John Bogle decries ‘failure to observe the fiduciary principle’

Below is a very good video of John Bogle, the legendary investor, at Columbia Business School, hosted by CBS Professor David Beim. In his speech, Bogle places much of the blame for the present crisis with the increasingly hostile corporate governance environment of the last quarter-century, a point I make in my recent post “The horrible self-dealing of Ken Lewis and the principal-agent problem.”

The pendulum has swung far to the extreme toward corporations governed by an insulated elite of managers divorced from owners’ true interests. It will take some time to correct these excesses.