John C. Bogle Quotes
I believe Washington should be a more active participant focusing on the issue of why corporate shareholders and mutual fund shareholders are not given fair treatment by corporate management and mutual fund management. We need to develop a national standard of fiduciary duty to ensure that these agents, if you will, are adequately representing the principles - pension beneficiaries and mutual fund shareholders - whom they are duty bound to serve.
Greenspan and some others assumed that the shareholders and the executives who ran the financial institutions had the same vested interests. But the executives had disconnected themselves from the fate of the shareholders, by having Golden Parachutes to protect the executives even if the business failed and they were fired. And they got their bonuses immediately so by the time the authorities and the shareholders discovered that the profits the bonuses were paid for were illusory, the bonus money was safely stored in a secret offshore bank. But if things went wrong, there was always the play of getting a government bailout which would keep the executives getting their huge bonuses and keep the shareholders from losing their money as the taxpayers covered most of the losses.
Corporate CEO pay had traditionally been 5-15 times the average wage for the company. But it had changed to where in banks and financial companies the CEO pay was often 100-1000 times the average salary. This became a major political issue after the 2008 Meltdown. During the Great Recession some CEOs who had led the company to huge losses and then had to take government money to bail them out and prevent bankruptcy, took multimillion dollar salaries and huge bonuses while average salaries had gone down. There was a move for government to regulate CEO salaries. Macke argued for the position that would finally be taken.
Greenspan accepted this as many other economists and financial regulators did. What they did not take into account was the incredible greed of many of the financial executive who were betting with their customers money, If the bet was right they, the shareholders and the customers all made out very well as they were highly leveraged. If the bet was wrong, the shareholders and customers lost a lot, and the financial executives only made their multimillion dollar salaries and bonuses (Many were actually were guaranteed their bonuses even if they put the company into bankruptcy.) Worse, they earned their money when they made their sales or earnings targets, but when the securities they bought went sour, even if the company had no funds left, the. It was “heads we all win and tails only I win.” The vested interests between the financial company executives, the shareholders, and the clients were divergent, and the customer was at the bottom of the money pole.
Note the difference in standards that existed at the beginning of the 20th century. The Wall Street Journal was offended because corporations had paid agents in labor unions, legislatures and political parties. A century later it was common for corporations to have many lobbyists (overt and covert) in legislatures,. They had key representatives in political parties and gave the parties huge fiscal and service contributions and not only had their paid agents in labor unions but often sometimes paid the officers of the unions. The morality of 1904 seems almost quaint.
Corporations were not common at the time. The corporations of the day like large corporations today had directors and managers who were not the principle owners. There was deep suspicion that these professional managers would not watch over the money of the corporation with the same degree of vigilance as would the owner manager. The same problem exists today when the economic vested interest of the managers and the shareholders do not always coincide. Various bonus schemes have been created to ameliorate the problem, but as the meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession demonstrated, many managers would make ruinous decisions for the corporation as they could get large bonuses. “Copartnery” is an older English term for “partnership.”
John Clifton "Jack" Bogle was an American investor, business magnate, and philanthropist. He was the founder and chief executive of The Vanguard Group, and is credited with creating the first index fund. An avid investor and money manager himself, he preached investment over speculation, long-term patience over short-term action, and reducing broker fees as much as possible. The ideal investment vehicle for Bogle was a low-cost index fund held over a period of a lifetime with dividends reinvested and purchased with dollar cost averaging.
