These involve granting differential voting rights to different classes of shares. This too, in some respects, is back to the future. It has echoes of the restricted or graduated shareholder rights models seen over a century ago. Dual class listings remain common practice in a number of countries today, especially in emerging markets. Interestingly, however, there have also been some signs of dual class shares recently playing a greater role in the US. A number of recent high profile US company IPOs, such as Facebook and Google, have issued dual class stock. 25  See Carney (2014). 26  See also Mayer (2013). 14  BIS central bankers’ speeches  These laws and emerging practices are in their early throes and are not uncontentious, especially among institutional shareholders. Nonetheless, they are symptomatic of a common desire to strengthen long-term investors’ hand in the oversight of companies. If these initiatives grew in prominence, they would begin to address some of the short-term and risk-shifting problems embedded in the current corporate governance model. Corporate governance If alterations to the balance of shareholder rights are increasingly under debate, the same is not true of the rights of creditors and other stakeholders. In principle, the case for recognising explicitly these broader interests seems sound enough. In a recent paper, I considered the risk-shifting problem within companies and various solutions to it (Haldane, Richardson and Willison (forthcoming)). The most effective was simply to alter the objectives of the company to reflect creditor, as well as shareholder, interests.
Among the households of people employed in industries less affected by the pandemic, saving by that half of households with least saving is higher: up to 40% of their annual income. 3  Taking as an indicator of financial vulnerability of the firm the ratio between its debt and its assets (net of non-interestbearing debt), and for the vulnerability threshold a value for this ratio of 75%. 4  See P. Hernández de Cos (2021): "The challenges to the banking sector a year after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic", Speech at the Observatorio de las Finanzas event organised by El Español/Invertia. 2  With a view to the future, the development of various vaccines and the start of their roll-out to the population has allowed us to discern a horizon in which this crisis is resolved. Yet uncertainty remains high, especially that arising from the course of the pandemic and the vaccination process, and the consequences of the crisis on the productive system and on agents’ behaviour. Against this background, the projections presented last Tuesday by the Banco de España continue to complement the baseline scenario with another two alternatives, with different assumptions about how the main areas of uncertainty will evolve.5 The first point of uncertainty evidently pertains to the epidemiological situation.