What new frontiers for corporate governance

Those involved in corporate governance are looking more and more like the European navigators who, at the dawn of the modern age, realised that the world was much larger than the 'mare nostrum' with which they had been familiar for centuries. The Mediterranean, in fact, looks more and more like the pillar G of sustainability, while the vast oceanic horizons can be considered as the pillars of the S and E. Not only that: the theory of agency costs and the separation of ownership and control, the basis of the neo-institutionalist theory of business and corporate governance, at least as we know them to date, seem to be increasingly obsolete. In the corporate world, globally, fewer and fewer companies are going public, and many listed companies are opting for delisting (29 delistings in 2024 and 17 in the first half of 2025 on the stock market alone). For these reasons, the wide range of remedies to minimise agency costs and private benefits are less topical, precisely because such situations are objectively less frequent. What then are the frontiers of corporate governance in a world that has crossed the Herculean columns of agency costs? The writer identifies two possible new frontiers for corporate governance, namely sustainability and connections with politics. Both of these perspectives, however, are also evolving from a traditional approach. As far as sustainability is concerned, it unravels from the quantitative dimensions of E to the more discretionary dimensions of S. These dimensions imply, firstly, an increasingly necessary interdisciplinary training and a contamination of economic, physical, engineering, accounting, financial, historical and sociological knowledge. Secondly, the minimisation of the weighted average cost of capital takes place not so much by designing an optimal financial structure, based on traditional canons, but rather by integrating the monitoring of multifaceted risk factors and communicating them to the market in a convincing manner. Sustainability thus becomes not merely an element of compliance and marketing, but a powerful tool for the effective monitoring of real risks. As far as connections with politics are concerned, these have historically been realised through a series of benefits resulting from the simultaneous presence of a shareholder or corporate representative in an elected government or parliament. Globally, the most politically connected parliament is the House of Lords. According to the existing literature, the politically connected company has greater market power, greater debt capacity and lower taxation. All this, however, also has the flavour of the past. Current connections with politics are through crypto currencies and stable coins and seem to have two perspectives. The definition of property rights and their tokenization with respect to assets or fractions of assets that were previously difficult to define or with uncertain property rights opens up a very large market ranging from works of art to real estate. However, there is another aspect that represents an absolute advantage for a specific currency area. This is the situation the United Kingdom found itself in during the classical gold standard (1870-1914). The manoeuvring agent of the time, i.e. the United Kingdom, financed significant deficits, mainly of a commercial nature, by inflows of capital from the various areas of the British Empire and from the states that had adopted the gold standard, without settling these deficits with gold outflows. The current manoeuvre, i.e. the United States, through the emergence of thestable coin may be able to finance ever larger budget deficits thanks to the adoption of the dollar and public debt securities issued in dollars, used as collateral. It is no coincidence that the recent Genius Act establishes a regulatory framework for this very purpose. This is a very significant advantage for US stable coin and politically connected enterprises in that context. We would advise; "Exsurge, Europe!"