Great
I always get told I'm a sony fanboy, so what do I do? While looking for a new digital camera for a decent price, I grab an Olympus, low and behold suddenly it's owned (partly) by Sony. Is there no escape?
Sony is reportedly about to invest ¥50bn ($642m) in beleaguered digital camera-maker Olympus, giving it a 10 per cent stake in the firm. The Japanese electronics giant will set up a joint business with Olympus to develop new medical equipment and get a seat on the board next year, three sources whispered to Reuters. Olympus …
So a single Japanese medical equipment/photographic technology company was caught doing some creative accounting ... I seem to recall a news story from a few years ago where the worlds banks were not only cooking their own books but conspiring with each other and the supposed regulators to maintain and sustain the financial fictions.
In the case of Olympus, who hurt no-one but themselves when they were found out, those involved are prosecuted, pilloried and hung out to dry.
In the case of the banks who damn near brought the world to it's knees (a position from which much of the world is still only slowly getting up from) the executives get given bonuses and governments line up to give the banks themselves even more money (taken from our pockets) to keep them going.
Can anyone figure this out ?
What interests me here is the remark attributed to former chairman Kikukawa Tsuyoshi - «I take full responsibility for what happened». What is meant by this ? Is Mr Kikukawa going to dig in his pockets and pull out that 1.7 thousand million USD ? Otherwise, just how is this «responsibility-taking» to be accomplished ?...
I certainly can't figure it out, just as I can't figure out why people allow the bank executives and Wall-Street high flyers to walk away scot free. Time to break out the pitchforks ?...
Henri
In the case of Olympus, who hurt no-one but themselves when they were found out, those involved are prosecuted, pilloried and hung out to dry.
They will have hurt shareholders, who when looking at the books for company info, will have seen a picture of health, not debt. These shareholders include pension funds, so Olympus will have still hurt someone other than themselves.
But I don't disagree the bankers should be held accountable and sentenced in an appropriate manor!
True, but technically a shareholder is a part owner of a business so if the impact is only on share value then the "damage" is essentially still confined to the business.
The fact that some of those shareholders weren't actually *investing* in the business but simply looking to realise a capital gain on some amount of money (and that this was part of a larger portfolio that constituted what they considered "their business") is arguably their problem. Such "investors" can lose even when the companies they gamble on are not cooking the books.
That's part of the problem right there - the transformation of stock markets from a place where people truly invest in businesses to a place where fund managers play roulette with other people's money on the strength of a promise that they can do it better than people can themselves, a fallacy that is not in fact reflected in reality.