Another constituency shared the managers’ interest in rent-seeking: the asset managers, a driving force behind the fashion for breaking up conglomerates to extract greater shareholder value. Economically and socially, asset managers were closer to corporate managers than they were to their real customers, the remote and probably poorly informed members of pension funds or holders of life insurance policies. MSV offered asset managers the chance to get rich alongside the managers of the companies in which they invested their clients’ money. Asset managers became the major holders of public
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