I’m not sure what we should be waiting for. The time for the free market to fix Boeing and “capitalism” (read: don’t regulate us please) to save the day would have been before Boeing killed 400 people in plane crashes.
I get that the idea of self-correcting markets are very appealing. But there are a ton of situations where they don’t work or don’t fix all of the problems they cause. Those situations are under the general umbrella of market failures. This particular market failure would probably be classified as adverse selection or more general information asymmetry.
I'm not advocating for less regulation in the slightest.
I'm saying that when a corpo breaks laws (don't follow regulations and lie about it), the fines need to substantially hit their shareholders, so that shareholders are generally aligned with following regulations and will demand additional diligence. Otherwise the game will be as it is - commercial aviation is highly regulated, but Boeing is so big that the fines don't matter to them or their owners (i.e. shareholders).
To summarize my objections, it seems like a “punish the shareholders” strategy has at least three problems:
1. Punishing shareholders doesn’t sufficiently discourage corporate management. They are usually fine even if the stock price takes a hit. The fact that corporate management may not act in the best interests of shareholders is a known example of the Principal-Agent Problem.
2. Shareholders might not know that bad behavior is happening, and even if they do, we want to discourage bad behavior that regulators might not find out about, and before it happens.
3. Many investors are not actively investing, but using robo investing services like Vanguard for their 401k. That means that even if you’re technically an “investor” you’re not actively investigating companies for fraud.
I get that the idea of self-correcting markets are very appealing. But there are a ton of situations where they don’t work or don’t fix all of the problems they cause. Those situations are under the general umbrella of market failures. This particular market failure would probably be classified as adverse selection or more general information asymmetry.