Simple Rules for Healthy Eating (2015)

Re:Simple Rules for Healthy Eating (2015) by nradov on Wednesday May 25, 2016 @02:11PM (#11771833)

But isn't that shift in wealth actually happening? My understanding is that the richest investors are increasingly moving their capital from publicly-traded stocks to privately held companies (venture capital and private equity) exactly because they earn higher long-term returns. Those private companies don't have the same pressure to pay attention to short term results. Average investors can't make the same investments because they are largely locked out of those private markets. This is a market inefficiency, but it's likely to persist for a long time.

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Re:Simple Rules for Healthy Eating (2015) by sheepleherd on Wednesday May 25, 2016 @03:25PM (#11772385)

There are other explanations for such a trend as you describe that do not hinge on long term vs short term thinking.

For example, if you have control over a golden goose asset and managing it to maximize wealth is best achieved by sitting in a room with other oligopolists and carving up markets, that (1) may be best accomplished "in private" and (2) why share unfairly high profits if don't need to? This type of thing has occurred for example in the growth of cable TV companies, go public (yet maintain control) to get access to the capital necessary to grow your networks, then go private again (you already have control) to not have to dilute profit over and in the face of inefficient public regulation.

In any case, the idea that the market is too focused on the short term has been around for decades, and if the shift had occurred as you propose, then we wouldn't still be hearing it.

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