Corporate Fraud Cases Often Spare Individuals
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/business/more-fraud-settlements-for-companies-but-rarely-individuals.html?_r=2&hp
CEOs have wwwaaaayyyyy too much power today. They control the board when it is supposed to be the other way around and in nearly a majority of cases the CEO doesn’t even own any stock (but has lots of stock options!). The way things are _supposed_ to go is that stock holders elect a board of their own choosing which then hires a CEO to operate the company for the greatest good for the stock holders. Plenty of liberals think that that is wrong, that somehow CEOs should be directed to operate the company for the greatest good for society, but that should be up to stock holders. Today, that simply isn’t the case no matter how you slice and dice. Even institutional investors (who I used to complain about because of their outsized influence (due to all the stock they buy) and short-term attention span (they often just want to hold for a few years)) are now treated like second class citizens (not sure why they put up with that, but I betcha a lot of the institutional reps are getting side paychecks to wear a muzzle). I used to lament that US companies had such a short-term planning horizon (often 3-5 years when the Japanese had 25 years or more), but that has become laughable now as typical planning ‘horizons’ are now 2-3 quarters and are all about maximizing the bonuses of the executives (generally at the expense of the long-term health of the company).
You would think that the GOP and Tea Party would be up in arms about the hijacking of shareholder rights by greedy CEOs, yet that isn’t the case. Gotta wonder why that is so…
