Corporategovernance
Nothing new, but always nice to emphasize. Booz & Co.’s Strategy & Business has a summary of a recent paper on CEO compensation. It’s public knowledge that it has skyrocketed in the last 20 years or so, but this paper searches for a driver – and finds it in “compensation benchmarking”. You could also call it “The grass is always greener” effect.
The August 2010 issue of Capital Aberto magazine has an article (in English) about the new UK Stewardship Code, designed to (take a deep breath) “enhance the quality of engagement between institutional investors and companies to help improve long-term returns to shareholders and the efficient exercise of governance responsibilities by setting out good practice on engagement with investee companies to which the FRC believes institutional investors should aspire.” Our partner and Head of Investor Relations, Elsen Carvalho, was interviewed and shared our take on the code.
This 2008 article discusses red flags for Board members trying to detect fraud. For us the article doesn’t give nearly enough emphasis to incentives, but to correct that we’re linking to our Q4 2008 report excerpts. It’s vital to remember that one shouldn’t rely on checklist approaches to CG, fraud, stock research and pretty much anything else involving “systems” that are far from simple.
A Harvard researcher says that Brazilian CG of about 100 years ago could teach the current-day US (and others) many lessons. What’s perhaps most interesting and thought-provoking: the provisions came from the companies themselves and surpassed – by far – the legal requirements at the time. We’re reminded of Saraiva, which instituted a tag-along provision long before the law demanded it.
A Moody’s study shows that bank Boards have seen some shuffling and that more “financial expertise” was added. The FT argues that some banks with the “worst” boards in terms of financial experience actually did pretty well, and notes other apparently strange occurrences – for instance, Goldman Sachs has a CEO who’s also chairman and yet the bank has done pretty well in the crisis… We’ll never get tired of saying this: dump the checklist approach to CG. Actually, dump the checklist approach to anything.
There’s lots of interesting content in Amazon.com’s launch page for “No One Would Listen”, a book by the main whistleblower in the Bernie Madoff saga. The timeline in particular is very impressive: it shows that it took ten years to uncover the mess – nine since the first contact with the SEC – by which time the problem was irreversible. And that’s far from the only case, which begs a question… How do we justify still having institutions supposed to keep watch so unready and unwilling to investigate red flags?
God has spoken, go out and read it. The core is dedicated to welcoming and explaining BRK to its new shareholders acquired through BNSF, so no big news. Buffett complains more about the media and investments analysts, on how they distort things, causing losses to the less diligent and recommends that everybody form their own knowledge base and opinion. Hope he lives to see that happening, but we sincerely doubt it.
In the 1st Buysiders article inspired by a reader’s suggestion, we’d like to propose “anti-portfolios”. It’s a vital lesson in humility: our activity involves a certain degree of failure, of missed or simply wrong ideas. Recognizing that we are going to make mistakes over time is extremely important in order to mitigate risk as we define it (the permanent loss of capital). The objective here is to insist, once again, that price is the ultimate measure. (…) After you’ve done all the homework, you still have to demand a price that implies a large margin of safety – and keep analyzing the position everyday with the same skepticism you had before you bought it.
They took questions from Columbia grad students and the event was broadcast live by CNBC. It has an eerie feel to it – with the whole “must keep spirits high” approach. That said, both men think in the long term (15+ years) and it’s always interesting to be reminded of some basic concepts.
Part 2 of the excerpts from our Q4 2008 report. In Part 1, we introduced and exemplified the theme of the structural fragility of incentive systems via two texts, “Own Goal” and “Dolus Bonus”. In this text, we present the core of our reflection on the subject in order to highlight the importance of raising our moral critical standards.
Read more about IP report excerpts, vol. 4: Moral diligence (part 2)
