I’ve recently subscribed to an email newsletter by Matthew Levine that I’m really enjoying. It’s mostly inside baseball stuff about finance which is tedious at times but the writing is very good. I love this quote from a recent article:
One rough model that you could have for modern corporate finance is that most senior corporate executives are mostly in the business of maximizing cash flows for shareholders, because that is what they were trained to do, but lots of shareholders are actually interested in something else. Sure they’ll take cash flows, cash flows are great, but they have other interests. Retail investors, for instance, seem to love memes, and crypto, and Elon Musk. Big institutional investors tend to be interested in ESG risk, and more generally in the systemic risks of their portfolios as a whole.
That’s pure gold and very reflective of where we are right now.