Liquidity.

Coherence.

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1. John Authers, Part 1:

Elements in the Trump coalition have long held an anti-corporate agenda. A few months ago, Adrian Wooldridge argued in this space that MAGA wanted to “end capitalism as we know it.” Specifically, he contended that many leaders in the Trump coalition wanted to “deconstruct the great workhorse of American capitalism: the publicly owned and professionally managed corporation.”

These are strong words, but sound understated compared to the writings of Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation and a lead creator of Project 2025, an ambitious and radical agenda for Trump 2.0. He argues that BlackRock, the world’s largest fund manager and a pillar of contemporary US capitalism, is “decadent and rootless” and should be burned to the ground — a fate it should share with the Boy Scouts of America and the Chinese Communist Party.

For Marjorie Taylor Greene, an outspoken Trump supporter in Congress, “the way corporations have conducted themselves, I’ve always called it corporate communism.” She has urged government investigations of companies that stopped donations to Republicans after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chief in 2016, complained to Semafor that only $500 billion of the US government’s $4.5 trillion came from corporate taxes. “Since 2008, $200 billion has gone into stock repurchases. If that had gone into plants and equipment, think what that would have done for the country.”

He advocated a “dramatic increase” in taxes on corporations and the wealthy. “For getting our guys’ taxes cut, we’ve got to cut spending, which they’re gonna resist. Where does the tax revenue come from? Corporations and the wealthy.” (Source: bloomberg.com)

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2. John Authers, Part 2.

Rising to the top of a company never used to be a ladder to mega-wealth. That was reserved for entrepreneurs who founded their own firms. Modern executive pay has changed that and allowed CEOs to become billionaires by meeting unchallenging targets for their share price. The gulf between their pay and workers’ wages shrieks of injustice; according to the Economic Policy Institute, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio reached 399-1 in 2021; in 1965, it was only 20-1. From 2019 to 2021, CEO pay rose 30.3% while those workers who kept their jobs through the pandemic got a raise of 3.9%.