Responsible to govern

The small matter of private property and the duties and rights that are attached to its ownership are to capitalism what the solid inner core is to earth. Thus it was a good time for Executive to perk up our collective editorial ears – which are always on the listen for deeper economic truths – upon the surfacing of a speech with the question, “Who owns a company?”, asked by no lesser mind than the chief economist at the Bank of England, Andy Haldane. “At least for publicly listed companies, its owners are its shareholders,” Haldane asserts at the start of his learned discourse. It’s their prerogative to claim the company’s profits and control its management. “And it is they whose objectives have primacy in the running of the company”. But then he turned to the issue of corporate governance, from a broad definition that corporate governance is “the set