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Cambridge District, Reino Unido
Is the "Age of Finance" drawing to a close? Sandy Jacoby thinks that it might be.1 Straws in the wind include the U-S, Business Roundtable's 2019 statement of corporate purpose, rejecting, in plain view, the logic of shareholder primacy.2 This was in part a response, he suggests, to a series of contemporaneous legislative initiatives on matters ranging from share buybacks, worker directors and union organizing rights.3 In a deadlocked Congress, none of these came close to being enacted, but they signal a change in the political climate around corporate governance.
Jacoby's focus is confined to the United States, but there are parallel developments elsewhere. Corporate governance reform is on the European Union's policy agenda following the publication of a study on "directors' duties and sustainable corporate governance" in July 20204 and a proposal for a directive on corporate sustainability reporting.5 Even the United Kingdom, which has arguably the most shareholder-centric regime of any developed economy, made a move in the same direction, amending its Corporate Governance Code in 2018 to nudge listed companies towards appointing a single worker director,6 although, characteristically for the United Kindgom's model of "gentlemanly capitalism," this remains optional in the final analysis.7 Towards the end of his account, Jacoby makes a reference to the Covid19 pandemic, which was presumably just beginning as the book went to press.8 As the pandemic has unfolded, it has indeed turned out to have implications for the governance of finance, and of labor. In several countries, limits were placed on dividends and buybacks by banks and financial institutions (although these were later withdrawn, the justification being that fears of financial instability had abated by the summer of 2021).9 Across mainland Europe, wage furlough schemes were combined with restrictions on collective redundancies, in several cases reversing the effects of deregulatory measures enacted in the previous decade.10 There is currently much discussion of a "great resignation" and of a revival of bargaining power for labor.
