While John K. Galbraith worried in the new industrial state (1967) of taking power within companies by managers, the last twenty years have been marked by a return in force of capital holders in the business management bodies. Corporate governance is regularly presented as an explanatory factor in the historic financial crisis in the world today. The speakers of this round table therefore register in the immediate news by questioning the “ Supremacy of shareholders ».
The conference video is available on the site of the economy days
Class = “framing”>
Do shareholders act only in the short term ? Have we really assisted an unprecedented deformation of the sharing of added value in favor of capital in recent years ? Do hedge funds lead, by applying a purely financial logic, to increasing complexification and abstraction of the business world ? Do they play, on the contrary, the role of “ Pilot fish “, By revealing the first information on the state of health of companies necessary for an optimal allocation of resources ?
The speakers are mostly finance practitioners. Their interventions emerge a great diversity of the time horizons of investors, and, in corollary, roles assigned to funders. If the long -term investor is readily sees as an accompanist for entrepreneurs, the owner of Hedge Fund considers investing in a risk profile more than in a company.
The role of governance rules in the convergence of the interests of the various stakeholders in the company (shareholders, managers, employees), the objectives to be set to the boards of directors as well as the place to be given to employees in the governing bodies have also been widely discussed. We have thus seen the question of the role of ethics in finance and corporate governance, without a consensus being able to really emerge.