15 ms·

One have to remember why this was setup in the way it is, to protect the company forever. In Sweden during the 70-ties 80-ties the Social democrats was pushing

One have to remember why this was setup in the way it is, to protect the company forever. In Sweden during the 70-ties 80-ties the Social democrats was pushing a radical socialist agenda ('löntagarfonder') to take over companies by taxing profits and then buying shares with it, all controlled by trade unions. Result of these policies was that many companies left Sweden to protect itself (of course). IKEA, Tetra Pak and H&M to mention a few. These socialist policies was one of many breaches of the so called Swedish model that the Social democrats did during the 70-ties 80-ties. This was beginning of the end of the Social democratic era and they started to lose elections one after the other. These funds was later abolished by the next right wing government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_funds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_funds

akuji1993 9y ago
This sounds so obviously stupid I wonder why nobody stopped and said "You know, we might just make all these companies leave with stuff as ridiculous as this."
- lev99 9y ago
  In many socialist points of view companies do not provide value, they are viewed as rent seekers. Value = {Raw Resources} + {Labor} + {Tools used by labor}. Companies own the tools, and take a margin of value. If labor owned the tools they could remove that margin. This sounds like the world view used to design that policy.
  - namlem 9y ago
    Yeah, that's Marx's Labor Theory of Value. The problem is that it doesn't account for the value of risk. It's easy to look at companies making money and assume they're extracting value if you ignore all the failed attempts that outnumber the successes 5 to 1. Now, rent-seeking is still a problem and corporations are often guilty of it, but the idea that all profit is rent is ridiculous. Some of it is compensation for risk.
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  That's not a mindset any true socialist/communist politician operate with. Good of economy, long term economical prosperity whatnot. More like how to tax rich till they leave, blame them for all the failures of politicians and central planning inefficiencies and so on.
- fetbaffe 9y ago
  Socialism always is. That generation of social democrats was more of socialists than democrats and that was where it all went wrong, making their own party ideology to state ideology. Taking over private property in that way is nothing more than theft and a breach of fundamental principals in Swedish society and especially against the consensus agenda (see Saltsjöbadsavtalet). Social democrats kicked out the communist from the party in 1917 and by that becoming a democratic party and in 1921 heading their first government, but by this communism where basically back in fashion again.
- vec 9y ago
  A someone who is broadly sympathetic to the idea of labor ownership of the means of production, could I trouble you to explain what's so obvious about the stupidity of this plan? Taxes on corporate profits are generally seen as reasonable in the abstract, and they're common all over the world. I could see setting an unusually high tax rate being problematic, but that doesn't appear to be what happened. And it doesn't appear that the state was seizing anything. They were buying up shares off the public market. This doesn't seem more objectionable than any other hostile takeover. If a business owner wants to maintain control of their company then it's trivially easy for them to do so. All they have to do is not explicitly sell it, which is what an IPO is after all. And I'm having trouble seeing where the creeping socialism concerns come in. The end goal, according to the wikipedia page, was that the companies would be owned and operated by their own labor unions, which isn't an uncommon or inherently controversial corporate governance model. The state appears to have merely been facilitating the transfer. With perfect hindsight we can of course see that it didn't work out, but I doubt I would have been able to predict that in advance with any confidence. Would this have been fine if the state used a different taxing model? Would it have been okay if the labor unions managed to do it of their own initiative? Is it that broadening ownership of a corporation is inherently objectionable for some reason? What am I missing?
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    Labor running the company? This fails more often than it succeeds. Bread and circuses are the result, then bankruptcy. Indeed obvious without the use of hindsight.
    - vanderZwan 9y ago
      > Bread and circuses are the result I'm not interested in debating the merits or lack thereof of socialism as a system of government, but the "bread and circuses" thing applied to Roman citizens. Unless I was misinformed, the overlap between the people in the Roman empire who were citizens and the people in the Roman empire who were the labour force was very, very small.
      - 9y ago
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  It doesn't sound that obviously stupid to me. It's the stock purchase plan part of a 401k, where instead of the employee/employer-match coming before taxes, it comes from taxes. Either way it's tax incented, the difference is partly semantics. Giving those shares to trade unions instead of individuals makes it more like the classic pension system than the 401k, but the concepts are similar enough that it's quite possible to see the Swedish approach here as almost a direct forerunner to the 401k.
