Can a dash of socialism be good for capitalism?

If capitalism is defined by the question of who controls capital - the money that makes the world go around - there's one organisation that has perhaps more influence over modern capitalism than any other. That company is BlackRock.

The American-founded investment company has total assets under management of more than $ 6 trillion (£ 4.6 trillion), bigger than any competitor.

BlackRock owns - on behalf of its millions of pension fund investors - a portion of just about every publicly-listed company in the world. And often a sizeable one. It invests in trillions of dollars of debts of global governments and company bonds.

So who runs this leviathan? Well, to some extent it's on auto-pilot. A hefty chunk of these assets are held in tracker funds, which simply passively "track" stock markets. But BlackRock also has hundreds of active fund managers, who select companies for their portfolios based on various criteria.

And what's their ethos? The answer, if you're used to hearing about the endemic short-termism of the world of finance, might surprise you.

Last week Larry Fink, the chief executive and founder of BlackRock, published his annual letter to the chief executives of all the companies around the world in which it invests last week. And Fink's message was: don't put profits first. Put "purpose" first. "Purpose is not the sole pursuit of profits, but the animating force for achieving them," Fink explained. "Profits are in no way inconsistent with purpose - in fact, profits and purpose are inextricably linked."

This corporate purpose, he went on, means investing for the long term, serving a community, developing the talents of a workforce. And so on. BlackRock also says that bosses' pay should not rise faster than that of the firm's workers and has threatened to vote against remuneration committees that agree to excessive awards.

It's enough to make the libertarian epigoni of Milton Friedman, the economist who famously asserted "there is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits", choke on their cornflakes.

But purpose is often easier said than delivered in the business world. Sacha Romanovitch was the chief executive of Grant Thornton, the first woman to run a major accountancy firm. She attempted to restructure the company to have a focus on (in her own words, but words that might also have come from Fink) "profits with a purpose". This meant dropping some questionable clients and sharing profits with all staff rather than just top partners. She capped her own pay at 20 times the average in the firm.

It ended badly. Romanovitch was essentially defenestrated by other Grant Thornton partners last autumn.

An anonymous memo of discontent leaked to the media claimed she was following a "socialist agenda".

But is Romanovitch's brand of reform really "socialist"? And even if we call it that, is it really something to fear? Among successful German "Mittelstand" companies - small and medium-sized family manufacturing firms - the kind of practices introduced by Romanovitch have always been normal.

Klaus Fischer, the owner of a firm near Stuttgart that makes wall plugs and car parts, insists that happy workers come above profits. "I've always been driven by the urge to be jointly successful with my employees, not just alone," he told the Financial Times recently.

And there's some evidence from the UK and the US that "shared capitalism" - where firms pay employees, in part, on the basis of performance of the overall enterprise or workplace - is associated with faster productivity growth within the organisation.

We often hear about Jeremy Corbyn's supposedly backward-looking "socialism". And Labour's plan to compel larger firms to distribute a tenth of their equity into special funds for workers has been dismissed in some quarters in those terms.

But it's worth thinking a little harder about what socialism means in the context of 21st-century business and finance. Perhaps a dash of that broader purpose-over-profits ethos is not as antithetical to successful business practice as we're often told. Perhaps it could actually be a benefit. The world's biggest fund manager, for one, seems to think so.

What do banks and financiers get in return for paying George Osborne £50,000 for one hour of work?

George Osborne presided over a national productivity disaster when he was Chancellor. But the MP for Tatton is certainly making an outstanding personal contribution to repairing some of the damage now.

Last week the House of Commons Register of Members' Financial Interests disclosed Osborne's earnings from outside Parliament since he was sacked from the Cabinet last year. What the record shows is nothing less than a productivity miracle. In October Osborne spent two hours delivering a speech to an outfit called Palmex Derivatives in the City of London for which he received £80,240. That's more than £40,000 per hour of his time. Not even Paul Pogba of Manchester United gets that kind of hourly rate.

Earlier in the same month Osborne gave a speech to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association in New York for just one and a half hours. He expects to receive £69,992 for his efforts; an hourly rate of £46,000.

Osborne's full salary when he was a Chancellor was around £120,000 a year. Assuming that he worked 10 hour days and took five weeks holiday a year his pay rate was around £50 an hour. So since leaving office Osborne has multiplied his personal output per hour by more than 900 times. If only the rest of the economy could bottle some of that productivity-enhancing magic. Maybe we should all get sacked from the Cabinet by Theresa May.

But speeches to financial firms are not Osborne's bread and butter. That will come from four days a month "advising" the colossal US asset manager Blackrock, a job for which he will be paid around £650,000 a year (not including share-based bonuses). Assuming, again, a 10-hour working day, that's £1,350 an hour, still at least 25 times his previous daily rate as a minister.

When he was shadow Chancellor George Osborne talked tough on the need to reform finance, sensing the mood of outrage in the country in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the associated economic carnage. In 2009 he made radical noises about breaking up "too big to fail" banks including Lloyds and the Royal Bank of Scotland, which had been bailed out by the taxpayer at huge public expense.

But that radicalism melted away when he entered 11 Downing Street. He did establish the Independent Commission on Banking headed by Sir John Vickers to look into the case for breaking up the giant banks.

But in his 2011 report, Vickers failed to recommend a split and instead delivered a halfway house known as "ring-fencing". The banks still gripe about that hassle of that reform, but this a pedicure compared to the amputation a full split would have represented.

And as the years went by Osborne talked less and less about financial reform and more about the need to unclip the wings of the banks. Avoiding "the stability of the graveyard" became his catchphrase. The Treasury's door was constantly open to the industry's lobbyists and top executives. In one remarkable episode, he personally intervened to stop the US Department of Justice bringing criminal charges against HSBC for laundering the profits of terrorists and drug dealers. One of Osborne's lucrative speeches in January was to HSBC: £51,328 for two hours of work.

As Chancellor he pushed through regulatory changes with major implications for the savings and pension industry - most of them positive for the bottom lines of those companies. And now Osborne works for the largest asset manager in the world, which plans to pay him almost 10 times his MP's salary while he continues to sit in the House of Commons.

We have no reason to believe that Osborne was motivated, while he was in high office, by the possibility of one day earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year from the financial sector; nor that he took any decision as Chancellor in relation to the industry with anything except the good of the British public uppermost in his mind.

Nevertheless what message does the example of him now being sprayed with cash by giant banks, financial trading companies, asset managers and hedge funds, all within months after leaving office, send? What's the message that goes out to other politicians ascending the greasy pole? It sends the message that it would be wise to be attentive towards the interests of the financial industry because, if your political career is terminated prematurely, these companies can - and do - reward former top politicians in ways that would make a Premier League footballer blush.