poetry, and you, and solitude

So, if margins are high but investment is low, what have companies done with their profits? Following the money leads us directly to shareholders. [...] corporations have largely returned profits to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buy-backs. Having averaged 10-20 per cent in the 1970s, the percentage of cash flow returned to shareholders has remained above 30, and sometimes substantially more than that for most of the past thirty years, although it dipped during the tech boom in the early 1990s when companies were investing. What emerges from the evidence presented so far is that, just like finance, the financialization of the productive sector extracts value - objectively, rent. But not only in the productive sector. In recent years a wide range of businesses in the UK, from social providers like care homes to utilities such as water, both of which had previously been regarded as steady and unexciting investments, have been subject to financial engineering by new owners, often PE firms. The result is a transformation of public goods into private goods. Financialization has a long arm. It reaches into society as well as the economy, and despite claims that its encroachment into the productive economy is a solution to issues such as average earnings, skills and inequality, the evidence is not encouraging. As John Bogle has noted: 'The highest-earning 0.01 per cent of U.S. families (150,000 in number), for example, now receives 10 per cent of all of the income earned by the remaining 150 million families, three times the 3 to 4 per cent share that prevailed from 1945 to 1980. It is no secret that about 35,000 of those families have made their fortunes on Wall Street.'

acrylic, canvas 40*50 cm «Lighthouse of the Northern Sunset» 2025