Shareholder Protection Quotes

good quality corporate bonds yielding 10% or better with great call protection.

Diversification is a protection against ignorance, a confession that you do not know the businesses you own.

A year earlier, no company had been accorded more faith than Enron; by late November, none was trusted less. And so, a gasping gurgle, a desperate SOS: Enron, the emblem of free markets, the champion of deregulation, reached into its depleted treasury and forked over $100,000 to each of the major political parties' campaign war chests. Then, it shuttered its online trading unit - its erstwhile gem. On November 28, Standard & Poor's downgraded Enron to junk-bond level - which triggered provisions in Enron's debt requiring it to immediately repay billions of its obligations. This it could not do. Its stock was seventy cents and falling, and, now, no gatekeepers and no credit remained. Accordingly, in the first week of December, Enron, the archetype of shareholder value, availed itself of the time-honored protection for those who have lost their credit: bankruptcy.

The best protection against inflation, according to Buffett, is your own earning power. If you constantly increase your earning power, you’ll be sure to get your share of the economic pie. The next best thing is to own wonderful businesses, especially those that have low capital requirements.

So I’m just proposing that we level the playing field and make those woke shareholders, like BlackRock or Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management, bear the same liability as any ordinary social activist when they engage in ordinary social activism through the companies that they invest in. Limited shareholder liability was never meant to protect well-heeled woke investors from the consequences of their actions during PR stunts at woke parades.

Speculators, meanwhile, have seized control of the global economy and the levers of political power. They have weakened and emasculated governments to serve their lust for profit. They have turned the press into courtiers, corrupted the courts, and hollowed out public institutions, including universities. They peddle spurious ideologies—neoliberal economics and globalization—to justify their rapacious looting and greed. They create grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge citizens into crippling forms of debt peonage. And they have been stealing staggering sums of public funds, such as the $65 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that have been unloaded each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash.21 They feed like parasites off of the state and the resources of the planet. Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money. They are no different from the detested speculators who were hanged in the seventeenth century, when speculation was a capital offense. The obscenity of their wealth is matched by their utter lack of concern for the growing numbers of the destitute. In early 2014, the world’s 200 richest people made $13.9 billion, in one day, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.22 This hoarding of money by the elites, according to the ruling economic model, is supposed to make us all better off, but in fact the opposite happens when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, as economist Thomas Piketty documents in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.23 The rest of us have little or no influence over how we are governed, and our wages stagnate or decline. Underemployment and unemployment become chronic. Social services, from welfare to Social Security, are slashed in the name of austerity. Government, in the hands of speculators, is a protection racket for corporations and a small group of oligarchs. And the longer we play by their rules the more impoverished and oppressed we become. Yet, like

Given the inefficiency of the Indian bureaucracy to effectively implement national objectives, a possible approach (as suggested by Prof. Kelkar once), to salvage the existing PSEs (including all its stakeholders) and to protect the State’s investment in them, would be to transfer all Government’s share in all PSEs to a holding company set up under the Disinvestment Act, at once. 8.4.4 Government should disinvest majority of its share (55 %) in the holding company to Indian mutual funds, and insurance companies through the book-building route, twenty per cent of its share to small investors through IPO (Initial Public Offer), five percent of its share to foreign institutional investors, ten per cent of its share through ADR/GDR in the foreign capital market (this would lead to improved corporate governance as listing in foreign markets, particularly NYSE has stringent requirements), and retain just ten per cent of share in the holding company. 8.4.5 The holding company should be managed by a reputed professional board (initially appointed by the Government through wide consultations and subsequently confirmed by the shareholders of the holding company). The Board would be responsible to its shareholders. The Board of the individual PSEs (which would no longer be a PSE as they would become subsidiaries of the holding private company) would be appointed by the holding company and be responsible to the Board of the holding company.

You do not adequately protect yourself by being half awake while others are sleeping.

