Between the 1950s and the 1990s, the attention paid by corporations to financial markets greatly increased, above all in the United States and the United Kingdom, but increasingly in other countries too. Corporate leaders for whom the financial markets were one concern among many Roger Lowenstein points out that Alfred P. Sloan Jr., who headed General Motors for four decades, never mentions in his autobiography the price of its stock "as a factor in his decision making" (Lowenstein 2004, p. 29) were replaced by a generation for whom their corporations' stock prices were an obsession.

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 1170