jernfrost 9y ago
As a Norwegian I keep getting surprised by things I learn about Sweden. Sweden seems to have been a lot more socialist than Norway. In some respect might still be. The housing system in Sweden sound more socialist than what we got in Norway today, judging from how a Swedish friend has explained it to me. However welfare benefits seems more generous in Norway. How sick people are dealt with in Sweden seems harsher. No pay the first days out of work, and maximum days sick decided by the government for different ailments etc.
- klipt 9y ago
  I guess Norway can fund more of its social benefits through oil money?
- fetbaffe 9y ago
  It is a mixed bag. In some aspects Sweden is more socialist and in other things Norway. But then, all government programs is not socialist by design, some is conservative other liberal. And I think that Norway is more conservative than Sweden. How to tell if a government program is socialist or not? Rule of thumb is if the labour union or any other part of the labour movement is in on it. 'Löntagarfonder' originated from the Swedish labour union LO, LO is the main funder of the Social democrats. Up to the 90-ties membership in LO included a forced membership in the Social democrats. Housing system is pure madness, rent is set by negotiation between the land lord and Hyresgästföreningen, historically a political ally to Social democrats! So in Norway you can surf to finn.no and find an available apartment within minutes. In Sweden, nope! One crazy thing I remember from Norway is that NRK can take money directly from your own bank account or contact your employer to take it from the salary if you don't pay the TV license ('kringkastingsavgift')!
  - ersii 9y ago
    > Housing system is pure madness, rent is set by negotiation between the land lord and Hyresgästföreningen, historically a political ally to Social democrats! Friendly reminder to not forget the stupid ass national (but regionally determined) rent control regulation. Oh, and the Planning and Construction law which most likely is the most tedious and single longest law in the Swedish law book. It's no wonder that you have to already rent an apartment, to rent an apartment in the Swedish cities and that Swedes get dumbfounded when you tell them you can get an apartment within days in other cities (although you'll have to pay more for it) around the world..
1337biz 9y ago
His anti-tax setup makes a lot more sense to me now. If I had build a company from nothing just to seen the government getting so close to stealing it away from me, I would also do my best to make sure they will benefit the least amount possible from it.
bearcobra 9y ago
Any ideas where I could find more details on H&Ms move? They appear to be listed in the Swedish stock exchange and headquartered in Stockholm so I’m curious how they ended up moving back.
- fetbaffe 9y ago
  H&M and Tetra Pak moved back to Sweden in the 90-ties after promises from the then current social democratic leader Ingvar Carlsson that they would never be introduced again. Source, Swedish https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_oktober-demonstrationerna#Bakgrund_till_demonstrationen https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_oktober-demonstrationerna#Ba...
- mongol 9y ago
  I believe that was not factually correct. See my comment elsewhere in the thread.
aomurphy 9y ago
I'm not Swedish, but I find this area relatively interesting. The idea is fairly straightforward: Sweden's model created low income inequality between the poor and the rich, but did not create low wealth inequality. A large proportion of Swedish capital was controlled by 15 families, and most wealth his still controlled by a small inherited class (many descended from the old Swedish nobility), and 80-90% of wealth is passed down. We might think of Sweden's long period of dominance by the Social Democrats from the 1930s - 1970s as a sort of bargain between the lower/middle and upper classes: pay your workers well, ensure a strong welfare state, don't be too ostentatious and the lower class will let the upper class run their businesses as usual. One family, the Wallenbergs, controlled ABB, Ericsson, Electrolux, Atlas Copco, SKF, AstraZeneca and Saab. In the 70s they employed 40% of Sweden's workforce and were 40% of Sweden's stock market's worth. https://econlife.com/2016/04/swedish-wealth-distribution/ https://econlife.com/2016/04/swedish-wealth-distribution/ http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/wealth-inequality-in-sweden.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/wea... For Socialists, this led to an obvious question: what should be done about this? Their solution: most of this wealth comes from ownership of Capital in Sweden's large firms (this is an important distinction between Sweden and Denmark - Sweden has many more large corporations). Workers represented by the trade unions would own a large share of capital and then redistribute the profits from capital back to the workers (and reinvest in the firm and in worker training and investment in new firs controlled by workers). I think this is a relatively interesting take on the idea of "worker controlled enterprises". A very leftist take on all of this is here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/sweden-social-democracy-meidner-plan-capital https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/sweden-social-democracy-m... Of course it didn't happen, as part of the larger global ant-left backlash beginning in the late 70s which took basically everyone by surprise (see also The Iranian Revolution, the American Evangelical