Britain has been the guinea-pig for an economic ideology. Britain’s banks have steered well clear of involvement in company management. Founding families have shed their shares because of the design of taxation. Legal control of companies is exclusively in the hands of the shareholders, of whom 80 per cent are pension funds and insurance companies. They, in turn, adopt the mantra, ‘If you don’t like the company, sell the shares.’ Their decisions are now based primarily on algorithms within computers, making sophisticated inferences from recent movements in stock prices: around 60 per cent of
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