Os incentivos do accionista, ou de quem de facto exerce os direitos accionistas, obedecem no caso dos gigantes de gestão de activos (asset managers), a leis (incentivos e interesses) muito diferentes das assumidas ou pressupostas nos estudos de corporate governance.
Assim pensa o economista Benjamin Braun. Em interessantíssimo artigo (disponível aqui), Eric Levitz fala do trabalho do economista Benjamin Braun (disponível aqui), que terá concluído que “the contemporary structure of corporate ownership is so novel and consequential as to mark a new era in economic history, the age of “asset-manager capitalism.”.
Alguns trechos do artigo de Eric Levitz no New York Magazine:
“Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think
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In the 21st century, however, pension funds have been superseded by a new breed of shareholder, the asset manager. Whereas pension funds pool the retirement savings of households, asset managers pool the holdings of pension funds, insurers, sovereign wealth funds, and myriad other investors. In other words, they’re huge.
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Making matters even weirder, contemporary capitalism’s dominant shareholders have no direct interest in the success or failure of the firms they own. (…) Asset managers make their money off of their clients’ fees, not their firms’ returns.
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American Airlines may benefit by undercutting Delta on price, but such competition would probably lower profit margins across the airline industry. And since American Airlines’ top shareholders also own every other airline, it is not in the interest of the company’s ownership for it to engage in competitive behavior.
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And yet this does not necessarily mean asset-manager capitalism has been bad for consumers.
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[I]f an entity owns every firm in every industry, the calculus changes: High prices in the airline industry reduce the profit margins of every corporation that needs to pay for business travel. The airline tycoon has an interest in collusion, but the universal owner has an interest in efficiency.
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More fundamentally, asset managers patently have less interest in the economic performance of any individual firm they own than that firm’s workers and managers do. After all, the latter’s job security and wage growth is contingent on their employer’s success. The top asset managers’ profits, by contrast, are barely impacted by the relative performance of any single one of their investments. As already discussed, it would actually be in BlackRock’s interest for
one of its firms to lose money if it did so in a manner that increased the stock market’s overall value.”.
