Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: Krugman.........faux Schumpeterian

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol Cox wrote:

> "Devine, James" wrote:
> >  > yaddah....
> >
> >  I believe PK is referring to the common "principal/agent problem" in which
> >  the agent (Ken Lay and the other crooks) get out of control of the principal
> >  (the stockholders).
>
> Doe anyone know who "the stockholders" were/are (not counting those
> "stockholders" whose holdings are indirect through retirement accounts,
> mutual funds, etc.)?

No, we don't really know who the ultimate beneficial owners of most
financial instruments are. There's info on holdings available through
the Yahoo! finance page <http://biz.yahoo.com/p/e/ene.html>, but the
names mean nothing - you don't know who State Street or Citigroup is
holding the shares for. You could find out with a Congressional
subpoena, which I think Wright Patman did in the 1970s, but there's
no one like that in Congress now.

> If they were mostly insurance companies, banks, billionaires from other
> fields "diversifying," etc. why didn't they protect themselves better?
> Or is the loss not that big a deal for such?

This is probably who they were, and 1) they're no smarter than the
average investor (because they are the average investor), and 2) in a
large diversified portfolio, it matters a lot less than it does if
you're an ENE employee.

Doug