Who Needs Shareholders?

Doug Henwood:

In Wall Street, I argued (among other things)

• shareholders provide little or no money to the companies whose stock they own, and rarely have
• in fact, since the early 1980s, the flow of cash has mostly gone in the reverse direction, from companies to shareholders
• stock prices are often noisy and even systematically wrong, so therefore provide no good evidence on how well managers are running firms
• shareholders’ interests are very narrowly selfish, usually at odds with workers, communities, and the broader society
• so, basically, who needs them?

Read the whole thing.