A Ponzi Scheme of Promises

Five years after the Business Roundtable ‘redefined’ the purpose of the corporation, has anything changed?

by Adam M. Lowenstein September 17, 2024

Steve Pearlstein was eating Honey Bunches of Oats when Jamie Dimon called. “That was the stupidest fucking column I’ve ever read!” Dimon announced when Pearlstein picked up the phone early one morning in June 2018.

“Wow, good morning, Jamie. Nice to hear from you,” Pearlstein, a longtime Washington Post columnist, replied.

The Pearlstein column in question had started with praise for an op-ed that Dimon, CEO of the mega-bank JPMorgan Chase, had written the day before with the iconic investor Warren Buffett, urging publicly traded companies to stop publishing forecasts every three months showing how much profit they expected to pay out to their shareholders. The business leaders argued that quarterly earnings estimates drive companies “to an unhealthy focus on short-term profits at the expense of long-term strategy, growth and sustainability.”
SNIP
CEOs weren’t actually promising a new way of doing business, but simply a new way of talking about doing business.

That’s what set Dimon off that morning. “He started explaining why I was full of shit,” Pearlstein recalled when we spoke last year. While he and Dimon weren’t close, they were familiar enough that Pearlstein understood that the CEO’s comments were tongue-in-cheek, not hostile. But he also knew that Dimon meant what he said.
https://prospect.org/power/2024-09-17-ponzi-scheme-of-promises/