Alfred Woody's Kewl Blog [ 椼森 ]

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

新加坡‧起訴同居富婆‧男子獲判4公司40%股份

（新加坡）男子起訴曾與他同居6年的富婆，要求對方買下過去送他的公司股份；法庭最後裁決男子可獲得5家公司當中4家的40%股份，而富婆也須買下這些股份。

但起訴人林志壯（40歲）不能獲得第5間公司任何股份。他擁有這家公司的0.001%股份，被他起訴的富婆陳淑娟（46歲，商人）曾在今年6月向他出價要買下股份，但他堅持他有權獲得當中40%股份。

司法委員羅賜安在判詞中指出，起訴人只在公司扮演“周邊”角色。答辯人為他“製造工作”，避免被他覺得她把他當成小白臉。

羅賜安司法委員認為答辯人的一些行為確實欺壓了身為小股東的起訴人。

富婆被令購買的股份，股價將交由獨立估價師估算。起訴人之前要求以450萬元（1080萬令吉）脫售公司股份。

司法委員羅賜安在111頁判詞中指出，起訴人林志壯從不是陳淑娟所成立公司的真正合伙人。他取得的股份是陳淑娟贈送給他。雖然他分文未付，但還是公司股東。

林志壯聲稱，他和答辯人在2003年的協議，兩人的股份比例為60%（答辯人）和40%。

陳淑娟公司內欺壓男子

他聲稱陳淑娟在5間合夥公司裡欺壓他，不但革除他的執行董事職位，也不准他參與管理公司，更不分發股息。他因此起訴陳淑娟和5家以“iPreci ation”為名的公司，要求高庭下令辯方以合理價格購買他名下的股份。

陳淑娟曾在2005年獲頒“新崛起最佳旅遊業傑出企業家”獎。她成立的幾家以“iPrec iation”為名的公司經營物色和售賣藝術品的生意。

林志壯也指陳淑娟挪用公司800萬元，並指出公司有餘款1000萬元，陳淑娟卻不分紅。

稱林志壯非真正合伙人

陳淑娟則辯稱公司是她創立，林志壯不是真正合伙人。她是看在兩人的關係而把股份分給他。

司法委員同意是陳淑娟帶動公司業務，陳淑娟有專長、人脈和熱忱，公司的資金也是她所注入的。

陳淑娟原籍香港，1997年底結束當地的畫廊生意到新加坡，在卡拉OK酒廊經由朋友介紹認識起訴人。兩人後來成為密友，並在1999年同居。不過，他們維持六年同居關係後，在2005年分手。

Economists Are Trained to Ignore the Real World

As I have repeatedly noted, mainstream economists and financial advisors have been using faulty and unrealistic models for years. See this, this, this, this, this and this.

And I have pointed out numerous times that economists and advisors have a financial incentive to use faulty models. For example, I pointed out last month:

The decision to use faulty models was an economic and political choice, because it benefited the economists and those who hired them.

For example, the elites get wealthy during booms and they get wealthy during busts. Therefore, the boom-and-bust cycle benefits them enormously, as they can trade both ways.

Specifically, as Simon Johnson, William K. Black and others point out, the big boys make bucketloads of money during the booms using fraudulent schemes and knowing that many borrowers will default. Then, during the bust, they know the government will bail them out, and they will be able to buy up competitors for cheap and consolidate power. They may also bet against the same products they are selling during the boom (more here), knowing that they'll make a killing when it busts.

But economists have pretended there is no such thing as a bubble. Indeed, BIS slammed the Fed and other central banks for blowing bubbles and then using "gimmicks and palliatives" afterwards.

It is not like economists weren't warning about booms and busts. Nobel prize winner Hayek and others were, but were ignored because it was "inconvenient" to discuss this "impolite" issue.

Likewise, the entire Federal Reserve model is faulty, benefiting the banks themselves but not the public.

However, as Huffington Post notes:
The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found.

This dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic economists. In the Fed's thrall, the economists missed it, too.

"The Fed has a lock on the economics world," says Joshua Rosner, a Wall Street analyst who correctly called the meltdown. "There is no room for other views, which I guess is why economists got it so wrong."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/07/priceless-how-the-federal_n_278805.html
The problems of a massive debt overhang were also thoroughly documented by Minsky, but mainstream economists pretended that debt doesn't matter.

And - even now - mainstream economists are STILL willfully ignoring things like massive leverage, hoping that the economy can be pumped back up to super-leveraged house-of-cards levels.

As the Wall Street Journal article notes:
As they did in the two revolutions in economic thought of the past century, economists are rediscovering relevant work.
It is only "rediscovered" because it was out of favor, and it was only out of favor because it was seen as unnecessarily crimping profits by, for example, arguing for more moderation during boom times.

The powers-that-be do not like economists who say "Boys, if you don't slow down, that bubble is going to get too big and pop right in your face". They don't want to hear that they can't make endless money using crazy levels of leverage and 30-to-1 levels of fractional reserve banking, and credit derivatives. And of course, they don't want to hear that the Federal Reserve is a big part of the problem.

Indeed, the Journal and the economists it quotes seem to be in no hurry whatsoever to change things:
The quest is bringing financial economists -- long viewed by some as a curiosity mostly relevant to Wall Street -- together with macroeconomists. Some believe a viable solution will emerge within a couple of years; others say it could take decades.

