This is nonsense. What you clearly have here is a principal/agent problem. The way it works is like this: 1) Money is invested in companies by a diffuse set

This is nonsense. What you clearly have here is a principal/agent problem. The way it works is like this: 1) Money is invested in companies by a diffuse set of investors. That diffuse group is unified by people responsible for managing money. 2) They invest it with the intention of having it go into the productive activities of a business, such as staff and plant and equipment or technology or software or marketing. That money when received by the business is managed by the company management. 3) What is actually happening is that each of these gatekeepers is taking as much as they can get away with. It really isn't all that much more complicated than that. They'll concoct increasingly complex rationalizations and call it "performance" and launch decades of public relations (like the article we're all commenting on) but at the end of the day the people who should be tasked with fairly apportioning resources in a common enterprise are taking more and more of it for themselves. The solution is to stop letting them get away with it.