Contract Buyout Quotes

Other narratives in the same constellation with the Laffer curve sprang up around the same time. The terms leveraged buyouts and corporate raiders also went viral in the 1980s, often in admiring stories about companies that responded well to true incentives and that produced high profits as a result. One marker for such stories is the phrase maximize shareholder value, which, according to ProQuest News & Newspapers and Google Ngrams, was not used until the 1970s and whose usage grew steadily until the twenty-first century. The phrase maximize shareholder value puts a nice spin on questionable corporate raider practices, such as saddling the company with extreme levels of debt and ignoring implicit contracts with employees and stakeholders. Maximize suggests intelligence, science, calculus. Shareholder reminds the listener that there are people whose money started the whole enterprise, and who may sometimes be forgotten. Value sounds better, more idealistic, than wealth or profit. Use of the three words together as a phrase is an invention of the 1980s, used to tell stories of corporate raiders and their success. The term maximize shareholder value is a contagious justification for aggressiveness and the pursuit of wealth, and the narratives that exploited the term are most certainly economically significant.