In the weeks and months after Immelt left GE in 2017, a parade of negative stories and embarrassing disclosures revealed major problems that sent the company’s stock into a long decline. Conversations about what happened inevitably shifted to blame, and Immelt was the obvious target. He had spent sixteen years at the top and, regardless of what Welch had left for him, he’d had plenty of time to fix it. But there was plenty of blame to go around. Perhaps most of it should be placed on the board of directors, the independent group that oversees the CEO. Board members claimed to have been unaware of problems and to have gotten bad guidance from external advisers, and they said they didn’t understand how the company went from good to bad seemingly overnight. Some directors had no experience in GE’s business lines, others had trouble staying awake during meetings, and many stumbled away from GE’s collapse wondering, How could we have known? It had been their job to know, however, and their job to ask the hard questions that weren’t fully answered, or were never asked at all. It was their job to oversee management, and it was their job to protect investors from fatal hubris. Still, the path ultimately leads back to Immelt. As chairman, he was also responsible for steering the board. There is no doubt that GE’s size and complexity, which grew exponentially under Immelt, made it difficult or even impossible to manage. The CEO of a company is responsible for its daily functions and for managing its operations, however vast. The chairman guides the board, which is responsible for overseeing management and the CEO. When the board chair and CEO are the same person, the top executive is essentially his own boss. It can only get worse with time if a chairman remakes the board to his own liking. Simply put, it is terrible governance to give so much power to a single person and so little voice to shareholders. That is one reason this governance structure has been slowly fading from corporate America since the Enron era.

They shut the door. The best funds often close to new investors—permitting only their existing shareholders to buy more. That stops the feeding frenzy of new buyers who want to pile in at the top and protects the fund from the pains of asset elephantiasis. It’s also a signal that the fund managers are not putting their own wallets ahead of yours. But the closing should occur before—not after—the fund explodes in size. Some companies with an exemplary record of shutting their own gates are Longleaf, Numeric, Oakmark, T. Rowe Price, Vanguard, and Wasatch. They don’t advertise. Just as Plato says in The Republic that the ideal rulers are those who do not want to govern, the best fund managers often behave as if they don’t want your money. They don’t appear constantly on financial television or run ads boasting of their No. 1 returns.

As you will come to see, much is governed by the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. There are powerful, influential, and enormously wealthy industries that stand to lose a vast amount of money if Americans start shifting to a plant-based diet. Their financial health depends on controlling what the public knows about nutrition and health. Like any good business enterprise, these industries do everything in their power to protect their profits and their shareholders. [...] The entire system— government, science, medicine, industry, media, and academia— promotes profits over health, technology over food, and confusion over clarity. Most, but not all, of the confusion about nutrition is created in legal, fully disclosed ways and is disseminated by unsuspecting, well-intentioned people, whether they are researchers, politicians, or journalists. The most damaging aspect of the system is not sensational, nor is it likely to create much of a stir upon its discovery. It is a silent enemy that few people see and understand.

As former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan grudgingly acknowledged in his testimony to Congress, there had been a ‘flaw’ in the theory underpinning the Western world’s approach to financial regulation. The presumption that ‘the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks, is such that they were best capable of protecting shareholders and equity in the firms’ had proved incorrect.8 Contrary to the claims of the ‘efficient markets hypothesis’ which underpinned that assumption, financial markets had systematically mispriced assets and risks, with catastrophic results.

But Obert Tanner’s greatest gift to his employees was contained in the provisions he made for the company after his death. He arranged for his 65-percent interest—the other 35 percent was owned by his nephew and the nephew’s family—to be put into a so-called one-hundred-year trust, under the terms of which the company could not be sold, merged, or taken public. Tanner’s express purpose was to protect his employees by ensuring that, as long as the trust remained in effect, their jobs would not be subject to the financial priorities of outside shareholders. (By law, the trust could last only as long as the lifetime of any descendants alive at the time of Obert’s death, plus twenty-one years.)

Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money.

Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money. They are no different from the detested speculators who were hanged in the seventeenth century, when speculation was a capital offense. The obscenity of their wealth is matched by their utter lack of concern for the growing numbers of the destitute

The semi-liquid status of interval funds also works as a protection for shareholders. When investors hear bad news about a stock, they panic and a massive sell-off follows, which sends the share price down to dirt cheap levels. That can’t happen with interval fund shares because they can’t be sold at will.

But this may be the place to remark that the very fact that the unit costs of electricity, gas, and telephone services have advanced so much less than the general price index puts these companies in a strong strategic position for the future.3 They are entitled by law to charge rates sufficient for an adequate return on their invested capital, and this will probably protect their shareholders in the future as it has in the inflations of the past.

Protect people, not jobs. Protect jobs, not corporations. Protect corporations, not shareholders. End of list.

corporation ought to be free to pursue activities that go beyond the pursuit of profit—America is a free country, after all—but to the extent that it does, its social-activist shareholders shouldn’t receive any special protection from direct liability. There is no government regulatory action needed here. Just a simple legal fix—arguably a form of deregulation—that clarifies that the construct of limited liability is… well, limited.

