|
 Clinton, in a speech in New York, said institutional investors
have an obligation to counter "hit and run" activist shareholders.
She also said the U.S. government needs to "stop pouring subsidies
into industries that are already thriving," such as the oil
industry.
Clinton, front-runner in the race for the Democratic Party's
nomination, is working to draw in progressive voters in her party
while not alienating big-money donors from Wall Street as she seeks
to build a broad coalition going into the general election in
November 2016.
But Clinton was criticized by Republicans, who generally prefer less
regulation of capital markets.
A spokesman for Republican candidate and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio
said in a statement that Clinton's tax policy was outdated.
"Hillary Clinton’s tax proposal picks winners and losers," said the
spokesman, Alex Conant, "and ultimately leaves behind the working
class."
Clinton called for government and private companies to join in the
fight against "quarterly capitalism."
 "It's bad for business, it’s bad for wages and it’s bad for our
economy," she said of short-term thinking at the expense of
long-term growth.
Clinton argued that the tax code and U.S. laws currently allow or
even encourage companies to focus on short-term gains in stock
prices in a way that undercuts the economy's long-term growth and
harms middle-class incomes.
The former U.S. senator and secretary of state also said "there is
something wrong when senior executives get rich" while companies and
workers suffer.
"How do we define shareholder value in the 21st century?" Clinton
asked. "Is it maximizing immediate returns or delivering long-term
growth?"
Companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 stock market index spent $566
billion buying back their shares in 2014, up from $480 billion in
2013 and the highest amount since 2007, according to research firm
FactSet.
She pointed to other countries that require companies to disclose
buybacks daily, giving regulators and outside investors more
information about the transactions and causes of share price
changes. "Here in the U.S. you can go an entire quarter without
disclosing," she said. "Let's change that."
[to top of second column] |
Clinton's main rival for the Democratic Party nomination, Vermont
Senator Bernie Sanders, has drawn crowds of thousands by appealing
to progressives, despite being far less well-known than Clinton.
He has, for example, endorsed their call for increasing the federal
minimum wage to $15. Clinton suggested on Friday that while this
might make sense in New York City, where the cost of living is high,
it made less sense in cheaper parts of the country.
Executive pay, padded out with stocks and options, has become
increasingly structured with "perverse incentives" to inflate
payouts by focusing on short-term rises in share prices, she said.
Companies should accept legal provisions yet to be fully enacted
that require them to say, in a ratio, how much more executives are
paid than other employees, a disparity that has widened in recent
decades.
She was also critical of generous executive pay packages during her
last attempt to win the presidency in 2008, when she also ran on a
platform seen to be to the left of the more centrist economic
policies of her husband, Bill Clinton, when he was president.
Her speech on Friday added to downward pressure on U.S. stocks,
which were falling in afternoon trading. [.N]
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Amanda Becker in Washington and
Luciana Lopez and Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Sandra
Maler and Grant McCool)
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