481–490 of 609 posts
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That would be actually a nice policy: only allow buybacks using taxed profits. Unfortunately, it's not there yet
Why would that be a good idea?
It's the shareholders cashing out, so rather than a failed business with shares of $0 value, they have money and the loans are someone else's problem.
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You look at these crappy companies and the problem you see is unionised staff? Have you seen the dividends and bonuses at Thames Water, or read the article posted here?
Thames Water's CEO has a $1.5 million pay package which is lower than CEOs of corporations of the same size. The funding for public unions in the UK is $233 billion. Great comparison there.
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Why would that be a good idea?
Lots of corporate tax code is about taxing the money flows from the company to the physical persons. Somehow buybacks weren't taxed until recently.
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Because ticket offices are a costly relic from the 20th century that simply are not needed, as evidenced by the collapsing usage of them.
There's a considerable portion of the population that does not own or feel comfortable using the Internet, and would prefer in-person interactions.
30 years ago Terry Wogan was using his radio 2 breakfast show telling the 40-60 demographic how to send emails and watch his webcam. That demographic are now 70-90. I do sympathise for independent 95 year olds who can't use a ticket machine. I'd rather we spent the money in a far better way -- increasing services for example.
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> Isn't that the whole point of privatisation? By introducing a profit maximisation goal you (supposedly) create a more efficient operation. Right, but efficient at what? The answer is almost invariably 'efficient at making money' - that's the whole point; competition normally forces alignment of incentives, wherein 'better' service (for some value of 'better') results in higher income. Thus a business that provides…
> The answer is almost invariably 'efficient at making money' That's because it's a more general category, not because it's a better category. Going the other way: privatisation can for example invest money up front to make operations cheaper. That example does result in "better at making money" but that money can then be used to lower prices / increase quality / pay shareholders dividends / pay employees higher wage…
Out of these, we often just see
> can then be used to…pay shareholders dividends
During the welfare capitalism of the early 20th century, we did see lower prices, higher quality products, and higher wages. Then Jack Welch and his ilk discovered that you could axe entire departments, lay off thousands of workers, and pay that money to shareholders while your company crashes and burns.
Why invest in making better products than “the commies” if you can make cheap products on par with imports and fire factory workers/QA/research? They learned that if the consumer doesn’t have a competitive choice for a product that will break in 1 year vs one that will last decades, then why not sell 10s of the cheap one over and over?
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What is your point? $1.5 million is used to attract a CEO who can manage a large corporation. That is less than many players on second tier English clubs who are riding the pine. That is a rounding error when considering $233 billion paid to unions.
CEOs have almost no competitive pressure. They are mostly recruited within the upper class. Paying more won't net you a better one.
Yes they do, from rival businesses, superior and new technology, just look at Chat-GPT potentially putting programmers out of work, or telegrams being made redundant by pagers, and text messages and email.
@arethuza
>CEOs of corporations of the same size quite often have to find and retain customers in competitive markets - which is hardly the case with Thames Water?
Water companies are delivering a minimum standard of water, call it the least toxic form of water considering the energy constraints and logistics of delivering water en-masse compared to other methods of obtaining water.
Mains water from a very young age always made me sick, so where possible I use bottled spring water in the kettle, but am currently considering a reverse osmosis water filter, to deionise the water in the house as much as possible.
Deionised water is the best tasting, sweetest tasting water I've ever experienced, and if I listened to the medical experts I should be dead on numerous counts of their assertations. So two fingers up to them as well! LOL
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My country recently (2019) privatized the electricity supply. The infrastructure is owner and operated by a government entity, but the company you buy electricity from is a private entity, and you can choose which supplier you use. Generation was already privatized a long time ago. It was advertised as being able to offer lower prices to the consumer through competition, but all it has done is provided more ways for…
Same thing happened in my country. Fortunately someone decided to create a cooperative and now I can avoid contributing to the profit margin of some private company
When wholesale energy prices spiked last year, followed by a cap being applied to the prices that they could charge, they weren't hedged and several ended up going bankrupt.
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> I believe the best way to make this work is by keeping the network itself in public hands and then having a competition of contributors to the network - e.g. electricity providers that add energy to the grid. One area -- in fact, the only area that I can think of -- where privatisation has mostly worked in the UK is the telecommunications market. Here the networks are in private hands, but the providers are forced…
One thing that can be done for all these services is to allow any private company to offer the customer facing front end (payment, bundling, support etc) which plug into a common wholesale backend.
The UK is increasingly resembling the rest of the world's rentpig. The UK government has made Britain into one massive investment vehicle for foreign capital -- our utilities, leading firms, football teams, landmarks and property all serve to enrich sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. These foreign investors have all received lavish incentives and grants, and in return we have been allowed to live way…