In Berkshire Hathaway’s 2007 letter to shareholders,2 Warren Buffett explains that the kind of companies he likes to invest in are ‘companies that have a) a business we understand; b) favourable long-term economics; c) able and trustworthy management; and d) a sensible price tag. A truly great business must have an enduring “moat” that protects excellent returns on invested capital.

If we shift our focus from relentless productivity, we may collectively rethink our societal metrics for success. A society obsessed with shareholder value, GDP, and corporate wealth creation will value and reward those who drive those metrics upward: bankers, venture capitalists, day traders. A society obsessed with quality of life, care, and societal health values and rewards a very different set of people. Before and during the pandemic, our most “essential” workers struggled to receive equitable pay and adequate protections, precisely because their work wasn’t valued. But what if it was? And what if one of the key steps to getting there was for nonessential workers (like us!) to change the way we see ourselves?

So they crafted a clever solution… one that already existed, actually. Counterintuitively, it was actually the legal mandate to maximize shareholder value. To protect against corporations becoming behemoth monsters, corporations needed to be restricted to their purposes.

As Robert Kiyosaki learned during his study of admiralty law, corporations came into common usage in the 1500s to protect investors in maritime ventures. Prior to the popular use of corporations, investors would come together as a partnership, outfit a ship, and send it out for trading purposes. If the ship was lost at sea, the investors could not only lose everything but also be personally sued by various creditors. Of course, this exposure deterred people from risk taking and discouraged economic activity. Seeing this, the English Crown and courts allowed for the charter of corporations whereby risks and liabilities could be limited to the corporation itself. The shareholders, the investors in the corporation, were liable only to the extent of their contribution to the business. This was a significant development in world economic history.

The endowment effect helps unlock the mystery of why Harold Staw twice would not sell his stores. In his battle with the Texas shareholders, in which his good friend and lawyer defected to the other side, he was endowed to the California stores in a way that those on the other side of the suit were not. He was unwilling to sell the California stores, stores he had created and built, to protect the value of the Texas stores, stores he had not created and built.

There was one major problem with this provision. International Match did not have 17 million dollars. Indeed, International Match did not have any money. Remember that Ivar previously had moved all of the cash International Match had raised from the gold debentures to Continental, the Liechtenstein subsidiary. Then, he had used the cash from the participating preferred shares to repay the gold debentures. That meant all the money was gone. In order to comply with the secret Poland contract, International Match would need to raise another 17 million dollars right away. In other words, Ivar had signed a promise to give Poland 17 million dollars he didn’t have. The second Poland agreement also contained some extraordinary protections for International Match, terms that would have impressed Lee Higginson’s bankers, if they had seen them. For example, Ivar obtained an agreement that if “for one reason or another” Garanta did not earn enough profit to pay the 24 percent interest payments due to Poland, those payments would be covered by “the income of the Polish Alcohol Monopoly or … the Polish Tobacco Monopoly.”34 In other words, Ivar obtained a promise of payment supported not only by the match monopoly, but by unaffiliated monopolies on alcohol and tobacco. Ivar also included a binary foreign exchange option, a kind of derivative contract, to protect International Match from any declines in the value of the dollar: “International Match Corporation shall have the right to obtain payment of interest in Dutch guilders or US dollars according to its choice and for all such payments one dollar shall be counted as 2½ guilders.”35 Given that Garanta’s shareholders would be nominated by Dr Glowacki, how would Ivar retain control of Garanta? Here, as well, Ivar created another innovative financial provision: During the first four years until October 1, 1929, International Match Corporation shall have the right to appoint the managing director of Garanta who is alone entitled to sign for the company. On or after October 1, 1929, International Match Corporation has the right to acquire 60 percent of the shares at par.36 This option term secured both initial control over Garanta and the right to own a majority of Garanta’s shares in the future. Either way, Ivar, not Dr Glowacki, would have control.

