount rate is going to feel to the average citizen, who faces the bill in 50 years, not like $1 million, but like $100 million. And for some societal purposes, 4% real is far too high. Surely, for example, shouldn’t the value, and hence cost, of a child’s life in 50 years be identical to the value and cost today? The reader can easily see how a corporation’s outlook on potential future damage might be a painful mismatch with that of ordinary individuals and society at large. The consequences of this not only can be disastrous but probably will be.

To move from the problem of long time horizons to the short-term common good, it is quickly apparent that capitalism in general has no sense of ethics or conscience. Whatever the Supreme Court may think, it is not a person.

Why would a company give up a penny for the common good if it is not required to by enforced regulation or unless it looked like that penny might be returned with profit in the future because having a good image might be good for business? Ethical CEOs can drag a company along for a while, but this is an undependable and temporary fix. Ethical humans can also impose their will on corporations singly or en masse by withholding purchases or bestowing them, and companies can anticipate this and even influence it through clever brand advertising, “clean coal” being my favorite. But that is quite different from corporate altruism. Thus, we can roast our planet and firms may offer marvelous and profitable energy-saving equipment, but it will be for profit today, not planet saving tomorrow.

Jeremy Grantham is the chief investment strategist of GMO.