How Sears Was Gutted by Its Own CEO

I'm old enough to remember when people like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens were famous for doing the same sort of thing. It's actually not bad in itself. The bottom feeders do play a valuable role in business, just as literal bottom feeders do in ecology. When animals or plants die, the process of converting its remains into a rich substrate for new life is facilitated by various organisms specialized for that task. So it is with dying businesses, and Sears really was in a precarious position already.

The travesty is that the business equivalent of beetles and worms and fungi reap such disproportionate benefit from the process. They consume the entire husk themselves, leaving a metaphorical desert instead of rich loam. The leverage of having enough money to buy one company translates into personal profit and thus even greater leverage for the next buyout. That's how you end up with an economy dominated by termites, hollowing it out instead of helping it grow.

This is done in my country alot - both by the government and CEOs. A road in my area has been in the works for a year now. Houses were demolished, shops broken, and the tarred parts of the road ripped to make a wider road.

All these were done months ago. Now the road is a dust blower when sunny. And a mud bath when it rains.

The road contractor is a private company called Arab Contractors. It's however rumored that the company is partly owned by a previous state governor.

The ex-governor privatized tax collection - and this company takes a princely percentage of collected tax.

He sold various state owned lands for pittance - sometimes directly to himself, other times through holding companies. And you know the best part? He used government funds to finance his private purchases.

He recently gave a land meant for a local government secretariat to a retail chain. I'm guessing he'll collect rent and more for the favor.

I think the law of diminishing returns applies to the criminal status of an act. After a certain number or scale, a crime is no longer a crime.

If a store manager sold inventory at half price to himself, or bought inventory from a supplier (a company he owns) he'll be in jail.

I've always felt there was way more to this cynical, vulture capital financial engineering than we have been told about. The shareholder lawsuits have shone a little light on Lampert's sketchy asset stripping behavior and slow motion starvation of Sears.

The successful lawsuit brought by individual investors who accused Sears of not properly overseeing deals to avoid conflicts of interest against Lampert, ESL, Seritage, and members of Sears' board of directors, which was won and cost Sears 44m. https://www.scribd.com/document/338974154/Sears-settlement#f...

you would think Sears board member Steven Mnuchin would now be ineligible for political office, but no... incredibly he's current United States Secretary of the Treasury as part of the Cabinet of Donald Trump.

Candidate story for “Last week tonight”.. wow terrible..