The line between the owner of the capital (the principal) and the manager of the capital (the agent) is lengthened. ‘Who owns a company?’ is a tough question.2 This principal-agent separation gets even harder now that we have investment portfolios as our way of investing in ‘growth assets’ ie, in business.
The link is now the saver (owner of the capital), the investment manager (who may even outsource parts of this), and then the company agent. Principal-agent-agent. This represents in large part the industry structure that most of the people in this audience operate in. What does it mean?