movement, Likud, the rise of the BJP in India...). It's still an interesting idea, I think made more interesting by the rise of index funds like Vanguard. Increasingly capital is controlled by a small group of massive investment funds whose goal is to do nothing. This has led to the half-joking idea that index funds are worse than Marxism. I'll let Mark Levine explain: " Virtually no one that I talk to in or around the financial industry really believes the "common ownership of companies by mutual funds undercuts competition" theory. It just seems too attenuated: Sure, it might be in BlackRock's and Vanguard's interests if the companies they own don't slash prices to compete with each other, but it's not (usually) like they call up executives to tell them that. Plus "competition" is usually a more nebulous concept than price-cutting: It might be in shareholders' interests to keep prices high, but it is also in shareholders' interests to see more innovation and more competition on quality. If you own the entire economic pie, your interest is in growing that pie, not in keeping each company's slices the same. And the way the pie grows is through the normal capitalist processes of innovation and competition and creative destruction and so forth. Still I am so desperately fond of this theory. What I love -- what is made so clear in Jacobin's discussion -- is how it wraps capitalism all the way around to socialism. Index funds are in many ways a perfection of financial capitalism: Not only are they the result of scientific finance (modern portfolio theory, the efficient markets hypothesis, etc.) replacing earlier and less rigorous forms of investing, but they also concentrate and align shareholders with each other, and corporate managers with shareholders, in a way that seems like it would be well suited to "ensure that corporations remain within capitalist logic." And the result is something that both Marxists and also financial analysts think is quasi-communist, that "undermines the basic logic that made capitalism an economically and politically successful system in the first place." What if Marx was right that capitalism would ultimately destroy itself, but the way that it does so is through index funds? " https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-26/maybe-index-funds-will-destroy-capitalism https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-26/maybe-ind... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-24/are-index-funds-communist https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-24/are-index... (this essay is also fun because he discusses the hypothetical "Best Planning Robot", a computer so good at allocating capital it finally solves all of Kantorovich's problems) Anyways, all of this sort of suggests on silly idea: why not just wait until Vanguard controls most of the stock market and nationalize it? I don't think anyone believes this, but it's certainly something to think about.
coderholic 9y ago
Not to take away from your interesting comment, but it's not written "70-ties", just "70s" - the first one reads as "seventy-ties", which is odd :) EDIT: Updated "70's" to "70s" because of the great child comment that links to an article showing that while 70's is technically correct it's much more usual to exclude the apostrophe.
- adrianmonk 9y ago
  As long as we're exploring punctuation, the apostrophe in that case is valid and correct, but it's growing obsolete as it becomes more normal to write "70s". https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/9199/do-decades-ever-get-apostrophes https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/9199/do-decades-ever...
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    I think it's beyond "more normal", right? https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13631/is-an-apostrophe-with-a-decade-e-g-1920-s-generally-considered-incorrect https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13631/is-an-apos... Almost all the style guides recommend no apostophes on the end. Rather, apostrophes are reserved for numerals that are lefts out, i.e., '60s or 1960s, but not 1960's.
    - adrianmonk 9y ago
      I guess it depends on how you define acceptable usage. Only a generation ago, it was widely taught to include the apostrophe. Even then it wasn't universal, but it was one recommended way to do it. For example, I have on my bookshelf "Webster's NewWorld Dictionary, Third College Edition" (copyright 1994) which says on p. 1560: "An apostrophe is used ... to show certain coined plurals. ... Figures may take either an apostrophe and an s or an s alone. 1990s or 1990's". It also mentions a rule about using apostrophes with plurals of abbreviations if the abbreviations include internal periods, and it gives the examples of "Ph.D.'s" and "ICBMs". I guess internal periods have fallen out of favor too. Anyway, the overall point here is it was taught this way relatively recently, and I don't think language moves so fast that what was taught a generation or two ago isn't considered acceptable usage. I'd call it correct but archaic.
mongol 9y ago
H&M is not an example of that, it remains in Sweden, its real growth came later than what you are refering. In the 90s however its owner Stefan Persson threatened to move it due to proposed wealth taxes. The workaround was a using tax exception for stocks listed a certain way on public exchanges (O-listan). In the end the government adjusted the tax legislation and H&M stayed. https://www.affarsvarlden.se/bors-ekonominyheter/formogenhetsskatten-regeringen-koper-lojalitet-6720443 https://www.affarsvarlden.se/bors-ekonominyheter/formogenhet...

