Aizle wrote:
Diamondeye wrote:
Hardly. I'm certain executives engage in at least as much self-preservation as anyone else, but you don't hear about corporations like Union Pacific, Huntington-Ingalls, General Dynamics, or General Electric suffering major collapses because they tried to boost short term stock gains. You're focusing excessively on companies that are highly visible to the general consumer, and on those that are noted for the type of behavior you're criticizing.
Not every type of business lends itself to even attempting the strategy you're describing.
Note a similarity in all those companies you list as well as Lydiaa's? All companies that are more than 50 to 100 years old with a long corporate history that was formed long before the current practices that are very common in the general business world.
You are of course correct that there are companies that don't behave as I've laid out, but if you look at the number of companies like them compared to the number that are similar to how I've described I think you'll find that they are a small minority.
On the contrary, you have presented no reason whatsoever to think that stable companies are a small minority. If what you were saying were true, we would, as Rynar pointed out, be in a constant state of economic crashes, and no one would bother to invest in much of anything because they would know that almost any company they invested in could collapse at any time.
You have this image of executives, stockholders, and boards as universally short-sighted and concerned only with petty gain in the moment. That is not the typical situation, or almost no enterprise would be workable at all.
As for the companies I cited, it isn't their age that makes them stable, its the fact that they engage in business that is steady over time, and is not easily subject to the whims of the consumer. General Motors can be suddenly hit by a major shift in car buyer attitudes, but Union Pacific hauls steel the same way regardless of how the public feels about what use that steel is put to.