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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9220516" data-attributes="member: 18">I mean, I think is a misunderstanding of how most shareholders operate. I don't think they forget - I think they're just not interested. Especially as an awful lot of major shareholders don't view themselves particularly as "owning" the company, even if they do in a practical sense, as much as temporarily - very much temporarily (even if it's for years) - having their money in a stock, in order to make money, either via share value increases or dividends. Now, one can absolutely say "Wow, that sucks, the system should change", and sure yeah, but that's how it is right now and how it has increasingly been particularly since the late 1970s/early 1980s, especially as share trading got orders of magnitude faster and easier.Worth noting the private equity is way worse for quality products than public shareholding though. Public shareholding still, currently, largely leans towards producing decent products and against running companies into the ground. Private equity, however, sometimes just destroys companies because their products/services, whilst reliably profitable, aren't making enough $$$ - Instant Brands (Instant Pot, Pyrex, etc.) is a good example - a lot of the press, including The Atlantic, misreported the story as just a sad tale of making a "product too good". But that's flatly untrue. Instant Brands could have kept going indefinitely, if private equity didn't get majority ownership. What some private equity companies do is, if a company isn't profitable enough for their liking, they force it to take on massive debt (which it usually easily can because it likely has few debts and a long history of solid profitability, which looks great to lenders), but instead of using the money to improve the company and make it more profitable, it's just used to pay the private shareholders (different from the public shareholders of Hasbro) massive dividends (i.e. payouts), then the company goes bankrupt because it can't pay the debt, but the private shareholders already got their massive dividends, which can't be clawed back, and then the private shareholders sell off what's left of the now-bankrupt company's assets and move on, much wealthier, to do it to another company.So we are kind of lucky Hasbro are publicly traded, which makes that much harder to pull off. Even if it leads to layoffs that are more for show than anything else.</blockquote>

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