Saturday, PhD economist Michael Hudson made the same point:

I think that the question that needs to be asked is how the discipline was untracked and trivialized from its classical flowering? How did it become marginalized and trivialized, taking for granted the social structures and dynamics that should be the substance and focal point of its analysis?...

To answer this question, my book describes the "intellectual engineering" that has turned the economics discipline into a public relations exercise for the rentier classes criticized by the classical economists: landlords, bankers and monopolists. It was largely to counter criticisms of their unearned income and wealth, after all, that the post-classical reaction aimed to limit the conceptual "toolbox" of economists to become so unrealistic, narrow-minded and self-serving to the status quo. It has ended up as an intellectual ploy to distract attention away from the financial and property dynamics that are polarizing our world between debtors and creditors, property owners and renters, while steering politics from democracy to oligarchy...

[As one Nobel prize winning economist stated,] "In pointing out the consequences of a set of abstract assumptions, one need not be committed unduly as to the relation between reality and these assumptions."

This attitude did not deter him from drawing policy conclusions affecting the material world in which real people live. These conclusions are diametrically opposed to the empirically successful protectionism by which Britain, the United States and Germany rose to industrial supremacy.

Typical of this now widespread attitude is the textbook Microeconomics by William Vickery, winner of the 1997 Nobel Economics Prize:

"Economic theory proper, indeed, is nothing more than a system of logical relations between certain sets of assumptions and the conclusions derived from them... The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world. A theory as an internally consistent system is valid if the conclusions follow logically from its premises, and the fact that neither the premises nor theconclusions correspond to reality may show that the theory is not very useful, but does not invalidate it. In any pure theory, all propositions are essentially tautological, in the sense that the results are implicit in the assumptions made."

Such disdain for empirical verification is not found in the physical sciences. Its popularity in the social sciences is sponsored by vested interests. There is always self-interest behind methodological madness. That is because success requires heavy subsidies from special interests, who benefit from an erroneous, misleading or deceptive economic logic. Why promote unrealistic abstractions, after all, if not to distract attention from reforms aimed at creating rules that oblige people actually to earn their income rather than simply extracting it from the rest of the economy?

As I have previously written, mainstream economists and financial advisors who promote flawed models are not necessarily bad people:

I am not necessarily saying that mainstream economists were intentionally wrong, or that they lied because it led to promotions or pleased their Wall Street, Fed or academic bosses.

But it is harder to fight the current and swim upstream then to go with the flow, and with so many rewards for doing so, there is a strong unconscious bias towards believing the prevailing myths. Just like regulators who are too close to their wards often come to adopt their views, many economists suffered "intellectual capture" by being too closely allied with Wall Street and the Fed.

As Upton Sinclair said:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Goldman May Move 20% of UK Staff to Spain

Goldman Sachs warns UK Treasury it may transfer 20% of its 5,000 London staff to Spain in protest over UK tax and bonuses

Goldman Sachs (GS) has threatened the UK Treasury with plans to move up to 20 per cent of its London-based staff to Spain in a standoff over tax and bonuses.

It's believed that the Wall Street investment bank, which paid more than £2bn to the Exchequer's ailing coffers in corporation tax alone last year, has fired a warning shot across the Government's bows in response to the tax measures unveiled in the pre-Budget report earlier this month.

Goldman Sachs International was the biggest contributor from the financial services sector to Britain's purse last year. Previous reports suggest that in some years the firm's staff have contributed more than £1bn in personal income tax to public coffers.

A City source said: "Goldman could move a relatively large number of people if it wants to. Given how much Goldman and its staff contribute to the tax take, the firm has plenty of leverage. This is a bargaining position more than anything."

The bank, which employs around 5,000 staff in London, is believed to have strong links to the Spanish government, although it has a relatively modest number of employees in the country. Although staff moving to Spain would not receive any special tax incentives, the bank could avoid paying the bonus tax, details of which, so far, remain sketchy. A Goldman Sachs spokesman said it is looking at all options as it negotiates with the tax authorities over the bonus tax.

Tullett Prebon, a City money broker, said last week that it was offering its staff the chance to relocate, in an effort to avoid paying the super tax. But it is thought that the offer only relates to a portion of its 700-strong London staff.

Barclays' (BCS) chief executive, John Varley, waded into the bonus debate on Friday, warning that talent was likely to flee London because of the tax. "This is a global industry and talent is mobile. We need a level playing field to make sure that we can compete with the best companies in the world," he said.

The Bank of England added fuel to the bonus fire last week when it said that the bailout of Britain's banks might have been avoided had City bonuses been just one fifth less in the years running up to the crisis. In its Financial Stability Report, the Bank said: "If discretionary distributions had been 20 per cent lower per year between 2000 and 2008, banks would have generated around £75bn of additional capital – more than provided by the public sector during the crisis."

Meanwhile, firms continue to negotiate with Her Majesty's Revenue over details of the super tax, which will tax bonuses of £25,000 at 50 per cent. It is believed that independent stockbrokers will be spared, after initially being caught in the Chancellor's net.

Provided by The Independent—from London, for Independent minds