so many of the current corporate layoffs and struggles and places going under are literally because they saw a huge spike in profits from the pandemic and had no real choice not to then have to make year-on-year profits that topped that even if everyone in the company knew it wouldn't last (as was obvious -- people can only buy so much stuff until mostly sated, even if the lockdown never ended).
but because they decided to shackle themselves to shareholders -- and because shareholders (especially big things like Vanguard) would pull out, in a very real way the companies basically are streamlined to failure. Because if they didn't perform, many of them would likely just be starved.
and every few weeks I just think about this, and how it was both inevitable and, largely, unpreventable. Whole system's sick.
There's no law that you have to privilege shareholders, but there might as well be at that scale.
it's like how having a bank account that's shared forces your org to be an NGO which then forces it to behave in ways that turn it into An NGO In Deed As Well As Word (Pejorative)
anyway this is part of why anything going IPO is usually a death blow to anything good, unless it already was so big that it had staying-power. Though that didn't really help google.