41–50 of 119 posts
As Nassim Taleb observed, the problem here is no skin in the game. Bankers keep the upside, but shareholders have to carry the can. It's an agency problem. The fix to all this is dispensing some good solid jail time.
Ah yes, incarceration, the solution to all of American's problems.
How many of these fines are even criminal, let alone worthy of prison time?
As Nassim Taleb observed, the problem here is no skin in the game. Bankers keep the upside, but shareholders have to carry the can. It's an agency problem. The fix to all this is dispensing some good solid jail time.
> shareholders have to carry the can Shareholders hold shares by choice, so they don't "have to" do anything. If there are 22 years of records about which fines were paid, then the market must have already priced in this information a long time ago. Shareholders chose to pay that market price.
5y -33%
Chase +21%
SP500 +44%
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is generally a problem with employees in general, especially as tenures decline. Sales stuffs the channel with products that are later returned as they get their commission. Or they vastly oversell what the product can do. Engineers rack up tech debt to keep the Scrum Master happy and choose technologies based on how good they look on a resume. HR people pass around crappy or abusive employees to other departmen…
> rather than doing the hard work of terminating I don't think that terminating an at-will employee is any hard work. What's hard is to hire a replacement; it can easily take months, and cost months of the employee's salary in the interviewing costs. And somebody got to do the jerk employee's work in the meantime. (And this is in the US; I can't start imagining the hurdles of firing somebody in the EU.)
German (and Workers Council member at my employer) here. Firing incompetent workers is possible here, although you do have to show efforts on your part as well to have improved the situation (e.g. by providing training to the employee), and firing malicious-acting employees (e.g. in cases of theft, violence or intentional property damage) is easy.
European worker protection laws demand good will from both sides, not just from the employee - so for example you can't be fired because you damaged or destroyed a piece of machinery in an accident if the employer hasn't taken reasonable steps to prevent such accidents, including not overloading your employees with work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this agency problem is partially caused by regulators and "good governance" rules who demand that the board is "independent" from the shareholders. But this makes them have less skin in the game and diminishing the effect of fines!
I also found out that in the UK there were bankers on the bank regulation committee. Hmmm, conflict of interest much?
As Nassim Taleb observed, the problem here is no skin in the game. Bankers keep the upside, but shareholders have to carry the can. It's an agency problem. The fix to all this is dispensing some good solid jail time.
> The fix to all this is dispensing some good solid jail time. Ah yes, incarceration, the solution to all of American's problems. How many of these fines are even criminal, let alone worthy of prison time?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> shareholders have to carry the can Shareholders hold shares by choice, so they don't "have to" do anything. If there are 22 years of records about which fines were paid, then the market must have already priced in this information a long time ago. Shareholders chose to pay that market price.
> Shareholders hold shares by choice, so they don't "have to" do anything. That's not how pensions, ETFs, index funds or pretty much anything works.
Yes, it's exactly how that stuff works.
Why is it not the pension managers responsibility to make sure his clients are not invested in these things if there is financial risk?
Or, if you decide to invest in a market-wide ETF, you are explicitly choosing to take the bad with the good.
I love how people think you can outsource decision making to absolve yourself of responsibility.
As Nassim Taleb observed, the problem here is no skin in the game. Bankers keep the upside, but shareholders have to carry the can. It's an agency problem. The fix to all this is dispensing some good solid jail time.
> Bankers keep the upside, but shareholders have to carry the can. While I'm not against throwing corrupt bank execs in jail, shareholders could also take their job seriously and only send people to the board of directors that actually hold the company officials accountable. Unfortunately, an increasingly large amount of stocks is held by "neutral" investors (=passive ETFs) or neutral-ish investors (pension funds, in…
Anecdotally, I rarely hear about China "fining" its egregious corporations, they go straight for the executives. America needs to get its spine back.
Anecdotally, I rarely hear about China "fining" its egregious corporations, they go straight for the executives. America needs to get its spine back.
The culture goes even further. We demand individuals to do pointless self flogging rituals like tediously organizing their recycling just to have it be buried in china. Meanwhile corporations are free to waste as much plastic product as they care to without repercussion. America is all about squeezing the individual for the few in power and wealth.
German here. It's not that hard to separate paper, glass, metal, plastics and remainder waste. Paper, glass and metal are recycled at very high rates (over 80% for paper and glass [1][2] and over 90% for metal), and the separation between plastics and remainder waste allows trash incinerator plants to better control their output and, at least assuming that we get large scale post-consumer plastics recycling plants, we already have the behavior and logistics established in place and only need to divert the streams at the collection level.
The key thing is, this sorting has to happen at the consumer, because filtering out valuables for recycling from a merged waste stream is all but impossible and at least in the case of paper, permanently kills off its recyclability.
[1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/ressourcen-abfall/verwe...
[2] https://www.bmuv.de/themen/wasser-ressourcen-abfall/kreislau...
[3] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/156541/umfrag...