[antisyzygy]

Investors have been spoiled rotten with hyperbolic growth for several decades.

They feel entitled to very large returns. The executive leadership's job is to give it to them.

Gone are the days of expecting a stable, life-long dividend.

Now if you're not cutting labor costs to the bone and impoverishing your workers, applying shrinkflation strategies, or monopolizing markets and fixing prices, then you aren't able to satisfy your increasingly greedy investors.

[WorldMaker]

Investors have also been allowed to be the tail eating the head of the snake in the US. Since the earliest days of the American car industry many of the biggest, most vocal shareholders have been the car dealers. Ford v Dodge is such a fascinating tale of broken expectations: the Dodge brothers were some of the largest dealers of Ford at the time (before they founded their own car company), as well as some of the bigger shareholders in Ford, and in that court case created the modern notion of "fiduciary duty" to shareholders because they wanted higher dividends from Ford (presumably to help fund their eventual competitor).

Ford v Dodge is a key court-case that still has so many terrible repercussions in modern America, and all because the biggest shareholders in Ford had a strange conflict of interest (that has never been fixed; dealers are still some of the biggest "activist" shareholders of both GM and Ford) and won the battle in the US courts to give themselves more power over company profits (than the company's board and interests like, you know, employees or customers).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.