by Lorgar » 22 Aug 2017, 4:56 pm
The numbers being quoted for this thing as so far beyond ridiculous it's not even a joke, it's flat out stupid and shows the people covering this don't know what the f*** they're talking about.
(I'm talking about polis, journos etc. plugging the stupid figures on the radio etc. Not having a go at you Jandamurra.)
A few company basics here (with rounded numbers).
CBA shares are worth $78~ (at the time of writing) and there are 1.7~ billion shares in the market.
That's a market cap of approx $133~ billion. You could roughly call this the worth of the company.
In their annual results published 09/08/17, CBA posted a net profit after tax of $9.8 billion
So, a $960 billion dollar fine would be roughly 7x the entire worth of the company, or 97 years profit.
A trillion dollars is not at stake here, such a fine is literally impossible. CBA do not have even remotely near that much cash or income to pay, and even a fraction of such a fine is not remotely realistic as the CBA would simply fold under its weight.
I appreciate most people don't follow the stock markets or financial news, but honestly, CBA is one of the most traded and covered stocks on the market. Goldman Sachs, Morningstar, Consensus, Citi, Morgan Stanley etc. and every Australian broker out there is watching it.
All of this is publicly available. Any stock broker could tell you all this off the top of their head. It would have taken a politician or journo 5 minutes to find these figures if they were at all interested in the facts rather then whipping up a storm.
For arguments sake, lets say a fine is issued, lets have a look at who pays.
CBA isn't owned by "the man" or "fat cats". It's a publicly traded and owned company.
Approximately 1.4 billion of their shares are owned by the general public.
And 262~ million are owned by institutions.
This includes holdings in superannuation funds. Even if you don't personally trade shares, every one of us almost certainly has currently, or has had shares in CBA via their superannuation funds investments.
A tiny remainder of shares are owned by private companies and insiders. The CEO getting his $10 million a year or whatever is a pittance compared to the public.
We own CBA. They wouldn't be punishing management with a fine.
Any fines issued comes out of profit, and when there's no profit there are no dividends payed to shareholders.
No dividends means loss of income, and when dividends are cut, the share prices drops. That means loss of capital.
CBA currently have a dividend of 5.5% fully franked. This is good, and a major part of the appeal of CBA stocks. CBA cutting their dividend to zero would disastrous for their stock price.
Outside of how shareholders in the company are affected, the CBA also makes up a huge chunk of the ASX200. Along with the other 3 big banks and big mining companies like BHP, RIO etc.
The loss of equity, uncertainty and panic selling of CBA crashing would cause our entire stock market to fall.
Going after the CBA like the media is portraying they will, would be like the Australian Government going Lehman Brothers on itself.
I'll tell you what's going to happen. Bugger all.
Last edited by
Lorgar on 24 Aug 2017, 9:56 am, edited 6 times in total.