There’s so much that could be streamline about corporate financials and taxes. Finance is usually less than 4% of headcount though. Even if you cut it 50% that’s only a 2 percent savings of headcount expenses which are ~30-40% at a tech company. It’s not going to move the needle.
I wonder how much time actually goes into the quarterly filings. I’ve never worked for a company that didn’t do internal monthly reporting anyway. Some are even doing it weekly depending on the area. Anything with sales is reported weekly.
I think the bigger value is being able to think longer-term instead of stressing to hit a target every quarter. A lot of times companies pull in sales to hit the current quarter which makes the next quarter far more challenging. That keeps happening until there’s nothing to pull in, and you get an epic miss.
Thinking short-term also prevents proper investment in future products. Companies get caught in the rut of only designing new versions of existing products, since designing truly new products for new markets would require a large budget increase. Very few companies redeploy staff and rebalance across products aggressively enough. Budgeting is typically baseline plus some percent increase which is beyond stupid. It’s the lazy way out.
Work in a public company. We do six-monthly re-plans and annual commits on budgets, etc. Not really quarterly driven (other then trying to ensure we hit our sales). Anything strategic or product is long term (several months to several year effort).
Quarterly report is not the cause of short-termism. Bezos and Buffett both report quarterly, and both are famous for optimizing for the long term. It’s up to the CEO’s to properly coach the investors. In Bezos’ case, he wrote a letter stating from the get-go Amazon is not optimizing for the short term.
I am reading all the past Bershire letters. Buffett said time and time again a company deserves the investors it gets and vice versa. That’s why he put in so much energy into communicating with Bershire shareholders. He wants to get the long term people and shoo the short term ones away.
Short-termism stems from CEO’s and managers trying to pump up stock price for their own financial gain.
You only get that sort of leeway when you produce. They have both proven to produce value.
UBNT recently said they won’t do quarterly guidance only annual. Im not sure how that will go. Everyone will react to a quarterly number and try to determine what it means I terms of beating or missing the annual number. The CEO is a student of Jobs, since he worked at AAPL. Jobs hated Wall Street.
I remember seeing some NTNX slides cheering their fast growth rate. So when you have CEO’s actively cheerleading short term fast growths you can’t turn around and blame Wall Street for focusing so much on the short term.
Let’s see, so far 5 people from his campaign from the bottom to the top have either pled guilty to felonies are have been convicted (Mike Flynn - NSA, George P - Foreign Policy, Rick Gates - deputy campaign manager & transition person, Michael Cohen - finance chair, personnel fixer, etc, etc, and last but not least Paul Manafort - campaign manager).
The first 2 congress members to back him are in serious financial crime troubles - Chris Collins for massive insider trading that will likely impact several other congress members and now Duncan Hunter (for massive misuse of campaign funds, also likely to impact other congress members).
We know a number of others in his admin are guilty of stuff that nobody is taking any action on just because of the sheer amount of crap being thrown out…
At what point do you say, this administration is the swamp and they are completely corrupt. We are barely 2 years into this administration and the number of guilty pleas and indictions are coming fast and furious.
“Mr. Cohen, 51 years old, pleaded guilty to a total of eight criminal counts: Two counts of illegal campaign contributions related to payments to women; five counts of evading personal income taxes from 2012 to 2016; and one count of making false statements to a financial institution.”
This means Cohen admits wrong doing, escaping Trump.
He states that the illegal payments and the campaign finance violations were on the direction of then candidate for president and now president in the guilty plea. So Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator in Cohen’s guilty plea
Press people are famous to manipulate statements to increase their ratings/viewers. This is where I doubt the Press & News unless someone clearly give the written transcript of Cohen exactly what he said to the judge !.
I see shane harris statement may imply anyone for the government office, not necessarily Trump.
This is exactly the repeat of Clinton, everyone knows the truth, but can not be proved !
How will this affect midterm election? Will it help or backfire?
If Democrats can win the house, there’s still not enough votes to do a real impeachment. But it can bring an impeachment and try to waste Trump’s time so that he has no time to campaign for re-election.
But for this midterm, the risk of impeachment can actually help GOP to get voters out. Pelosi does not mention impeachment, probably trying to avoid this.
The real impact from this investigation can be minimal, I think the effect is to distract Trump and wait for him to make more mistakes under distress. Russian is not an issue, but they investigated Cohen instead.
So if the law enforcement is determined to put you in jail, they will scare, trick and wait for the chance. Big government is scary even for the powerful people.