akuji1993 9y ago

This sounds so obviously stupid I wonder why nobody stopped and said "You know, we might just make all these companies leave with stuff as ridiculous as this."

lev99 9y ago
In many socialist points of view companies do not provide value, they are viewed as rent seekers. Value = {Raw Resources} + {Labor} + {Tools used by labor}. Companies own the tools, and take a margin of value. If labor owned the tools they could remove that margin. This sounds like the world view used to design that policy.
- namlem 9y ago
  Yeah, that's Marx's Labor Theory of Value. The problem is that it doesn't account for the value of risk. It's easy to look at companies making money and assume they're extracting value if you ignore all the failed attempts that outnumber the successes 5 to 1. Now, rent-seeking is still a problem and corporations are often guilty of it, but the idea that all profit is rent is ridiculous. Some of it is compensation for risk.
saiya-jin 9y ago
That's not a mindset any true socialist/communist politician operate with. Good of economy, long term economical prosperity whatnot. More like how to tax rich till they leave, blame them for all the failures of politicians and central planning inefficiencies and so on.
fetbaffe 9y ago
Socialism always is. That generation of social democrats was more of socialists than democrats and that was where it all went wrong, making their own party ideology to state ideology. Taking over private property in that way is nothing more than theft and a breach of fundamental principals in Swedish society and especially against the consensus agenda (see Saltsjöbadsavtalet). Social democrats kicked out the communist from the party in 1917 and by that becoming a democratic party and in 1921 heading their first government, but by this communism where basically back in fashion again.
vec 9y ago
A someone who is broadly sympathetic to the idea of labor ownership of the means of production, could I trouble you to explain what's so obvious about the stupidity of this plan? Taxes on corporate profits are generally seen as reasonable in the abstract, and they're common all over the world. I could see setting an unusually high tax rate being problematic, but that doesn't appear to be what happened. And it doesn't appear that the state was seizing anything. They were buying up shares off the public market. This doesn't seem more objectionable than any other hostile takeover. If a business owner wants to maintain control of their company then it's trivially easy for them to do so. All they have to do is not explicitly sell it, which is what an IPO is after all. And I'm having trouble seeing where the creeping socialism concerns come in. The end goal, according to the wikipedia page, was that the companies would be owned and operated by their own labor unions, which isn't an uncommon or inherently controversial corporate governance model. The state appears to have merely been facilitating the transfer. With perfect hindsight we can of course see that it didn't work out, but I doubt I would have been able to predict that in advance with any confidence. Would this have been fine if the state used a different taxing model? Would it have been okay if the labor unions managed to do it of their own initiative? Is it that broadening ownership of a corporation is inherently objectionable for some reason? What am I missing?
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Labor running the company? This fails more often than it succeeds. Bread and circuses are the result, then bankruptcy. Indeed obvious without the use of hindsight.
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    > Bread and circuses are the result I'm not interested in debating the merits or lack thereof of socialism as a system of government, but the "bread and circuses" thing applied to Roman citizens. Unless I was misinformed, the overlap between the people in the Roman empire who were citizens and the people in the Roman empire who were the labour force was very, very small.
    - 9y ago
WorldMaker 9y ago
It doesn't sound that obviously stupid to me. It's the stock purchase plan part of a 401k, where instead of the employee/employer-match coming before taxes, it comes from taxes. Either way it's tax incented, the difference is partly semantics. Giving those shares to trade unions instead of individuals makes it more like the classic pension system than the 401k, but the concepts are similar enough that it's quite possible to see the Swedish approach here as almost a direct forerunner to the 401k.

jernfrost 9y ago

As a Norwegian I keep getting surprised by things I learn about Sweden. Sweden seems to have been a lot more socialist than Norway. In some respect might still be. The housing system in Sweden sound more socialist than what we got in Norway today, judging from how a Swedish friend has explained it to me. However welfare benefits seems more generous in Norway. How sick people are dealt with in Sweden seems harsher. No pay the first days out of work, and maximum days sick decided by the government for different ailments etc.

