Fra investorens mund: "A deeper problem than fraudulent reporting is managerial theft.

Steven 🌞 Snedkers billede
Af Steven 🌞 Snedker den 26. januar 2014 - 16:06 [2]

Fra investorens mund: "A deeper problem than fraudulent reporting is managerial theft. Investors have accounting firms and the SEC to protect them but the top managers have their hands on the company checkbook and their friends on the Board of Directors. In the old days if a company did well the managers would send a letter to shareholders: "The economy was booming last year and Blatzco prospered; your dividend is being doubled." In the 1980s and 1990s a more typical response to a boom year was management saying "Blatzco did well because we're such geniuses; we are going to take home all of the improved profit in the form of bonuses and stock options." Jack Welch in Straight from the Gut proudly states that during his 20 years as General Electric CEO the "employees", by which he means himself and some other top managers, went from 0% to 31% ownership of GE. Rephrased, Jack and his golf partners stole 31% of GE from the investors who owned the company in 1980. What's more, thanks to accounting rules that enable unlimited stock option grants without any charge to earnings, none of this had to be reported in financial statements. My cousin used to be an animator at Walt Disney. In the old days of Hollywood a boom and bust cycle of profits was to be expected. It is tough to predict whether a movie will be a hit. But after Michael Eisner joined the company in 1984 successes were attributed to superior management rather than luck. Eisner helped himself to more than $1 billion of the shareholders' money over the years. Thus when Disney ran into a string of flops the company didn't have enough cash to hang on until the next boom. Disney shut down its Los Angeles animation group and will use contract labor in Eastern Europe for future animated features.

It is tough to see how historically high rates of return on common stocks can be maintained in a world where managers steal most of the fruits that stem from the investors' capital."

#GoldmanSachs #Dong #lovligkriminalitet

http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/money

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Steven Snedkers billede

Og i en lidt anden aftapning: "Right now the shareholders of a public company are at the mercy of management.  Without an expensive proxy fight, the shareholders cannot nominate or vote for their own representatives on the Board of Directors.  The CEO nominates a slate of golfing buddies to serve on the Board, while he or she will in turn serve on their boards.  Lately it seems that the typical CEO’s golfing buddies have decided on very generous compensation for the CEO, often amount to a substantial share of the company’s profits.  The golfing buddies have also decided that the public shareholders should be diluted by stock options granted to top executives and that the price on those options should be reset every time the company’s stock takes a dive (probably there is a lot of option price resetting going on right now!  Wouldn’t want your CEO to lose incentive).

If current trends continue, the CEO and the rest of the executive team will eventually have salaries that consume 100 percent of a public company’s profits and they will collect half ownership of the company via stock options every few years.  Who would want to invest in that?  Not sophisticated investors, it turns out.  Big universities such as Harvard and Yale have reduced their exposure to U.S. public companies down to about 15 percent.  Instead of buying a forestry company and watching the managers steal the trees, they’ve chosen to own forests directly.  Given the laziness of university administrators, it should have been a wake-up call to the SEC that something needed to change when Harvard preferred to run its own forests.

Corporations are supposed to operate for the benefit of shareholders.  The only way that this can happen is if a majority of Directors are nominated by and selected by shareholders.  It may have been the case that social mores in the 1950s constrained CEO-nominated Boards from paying their friend $50 million per year, but those mores are apparently gone and the present structure in which management regulates itself serves only to facilitate large-scale looting by management."

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/10/09/time-for-corporate-governance-reform/

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Ja, dette er et dumt spørgsmål med et nemt svar, men det er der kun fordi spam-robotter er for dumme til at besvare den slags, mens mennesker ikke er.
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