When it comes to boardroom bad behaviour, investment managers certainly talk a good game.
The multi-trillion pound fund management industry should hold great sway over the shenanigans at major companies – and they like to mouth off about how they could hold firms accountable.
But there does seem to be a gap between their actions and their words – it is as if the corporate governance departments and the fund managers who hold the voting rights do not talk to each other. And I suspect that is because they do not.
They have got different interests. Corporate governance departments are all about building reputations – though often they seem to care more about their own than the companies they actually invest in. It is a back-slapping exercise to prove how worthy and wonderful they are.
More women on boards, more control over remuneration policies, more accountability in takeover battles and so on. These are commendable targets that all well-run companies should aim for – if I only thought investment houses were really prepared to act on it.
The problem is that the money men always win, and that is why frequently the corporate governance targets are quickly forgotten by the fund managers who want to make a profit for their investors. All of this came to my mind when the corporate watchdog, the Financial Reporting Council last week revealed its latest proposals for a corporate governance code.
Specifically this latest upheaval has been prompted over the scandals of the collapse of Carillion and the vast bonus payouts for directors of house builder Persimmon, which saw its chief executive dubbed Mr £131m.
It will make no difference.
I suppose the real question is whether investors really care.
I am not an ethical investing convert, but badly run companies are harmful to wealth accumulation, and that is the point of investing, after all. Controlling rogue boardrooms and bad chief executives is why companies have shareholders.
But it is hard for investors to be engaged in a process from which they are detached by the process of owning shares.
In investment funds we delegate that responsibility to the fund manager, but how do you know how they voted? You do not because they will not tell you and frequently the votes of major shareholders are undeclared.
And even if you hold a share directly through a platform you cannot properly have your say as the platform holds your voting rights. It is technically possible, but practically unlikely. Of course this is all assuming investors are astute enough to actually realise when a company holds its annual general meeting.
It all ends up being a mess. But the end result is that neither the fund managers nor the companies are accountable. This allows hedge funds and other short-term investors to have an even greater say over companies which, in the long run, is no good for the wider health of the UK plc.
Only total transparency can solve this. Investors should have the right to find out how fund managers voted in annual meetings. But I would place a fair old sum that none are bold enough to do this – even if it is something else it would be good to boast about.
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Spare a thought for the 40-year-old savers
Did you know that people in their 60s and 70s have got more wealth than those in their 40s? And did you also know that those in their 40s have more assets than those in their 20s?
Of course you did. You are not an idiot and understand that the longer you live and work, the more likely it is you will have had a chance to build up a pot of money.
Yet this totally obvious fact seems to routinely pass by those taking sides in the war on inter-generational wealth.
Pointing out how much one generation has got compared to the other is not only spurious, it is unhelpful.
Besides, it is people like me in their early 40s who are worst off. We missed out on auto-enrolment, and have not had years of contributions in to a final salary pension.
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UK property prices to head south
We are at a turning point in house prices. They have been stagnating all year as the market is hampered by shortage of supply and lack of demand.
But recent figures suggest supply is increasing. This has been pent up since the end of last year, and was bound to come. With supply rising, that can only mean one thing for prices across the country: they are on their way down.
James Coney is finance editor at the Daily Mail
