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A comment on WaMu Fails. First major comercial bank to go.. Parent comment

Re:WaMu Fails. First major comercial bank to go. by dhimes on Friday September 26, 2008 @06:57AM (#315908)
In a public company, the pressure to chase quarterly profits exists anyway because of the shareholders. If company A does something of questionable morality or risk, but it nets their shareholders a lot of value, it gets hard for the executives at company B to say 'no' to the strategy, even if they know better.

My suspicion is that this is why some companies start out as good and are later perceived as evil. The game changes once you have legal fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders. It seems to me that it can get very hard to defend your strategy of not maximizing profits when others around you are raking it in.

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Re:WaMu Fails. First major comercial bank to go. by lisp_padawan on Friday September 26, 2008 @01:28PM (#316300)
indeed, corporations are in legal terms considered with legal equivalence to an individual, and a public traded company is legally bound to maximise shareholder profit, we have basically created a legal psychopath, they're (the board, ceo etc) legally bound to do anything within the law to generate profit/growth. As you say, hardly surprising that companies with mottos like 'do no evil' end up censoring bloggers in the PR of China.
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