"History is a wonderful thing, if only it was true"
-Tolstoy

Friday, June 18, 2010

Caution

Not only are taxes set to go up on CapGains and Dividends, corporations themselves are at risk

FT.com / Columnists / John Gapper - Oil has become the new tobacco:

"Other companies may look at all this and believe that they and their investors are liability-free because they have not spilled oil in the gulf, sold cigarettes, made cars that do not brake or constructed synthetic collateralised debt obligations.

That would be a mistake. Many of S&P’s dividend aristocrats rely on the goodwill of consumers and politicians to keep accumulating cash for payouts. The mood following the bail-out of Wall Street is now so hostile to corporations, and public budgets so strained, that any slip would make them vulnerable.

Robert Reich, the former US labour secretary who wants the US government to put BP into temporary receivership although many of its investors are UK-based, defines the affair as a “contest between citizenship interests and shareholder interests”."

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