Big corporations are not what we think they are, Brian Easton says

This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.

John Kay has been widely described as ‘one of the greatest economists of our time’.

He is well grounded in economic theory and has taught it. He is rich with practical experience, both as a consultant and a corporate director, which he melds shrewdly with the theory. He writes precisely and charmingly. And he is not constrained by the inertia of the conventional wisdom. I particularly liked his books on Obliquity, Other People’s Money and Radical Uncertainty (the latter he wrote with Mervyn King) where he pushes economists’ thinking forward– the conventional wisdom will eventually follow.

His latest book, The Corporation in the 21st Century, is even more challenging. A warning though. The publishers subtitle, ‘Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong’, is misleading. Kay is explicit that he is writing about mega-corporations rather than conventional businesses. The standard paradigm still applies for most of those we know, work for and purchase from. The book, however, makes a compelling case that there is evolving a quite different sort of business, typically associated with products we may love, but whose producers we hate.

That is almost the title of the book’s first chapter which, initially, I found had a strange theme. Kay cites a recent legal case in which an investor sued Goldman Sachs for not following its ethics and values statement which begins ‘our client interests always come first’. The investment bank defended its case in court by arguing that the code was puffery and that no reasonable person would regard it as a statement of fact on which they might rely. The argument was supported by the US Chamber of Commerce and various other business peak associations. The US Supreme Court sided with the argument. Apparently, you should not trust what businesses tell you. Kay cites other instances with similar conclusions. 

(Kay does not explore the common notion that a successful economy depends on trust, although he has an acerbic ‘the 2024 meeting at Davos adopted its theme “Rebuilding Trust”. Well it might.’ Perhaps that will be in his next (fourteenth) book.)

The purpose of the opening chapter seems not only to express moral outrage, but also to frame the book: don’t believe what business tells you. What then are you to believe? Who then are you to believe?

Kay’s book is so rich in insights and examples that it is difficult to summarise. Basically, his message is that the features of corporations we are familiar with are no longer dominant. The archetypal business of the Industrial Revolution was a steelworks or a textile mill. Subsequently, the model was extended to embrace new technologies such as automobile production.

However, business went beyond that, nicely illustrated by the evolution of General Motors, which transformed from a company which made cars to a finance corporation which used its cars to secure its lending to consumers.

This rising role of finance in the modern economy is one of the major transformations of the modern era. Kay cites the case of the Halifax Building Society, once the largest mortgage lender in the world, whose board he was on – he left before it collapsed. For more than a hundred years it was a mutually owned organisation. It was converted to a shareholders’ company, became merged with the Bank of Scotland and crashed with it in 2008 under the impact of bad loans and inept money market trading. (One employee was fined £500,000 for reckless conduct.)  Kay thinks the rot set in before the demutualisation saying:

“I trace the beginning of the decline to an earlier board decision to establish Treasury, which managed day-to-day cash balances as a profit centre in its own right. ... Trading in short-term money market instruments is essentially a zero-sum game – one party’s gain is another’s loss. So what was the source of the trading profits that not just our company, but every company in this business, claimed to make? The experienced bankers would shake their heads at this naivety. If they deigned to answer the question at all, it was to say that our traders were uniquely perceptive and prescient, although it was difficult to remain convinced of that once you had met them. The fantasy that sustainable earnings could be achieved through a sleight of hand was dispelled by the 2008 crisis – and was a principal cause of it.”

So the financial gains were a kind of Ponzi scheme in which the traders used a valuation of their assets unconnected with tangible assets or the actual future flow of income to give the impression that they were all making money. It came crashing down in 2008. But we never learn and, no doubt, the same thing is happening today. Mind you, those involved in the dealing make a mint during the boom, which is ultimately paid by the losses suffered by depositors, shareholders and taxpayers when the crash occurs.

When will the next crash happen? I can’t tell you. Dornbusch's Law states that crises ‘take longer to arrive than you think, but then happen faster than you thought’.

Yet we are only halfway through the book (and have already skipped a lot of interesting ideas). Its second half moves on to explore another of Kay’s central themes. ‘The value of production today lies in the ideas rather than the stuff – think of pharmaceuticals or smartphones.’

A startling illustration is Amazon, a two-trillion-dollar company, which reports holding assets which are less than a quarter of that. Most of its buildings and the like are leased property which it does not own. ‘The key point is that Amazon has virtually no [tangible] assets akin to the Carron ironworks, the rail line from London to Bristol or Henry Ford’s River Rouge complex.’ Most of the limited assets its owns are financial. Trillion-dollar Apple has a similar story. It does not make computers, distribute them or sell them. It coordinates these activities.

Kay argues these companies are more typical of the modern mega-corporation. The core ideas in his book – collective intelligence, radical uncertainty, disciplined pluralism, relation contracts and the mediating hierarchy – lead to a quite different account of the organisation of the firm from how the standard economic theories and the law characterise it.

That discussion is for another venue. In fact, this book is a work-in-progress. It will take us a long time to work out its implications. Sometimes he gives the impression he may not fully understand himself. That is the nature of revolutionary tracts.

The concluding chapter, ‘After Capitalism’, is an indication of just how revolutionary Kay’s thinking is. I am not sure that is the right way to think about this era. Capitalism has transmuted greatly in the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution.

Observe that ‘capital’ has two different meanings. Kay is pointing out that in the evolving era, physical capital appears to be less significant. But financial capital remains significant, as this book and some of his earlier ones argue. Symbolically, Trump’s cabinet is stacked with billionaires.

And if financial capital remains politically powerful – the golden rule of those who have the gold make the rules – what if it is all a Ponzi system? Gee willikers.

*Brian Easton, an independent scholar, is an economist, social statistician, public policy analyst and historian. He was the Listener economic columnist from 1978 to 2014. This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.