Corporate governance in particular plays a significant
role in the thesis. After the corporate scandals in 2002, Taylor (2003) suggested four reasons
for crisis in corporate governance: the burst of the dot.com bubble, the stock market crash,
high-risk strategies and insider greed, which all impacted public trust. At least two of these
have been repeated in the recent financial crisis: greed and high-risk strategies. Management
and board supported high risk strategies, and were compensated based on short-term results at
the expense of long-term performance. That is in line with Gladwin et al. (1995), who argue
that here has been increased separation of the economy and society, and increasingly
orientation on short-term financial performance. In the IT–bubble, the equity was overvalued5
partly due to the market mistake of creating agency costs through damaging managerial and
organisational incentives (Jensen, 2002). In the credit crisis6
, the risks that banks took on were
incorrectly valued. Undervalued equity can be easily solved by hostile takeovers or leveraged
or management buyouts, but overvalued equity can normally only be solved through corporate
governance (Jensen et al., 2004).