By the late 1990s, shareholder value was the explicit, new priority for the old corporations in the US and UK where the stock market had gained an unprecedented influence on the behaviour of giant corporations. The business press obsessively discussed which managements were, and were not, delivering value and all the major US consulting firms had moved into selling value metrics and implementation packages promising to solve this question. Over this decade, share prices rose unsteadily in a long bull market which ended in the tech stock crash of Spring 2000 which, one year later, had turned into a bear market in a slowing US economy. All this poses new questions about what’s at stake in the capital market's pressure on corporations for increased returns; and what's behind higher share prices and their collapse? The intellectual responses widened the debate but has led to increasing conceptual confusion: the journalistic term "shareholder value" has passed into academic usage; while neologisms such as financialisation are used differently by various authors. Against this background, our paper aims to discuss the existing terms and main definitions and to argue for a redefinition of the problem around a new generic concept of coupon pool capitalism. After this, the paper presents a brief empirical analysis of the dynamics of the coupon pool in the USA and UK. This analysis represents part of our answer to the question of what's new and different about the current forms of capitalism.
kinds of Capitalism; corporate governance; finacialization; kinds of wealth; kinds of income; shareholder revolution
