Vanguard has an interesting ownership structure where the funds own the Vanguard company. They're basically (but not "officially" as far as I can tell) a non-profit, and that's why their fees tend to be the lowest.
820 karma · joined July 26, 2013
(I personally sued a debt collector in small claims court for wrong number robocalls to my cell phone, and settled for the entire amount I was asking, $500 per call.)
This is what I've always wondered: how the hell do companies like Goldman still exist and get business?
They did:
> Lucky for me, I explained my situation to Amazon customer support – and they knew I wasn’t bitcoin mining all night. Amazon was kind enough to drop the charges this time…
I'm not familiar with German labor laws, but I know this is (typically) illegal in the US and I suspect that can't be different in other first world countries. Is it?
A 0% corporate income tax rate would just allow unlimited tax deferment.
> By 1916, the Ford Motor Company had accumulated a capital surplus of $60 million. The price of the Model T, Ford's mainstay product, had been successively cut over the years while the cost of the workers had dramatically, and quite publicly, increased. The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to end special dividends for shareholders in favor of massive investments in new plants that would enable Ford to dramatically increase production, and the number of people employed at his plants, while continuing to cut the costs and prices of his cars. In public defense of this strategy, Ford declared:
> “My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business. ”
> While Ford may have believed that such a strategy might be in the long-term benefit of the company, he told his fellow shareholders that the value of this strategy to them was not a primary consideration in his plans. The minority shareholders objected to this strategy, demanding that Ford stop reducing his prices when they could barely fill orders for cars and to continue to pay out special dividends from the capital surplus in lieu of his proposed plant investments. Two brothers, John Francis Dodge and Horace Elgin Dodge, owned 10% of the company, among the largest shareholders next to Ford.
I don't have time to read the actual court documents, so I'll assume this is reasonably accurate.
It seems Ford was trying to say "screw shareholder value, we're doing the right thing because we want to support society." This was of course a losing argument. But it sounds like the whole problem was the argument. Couldn't the argument be "we did the right thing and took a short-term loss, but we believe this is in the company's, and by extension the shareholders', best interest because [it will create tons of goodwill | it creates tons of good PR for us | whatever]"?
> Apple Pay works with most of the major credit and debit cards from the top U.S. banks. Just add your participating cards to Passbook and you’ll continue to get all the rewards, benefits, and security of your cards.
I've thought the ideal (from a fairness point of view, not "let's keep the banks' profit intact" point of view) model would be to have cut fees significantly (in the 0.5% area), eliminate rewards (again, merchants in competitive markets will lower prices accordingly), and eliminate the grace period on credit cards. This will mean debit cards would be used day-to-day by most people, and credit cards only when the financing is actually required (not as it is now where many, including myself, use credit cards for everything due to the rewards and pay in full). I prefer this to the current system of merchants paying inflated fees, which are passed onto us in higher prices, and rebated back to us by credit card companies (after taking their cut of course).
What's next, the Apple Phone?
The skills learned in a business administration program, in themselves, are useless for actually creating a product or service to sell or practicing some field (e.g. law, medicine, etc.). The skills taught in such programs instead are about destroying value by trying to milk everything as much as possible, i.e. maximize profits at any cost. This results in dumb short-term thinking - do everything possible to maximize profits this quarter, who cares if the customers leave next quarter. This is why I call them parasites.
Someone might say, "well, isn't that a useful skill in itself, the MBA and [CS|whatever degree] can work together." I disagree. In order to be in business, you need to have something of value to offer in exchange for people's money. Business administration is about sucking value from other people's work.
(Another term for this is "socially responsible investing" and there are indexes, and associated high-fee funds, that claim to seek it. However, I feel this is a very personal issue; I wouldn't use such an index because someone's definition of socially responsible/non-evil may be very different from mine. My opinion is such indexes/funds are just gimmicks with high expense ratios.)
And even if such an approach will most likely lead to lower returns (for example, due to higher fees in paying commissions, though that can be reduced or eliminated by smartly taking advantage of brokerage promos), I'm fine with that. I'll take my $1.00 earned from what I consider to be ethical means vs. $10.00 earned from what I consider to be unethical means.
But yeah, the 0.xxx1% percentage was just exaggeration :P
Of course, as far as I can see this is just a checkbox saying "I agree and meet these standards." No way for them to verify.