klipt 9y ago
I guess Norway can fund more of its social benefits through oil money?
fetbaffe 9y ago
It is a mixed bag. In some aspects Sweden is more socialist and in other things Norway. But then, all government programs is not socialist by design, some is conservative other liberal. And I think that Norway is more conservative than Sweden. How to tell if a government program is socialist or not? Rule of thumb is if the labour union or any other part of the labour movement is in on it. 'Löntagarfonder' originated from the Swedish labour union LO, LO is the main funder of the Social democrats. Up to the 90-ties membership in LO included a forced membership in the Social democrats. Housing system is pure madness, rent is set by negotiation between the land lord and Hyresgästföreningen, historically a political ally to Social democrats! So in Norway you can surf to finn.no and find an available apartment within minutes. In Sweden, nope! One crazy thing I remember from Norway is that NRK can take money directly from your own bank account or contact your employer to take it from the salary if you don't pay the TV license ('kringkastingsavgift')!
- ersii 9y ago
  > Housing system is pure madness, rent is set by negotiation between the land lord and Hyresgästföreningen, historically a political ally to Social democrats! Friendly reminder to not forget the stupid ass national (but regionally determined) rent control regulation. Oh, and the Planning and Construction law which most likely is the most tedious and single longest law in the Swedish law book. It's no wonder that you have to already rent an apartment, to rent an apartment in the Swedish cities and that Swedes get dumbfounded when you tell them you can get an apartment within days in other cities (although you'll have to pay more for it) around the world..

1337biz 9y ago

His anti-tax setup makes a lot more sense to me now. If I had build a company from nothing just to seen the government getting so close to stealing it away from me, I would also do my best to make sure they will benefit the least amount possible from it.

bearcobra 9y ago

Any ideas where I could find more details on H&Ms move? They appear to be listed in the Swedish stock exchange and headquartered in Stockholm so I’m curious how they ended up moving back.

fetbaffe 9y ago
H&M and Tetra Pak moved back to Sweden in the 90-ties after promises from the then current social democratic leader Ingvar Carlsson that they would never be introduced again. Source, Swedish https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_oktober-demonstrationerna#Bakgrund_till_demonstrationen https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_oktober-demonstrationerna#Ba...
mongol 9y ago
I believe that was not factually correct. See my comment elsewhere in the thread.

