Economic trends are sometimes more closely related to one another than news reports make them seem. For example, one regularly encounters reports of governments' financial troubles, like the "fiscal cliff" in the United States and the debt crisis in Europe. And much attention has been devoted, often in nearby opinion pieces, to the view that hyperactive equities markets, particularly in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, push large corporations to focus disproportionately on short-term financial results at the expense of long-term investments in their countries' economies.
The two are not unconnected. And examining that connection provides a good opportunity to assess the weaknesses and ambiguities of the long-standing argument that furiously high-volume stock-market trading shortens corporate time horizons.
The conventional thinking is that as traders buy and sell corporate stocks more often, they induce corporate managers to plan for shorter and shorter horizons. If institutional investors refuse to hold stocks for more than a few months, the thinking goes, CEOs' time horizons for corporate planning must shrink to roughly the same timeframe.