The empty apartments. They’re the key to what I have planned. I need to establish a foothold. I want you to move into one. I’m asking all my warriors to do that, minus the ones I need for protection here on the barge, of course.” “The empties are real?” Another one of those Qaanaaq stories that people loved to tell, right up there with the heat-resistant spiders that supposedly infested the geothermal pipes, and the threat of Russian invasion. Allegedly, it was common practice for shareholders to keep some of their holdings off the market. A sort of gentleperson’s agreement, to artificially inflate prices by increasing demand by keeping supply low. Soq didn’t doubt that the empties existed, but they were pretty sure their number was exaggerated, as was the extent of the conspiracy behind it. The more likely reason was the simple thoughtless wickedness of the rich, who had more money than they knew what to do with, who didn’t need the rental income and could keep an apartment empty for Grandma’s once-a-year visit or in memory of a loved one dead for decades. Either explanation was unacceptable. Shareholders were wise to keep themselves hidden, because surely Soq wasn’t the only one who would gladly stomp them to death if given the chance.

Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money. They are no different from the detested speculators who were hanged in the seventeenth century, when speculation was a capital offense.

Managing Church Culture As leaders we do not just make big culture changes, we manage culture constantly. To manage culture, church leaders will need to influence and shape the foundational beliefs of the church community, while helping those beliefs find meaningful expression. More than just providing a picture of a future reality, culture-shaping leaders help establish the worldview necessary to bring about that future. Managing culture is an invasive, sweeping, and ongoing effort. All too often, leaders underestimate the time and the constant pressure required for managing church culture. As a culture is forming and old worldviews are being transformed, there are adjustment periods filled with tension, trial and error, and lots of rehashing of conversations. Changing practices or strategies is one thing, but driving change while protecting and shaping culture is quite another. And changes in practice do not last if they are not used to help create a new culture and are not grounded in that culture. This challenging paradox points to the power of culture. The culture cannot be shaped easily, but it must be managed well or a new approach and vision can have unexpected effects on culture. Managing culture in the church is not simply an act of going from one strategy to another. It’s not just changing a mission statement or language to get a better result. We are not like the world who attempts to find the right set of values to maximize shareholder value or increase market share. Our desire to shape church culture is a direct action to lead the body of Christ to follow the rule of God. The worldview we are forming in our church is not an arbitrary set of altruistic values. The culture we form in our churches is the set of beliefs and behaviors of God’s people as they strive by faith to obey God’s Word. So, church leaders who labor to lead church culture are actually leading our churches to repent of common idols, to reject common lies, to forsake ungodly behaviors, and to embrace the lordship of Jesus over the Church.

Rule 14e-3 does not protect shareholders. It hurts them because it makes value-increasing takeovers, and the increases in wealth that they create, less likely.

As you will come to see, much is governed by the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. There are powerful, influential and enormously wealthy industries that stand to lose a vast amount of money if Americans start shifting to a plant-based diet. Their financial health depends on controlling what the public knows about nutrition and health. Like any good business enterprise, these industries do everything in their power to protect their profits and their shareholders.

Forming a corporation is simple. Essentially, you file a document that creates an independent legal entity with a life of its own. It has its own name, business purpose, and tax identity with the IRS. As such, it—the corporation—is responsible for the activities of the business. In this way, the owners, or shareholders, are protected. The owners’ liability is limited to the monies they used to start the corporation, not all of their other personal assets. If an entity is to be sued it is the corporation, not the individuals behind this legal entity.

Koch’s oil gathering division delivered a steady flow of cash and profits into the company. This money gave Charles Koch a chance to put his management theories to the test. He encouraged his employees to look for new growth opportunities and to act like entrepreneurs. He wanted to lead by example. In his first years as head of Koch Industries, Charles Koch put together one of the most brilliant and profitable deals in the history of Koch Industries. The deal involved an oil refinery. Since the late 1950s, Fred Koch had owned a minority share in the Great Northern oil refinery outside of Minneapolis, near the Pine Bend Bluffs natural reserve. The other shareholders in the refinery were an oil tycoon named J. Howard Marshall II and the Great Northern Oil Company. In 1969, the refinery didn’t look like a gold mine. Competition in the sector was fierce, with new refineries being put into production monthly. But the Pine Bend refinery, as everyone called it, had a secret source of profits. And this source of profits could be traced to exactly the kind of government intervention that Hayek hated most. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower capped the amount of oil that could be imported into the United States, in one of the federal government’s many ploys to protect domestic oil drillers. (Imported oil was often cheaper than domestic oil, so US drillers wanted it kept out.) But there was a loophole in that law that allowed unlimited imports from Canada. As it happened, Canada was the primary source of oil processed at the Pine Bend refinery. Pine Bend was one of only four refineries in the nation that was able to buy cheaper imported oil in unlimited quantities, giving it a huge advantage over firms that were forced to buy mostly domestic oil.