aomurphy 9y ago

I'm not Swedish, but I find this area relatively interesting. The idea is fairly straightforward: Sweden's model created low income inequality between the poor and the rich, but did not create low wealth inequality. A large proportion of Swedish capital was controlled by 15 families, and most wealth his still controlled by a small inherited class (many descended from the old Swedish nobility), and 80-90% of wealth is passed down. We might think of Sweden's long period of dominance by the Social Democrats from the 1930s - 1970s as a sort of bargain between the lower/middle and upper classes: pay your workers well, ensure a strong welfare state, don't be too ostentatious and the lower class will let the upper class run their businesses as usual. One family, the Wallenbergs, controlled ABB, Ericsson, Electrolux, Atlas Copco, SKF, AstraZeneca and Saab. In the 70s they employed 40% of Sweden's workforce and were 40% of Sweden's stock market's worth. https://econlife.com/2016/04/swedish-wealth-distribution/ https://econlife.com/2016/04/swedish-wealth-distribution/ http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/wealth-inequality-in-sweden.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/wea... For Socialists, this led to an obvious question: what should be done about this? Their solution: most of this wealth comes from ownership of Capital in Sweden's large firms (this is an important distinction between Sweden and Denmark - Sweden has many more large corporations). Workers represented by the trade unions would own a large share of capital and then redistribute the profits from capital back to the workers (and reinvest in the firm and in worker training and investment in new firs controlled by workers). I think this is a relatively interesting take on the idea of "worker controlled enterprises". A very leftist take on all of this is here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/sweden-social-democracy-meidner-plan-capital https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/sweden-social-democracy-m... Of course it didn't happen, as part of the larger global ant-left backlash beginning in the late 70s which took basically everyone by surprise (see also The Iranian Revolution, the American Evangelical movement, Likud, the rise of the BJP in India...). It's still an interesting idea, I think made more interesting by the rise of index funds like Vanguard. Increasingly capital is controlled by a small group of massive investment funds whose goal is to do nothing. This has led to the half-joking idea that index funds are worse than Marxism. I'll let Mark Levine explain: " Virtually no one that I talk to in or around the financial industry really believes the "common ownership of companies by mutual funds undercuts competition" theory. It just seems too attenuated: Sure, it might be in BlackRock's and Vanguard's interests if the companies they own don't slash prices to compete with each other, but it's not (usually) like they call up executives to tell them that. Plus "competition" is usually a more nebulous concept than price-cutting: It might be in shareholders' interests to keep prices high, but it is also in shareholders' interests to see more innovation and more competition on quality. If you own the entire economic pie, your interest is in growing that pie, not in keeping each company's slices the same. And the way the pie grows is through the normal capitalist processes of innovation and competition and creative destruction and so forth. Still I am so desperately fond of this theory. What I love -- what is made so clear in Jacobin's discussion -- is how it wraps capitalism all the way around to socialism. Index funds are in many ways a perfection of financial capitalism: Not only are they the result of scientific finance (modern portfolio theory, the efficient markets hypothesis, etc.) replacing earlier and less rigorous forms of investing, but they also concentrate and align shareholders with each other, and corporate managers with shareholders, in a way that seems like it would be well suited to "ensure that corporations remain within capitalist logic." And the result is something that both Marxists and also financial analysts think is quasi-communist, that "undermines the basic logic that made capitalism an economically and politically successful system in the first place." What if Marx was right that capitalism would ultimately destroy itself, but the way that it does so is through index funds? " https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-26/maybe-index-funds-will-destroy-capitalism https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-26/maybe-ind... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-24/are-index-funds-communist https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-24/are-index... (this essay is also fun because he discusses the hypothetical "Best Planning Robot", a computer so good at allocating capital it finally solves all of Kantorovich's problems) Anyways, all of this sort of suggests on silly idea: why not just wait until Vanguard controls most of the stock market and nationalize it? I don't think anyone believes this, but it's certainly something to think about.

coderholic 9y ago

Not to take away from your interesting comment, but it's not written "70-ties", just "70s" - the first one reads as "seventy-ties", which is odd :) EDIT: Updated "70's" to "70s" because of the great child comment that links to an article showing that while 70's is technically correct it's much more usual to exclude the apostrophe.

adrianmonk 9y ago
As long as we're exploring punctuation, the apostrophe in that case is valid and correct, but it's growing obsolete as it becomes more normal to write "70s". https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/9199/do-decades-ever-get-apostrophes https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/9199/do-decades-ever...
- jessriedel 9y ago
  I think it's beyond "more normal", right? https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13631/is-an-apostrophe-with-a-decade-e-g-1920-s-generally-considered-incorrect https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13631/is-an-apos... Almost all the style guides recommend no apostophes on the end. Rather, apostrophes are reserved for numerals that are lefts out, i.e., '60s or 1960s, but not 1960's.
  - adrianmonk 9y ago
    I guess it depends on how you define acceptable usage. Only a generation ago, it was widely taught to include the apostrophe. Even then it wasn't universal, but it was one recommended way to do it. For example, I have on my bookshelf "Webster's NewWorld Dictionary, Third College Edition" (copyright 1994) which says on p. 1560: "An apostrophe is used ... to show certain coined plurals. ... Figures may take either an apostrophe and an s or an s alone. 1990s or 1990's". It also mentions a rule about using apostrophes with plurals of abbreviations if the abbreviations include internal periods, and it gives the examples of "Ph.D.'s" and "ICBMs". I guess internal periods have fallen out of favor too. Anyway, the overall point here is it was taught this way relatively recently, and I don't think language moves so fast that what was taught a generation or two ago isn't considered acceptable usage. I'd call it correct but archaic.

mongol 9y ago

H&M is not an example of that, it remains in Sweden, its real growth came later than what you are refering. In the 90s however its owner Stefan Persson threatened to move it due to proposed wealth taxes. The workaround was a using tax exception for stocks listed a certain way on public exchanges (O-listan). In the end the government adjusted the tax legislation and H&M stayed. https://www.affarsvarlden.se/bors-ekonominyheter/formogenhetsskatten-regeringen-koper-lojalitet-6720443 https://www.affarsvarlden.se/bors-ekonominyheter/formogenhet...