Many other companies “Wall Street” trades shares in did not have a problem with setting long term goals for compensation, why did Intel?
Why would Wall St want Intel’s market cap graph to look like this:
https://companiesmarketcap.com/intel/marketcap/
Rather than this:
https://companiesmarketcap.com/tsmc/marketcap/
https://companiesmarketcap.com/nvidia/marketcap/
https://companiesmarketcap.com/apple/marketcap/
https://companiesmarketcap.com/qualcomm/marketcap/
It makes no sense to scapegoat Wall Street, when the SP500 was a rocketship (does Wall Street not get the blame for that, if they are apparently responsible for Intel’s demise?)
People complain about lack of US manufacturing, and short term thinking and its all heavily tied to a couple fundamental truths about companies in the USA.
Corporate raiding and looting is a core part of the fiance sector. There are a half dozen methods of asset stripping used against literally all successful businesses here. Much of this 'short term thinking' is either the business trying to make itself look less appealing, or the actual act of handing the money over directly via stock buybacks or dividends (which are at least taxed) rather than investing in the company.
'Investors' in the USA have absolutely zero interest in the actual companies they are investing in, because it is to easy to divest of those investments or sell/merge the resulting companies. The goal largely seems to be to create the illusion of success at any cost. If that means destroying the company to get a 10% return next month, then that's fine, because they will then turn around and sell it before it collapses.
At least some of this could be solve via strong incentives against short term investing. Say an actual value tax (rather than a capital gains tax) that penalizes holdings less than a couple years. A 25% value tax applied for holdings less than a year that decreases to 0 over some longer time-frame, say 5 years. Yes this would completely destroy the business model of quite a number of wall street firms, and maybe even make it hard for businesses to raise capital. But, it would put a lot more focus on buying businesses that actually have long term prospects, allow those businesses to invest in capital intensive manufacturing operations and a laundry list of other things most people agree is a good idea. It would also likely return stock prices to realistic future return numbers because investing in companies with obviously inflated market caps would become a lot more risky.