In the Media

By Katharina Pistor
The Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs in the US, announced this month that the era of primacy is over for shareholders' interests. Remarkably, this is less because of the content but because it reveals the mindset of corporate leaders. Apparently, the American CEOs believe that they can freely decide who they serve. But they are agents - not clients. Ergo, this decision is not theirs.


By Katharina Pistor
The fact that American CEOs think they can choose their own masters attests not just to their own sense of entitlement, but also to the state of corporate America, where power over globe-spanning business empires is concentrated in the hands of just a few men (and far fewer women). . . . By capturing the process to which they owe their own positions, American CEOs have made a mockery of shareholder control.