> Behalf Of Dan Minette > > I think that the key ingredient in the lack of transparency is > the inability > of people charged with determining the value of companies to actually > understand what is going on. This is coupled with the present goal of > many/most? leadership teams to maximize stock value. What is truly amazing > about this is that it keeps on going. For example, my former company just > announced another 0.25% quarterly dividend. Yet, the stock price is going > up. If this sorta thing happened for a year or two, I could > understand the > idea of future growth. But, its been going on for at least a decade.
For me, the big thing is Andersen coming a cropper. I'm biased in that, as a contract techwriter, I've seen Andersens come into a project in one area, say providing due diligence, and then work the system over the next few months to end up with the whole lot. I've never much been struck by their ethics. Apologies to any Androids out there on the list. The idea of an auditor also providing project management and financial controller type services to the same company has always, to me, seemed wrong. I know Andersens are not the only ones that do it, I guess it's just that they are the ones I've seen most often. Part of the problem, of course, is all the mega-mergers of the 80s and 90s that formed the Delloite Touche Tohmatsus, KPMG, PriceWaterhouse Coopers etc, but it is about time that the increasing incestuousness of the so called self-regulating watchdogs got cleaned up. This is one of the areas I think the business memes of the minimal government intervention and monitoring are going to have to change. A market can only work where the information flow is full and unrestricted, and patently where you get these mega corporations involved that does not happen. So enforced transparency is needed to make up for it. That, I think, means better control through government. And yes, government needs perhaps to be a little less cosy with business sometime. Australia's public service has become much more like that of the US over the last 15 or so years, with political appointments being made more often to key positions rather than the career public servants. It used to be that a public servant could argue a case for or against a government policy without too much fear of being sacked. That meant that some of the political flights of fancy were tempered with unbiased criticism. That is less likely these days, which means that some patently bad ideas have gone through unexamined. We too have gone through privatisations of power and transport and other industries that have ended up performing less and costing more. And there is occasional talk here of privatising waterboards and the like. "Hello, I live at 25 jackson street and I want to change my water supplier... blah!" And each time the same groups or people seem to end up making all the money. And then there is the stupid duplication of fibre networks in half of each of Melbourne and Sydney, courtesy of Comrade Rupert and King Packer. The other half of each city, BTW, has no fibre access at all. Brett
