Transparent disclosure by companies

Chris Beggy news at kippona.com
Thu Oct 25 18:46:57 PDT 2001


Chris Burford <cburford at gn.apc.org> writes:


> Commentator suggested that investors might start shaping their
> decisions by whether a company has a good disclosure policy.
>
> This little detail would be a major step towards modifying the
> capitalist laws of private ownership of the means of production, which
> protect secrecy in gaining monopoly advantage in markets with changing
> technology. It accepts that the company exists in a much wider
> economic and social system.

Maybe this is the trend in Europe, where disclosure is voluntary, and there are socialist constituencies.

The US already has laws requiring disclosure and independent auditing for public corporations. Yet we have:

Microsoft: twice guilty in the last 10 years of illegally using

their monopoly to crush competitors and extort PC makers

ArcherDanielsMidland: guilty of colluding with competitors to

fix the market price of lysine.

Cendant: accounting irregularities including recording of

fictitious revenues, false coding of services sold

to customers, irregular charges against merger reserves

and more.

This behavior is bad enough to make capitalists spit! It's true, investors dump the stocks of companies that lie and overstate their revenues, e.g. Cendant. It seems that in the case of MSFT and ADM, investors discount the risk that these companies are chronic lawbreakers, and hope they win in court and don't get caught the next time.

Chris



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