Yushui Village in Lijiang, Yunnan, with snow mountain backdrop and cascading waterfalls.
9/18/2008
The Loot Chain
The trouble financial institutions in the US did not happen yesterday. It did not happen last year. It happened many years back. But all these institutions were reporting glorious profits all these years. And the top management were paying themselves crazy for turning in profits after profits. And they all looked so real.
These are high profile public companies and are audited annually by the top auditing firms. Cannot be wrong. And there are top notched regulators regulating them. Everything is above board. Now they have turned out to be cans of worms.
Why nobody knows? Why no whistleblowers? Yes, there were. Read a Bloomberg article posted in http://www.littlespeck.com/ for the full story. Whistleblowers were threatened inspite the laws to protect them, and threatened by the regulators who were supposed to look at these companies carefully.
The moral of the story is to check who are behind these looters before you blow the whistle.
US$900b have been pumped in so far to save all the fallen blue chip companies. Would the investors be able to take a single cent back from the management who have been looting the companies? Would the auditors and regulators be hanged? Unlikely. They are all in the loot chain.
Would this happen here? Unlikely. We have the best brains administering the system and watching over them like a hawk. Even people who bought a single lot of 20c share and recorded the date wrongly will be caught. This is how meticulous and detailed we are. We have the resources. And there will be more resources to watch over the big boys.
Then we have the best auditing firms, and top notched management team. If they play around with the accounting system they will be caught. No way will it happen here. But if 'sway sway' that it happens to some of the big companies, just pray hard that they are not managed by foreign talents. For most foreign talents will come in with a golden parachute. Anything wrong, company goes bust, they will still bail out safely with a soft landing and a big bag of loot to retire happily.
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