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  3. The spectacular collapse of so many big financial firms during the crisis of

The spectacular collapse of so many big financial firms during the crisis of

游客2023-12-12  30
问题     The spectacular collapse of so many big financial firms during the crisis of 2008 has provided new evidence for the belief that stockmarket capitalism is dangerously short-termist. After all, shareholders in publicly traded financial institutions cheered them on as they boosted their short-term profits and share prices by taking risky bets with enormous amounts of borrowed money. Those bets, it turns out, did terrible damage in the longer term, to the firms and their shareholders as well as to the economy as a whole. Shareholders can no longer with a straight face cite the efficient-market hypothesis as evidence that rising share prices are always evidence of better prospects, rather than of an unsustainable bubble.
    If the stockmarket can get wildly out of whack in the short run, companies and investors that base their decisions solely on passing movements in share prices should not be surprised if they pay a penalty over the long term. But what can be done to encourage a longer-term perspective? One idea that is increasingly touted as a solution is to give those investors who keep hold of their shares for a decent length of time more say over the management of a company than mere interlopers hoping to make a quick buck. Shareholders of longer tenure could get extra voting rights, say, or new ones could be barred from voting for a spell.
    An advisory committee in the Netherlands has proposed loyalty bonuses for long-term shareholders, such as increased dividends or additional voting rights after holding a share for four years. Likewise, Britain’s minister for financial services, Paul Myners.has suggested that short-term holders of shares should have inferior voting rights.
    The theory behind these proposals is that those who hold shares longer are more likely to behave like owners than those who trade frequently to bet on short-term movements in prices. Disenfranchising the punters would not only give investors an incentive to hang onto their shares for longer, the argument runs, but would also encourage those with voting rights to use them, as they would know their votes would be more likely to count in board elections and so forth.
    Would it work? Happily, an experiment in dual classes of shareholders has long been under way in France, where shares often gain double voting rights after being held for a specified period usually two years, although sometimes as long as ten. A recent paper, "Disclosure and Minority Expropriation:A Study of French Listed Firms", by Chiraz Ben Ali, an economist at the University of Paris Dauphine, found that the main impact of the dual-class structure was to increase the exploitation of minority shareholders (which tended to own the shares with weaker voting rights) by the controlling majority. Accounting practices, for example, tend to be much less transparent. Admittedly, France’s feeble safeguards for minority shareholders may be partly responsible for this result—but at the very least that suggests that extra voting rights are no cure-all.
    Equally, there is some evidence, albeit not conclusive, that short-term shareholders from activist hedge funds and the like can improve the performance of poorly run companies through brief campaigns to improve their strategy or management. As Colin Melvin, the boss of Hermes Equity Ownership Services, an advisory firm with activist leanings, points out, "Disproportionate voting rights can (and often do) serve to insulate management and make it less accountable to shareholders."In short, the length of time that an investor holds a share does not tell you a lot about how much interest he will take in the management of the firm concerned. Many long-term index investors hold shares for years without taking the slightest interest in how the firms they invest in are run, let alone doing anything to improve matters. There is also a moral argument, of course, against depriving property-owners of their rights, no matter how seldom they make use of them.
    The real issue is not how to encourage investors to keep hold of their shares for longer, but how to encourage more of them to take their duties as owners seriously, irrespective of the length of their tenure. Instead of creating multiple classes of shareholders, governments and regulators may want to think about how they define fiduciary duties in the financial realm. Better yet, the investing public, whose retirement savings have atrophied in the financial crisis thanks in part to the short-term way in which they were invested, may sort things out themselves, by demanding a longer-term perspective from the pension and mutual funds that they have entrusted with their money. [br] The author believes that the dual-class structure in France is
选项 A、an overall solution.
B、a complete failure.
C、a great success.
D、still in doubt.
答案 D
解析 推断题。由题干中的dual-class structure定位至第五段。第三句指出双阶层股东实验的结果“found that the main impact of the dual-class structure was to increase the exploitation of minorityshareholders(which tended to own the shares with weaker voting rights)by the controlling majori-ty”，即掌握大权的多数股东更变本加厉地利用弱势股东。末句进一步说明“at the very least that sug-gests that extra voting rights are no cure-all”，说明作者对dual-class structure的效用存在质疑，故[D]为答案。
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