On the legal front, Harris County (Houston) is suing VW for $25,000/car/day for those diesels, total $100,000,000.
On the legal front, Harris County (Houston) is suing VW for $25,000/car/day for those diesels, total $100,000,000.
Any one think this will really fly? Personally I think it is just a ploy to keep it in the headlines and further degrade VW in general throwing more fuel on the fire. Which I really don’t think it needs any help.
May require a state to pass a law.
A law like that will NEVER pass in NH. MA might pass that law.
Just my daily musings but maybe its time to back off a little. Today its Ford and their F-150 automatic brakes slamming on and yesterday it was Chrysler (I’m not ready to call it Fiat yet) that was fined somewhere around $100 million for poor recall response. Then it was GM, then Toyota, then Honda. So where does the money from all these fines go? Into the coffers of EPA and NHTSA and some back to the whistle blowers.
Now really, the obligation of the car companies is to fix the cars if they are found faulty. So just fix them and make it right. All of these punitive damages to me are just padding the budgets of the feds and the lawyers involved. I’m not saying don’t hold people criminally responsible if there is fraud but gee whiz, we are the ones paying the premium costs for all of this.
When something like VW happens, it is going to be hard enough to design and initiate a corrective action without all of the other product liability and fines. Really $25,000 a day per car just shows how silly this whole process has become. But then again like I said, its not silly for the EPA who has a long range plan of eliminating IC engines and we just lap it up and play right into it.
Corporations, especially foreign ones, can do funny things…Like declaring bankruptcy after transferring all the companies assets to a new off-shore holding company…Harris County, Texas will never see a dime…
Volkswagen will survive this and recover. It will have been a very expensive lesson. Even countries that could not care less about air quality will see this as an opportunity to soak those rich Germans.
Before bankruptcy, GM lost $7 billion in one year.
I came close to buying a turbo diesel VW, but with the higher than gas price of diesel fuel in North America, there was no savings in fuel cost and a definitely higher maintenance and repair cost than a Toyota.
I agree
The tax structure for automotive fuels in the US is such, that buying and operating a diesel powered car rarely makes economic sense
Unlike in europe, for example
Yes, but even Europe’s getting rid of the cheaper diesel taxes.
Corporations, especially foreign ones, can do funny things.
The American companies ask permission of their employees to invest their 401k fund into the company…then give the executives huge bonuses…then declare bankruptcy.
. . . “ask permission of their employees”? I thought they just matched your contributions in company stock instead of “money” so you end up with company stock whether you want it or not? Then tell you you have to hold it for 3 or 5 years or whatever before you can sell it (while the execs unload all of their stock).
I’ve never really seen the point behind a diesel car either. So the fuel mileage is higher, but the fuel costs more. Just like the e-85 is cheaper but the mileage is lower. No such thing as a free lunch. . .
The American companies ask permission of their employees to invest their 401k fund into the company...then give the executives huge bonuses...then declare bankruptcy.Why is it the Progressives all say "the worker should own the means of production!"...and then proceed to criticize each and every attempt towards that end?
Why is it the Progressives all say "the worker should own the means of production!"...and then proceed to criticize each and every attempt towards that end?
Criticize each attempt toward that end? Are you kidding me?
Sorry mean - you have no idea what you’re talking about. The employees signed up to help the company become strong by investing in it’s future…They did NOT sign up to have their 401k RAPED by upper management and then let the company die. We had two small companies here in NH who did just that. They had no intention of putting any of the 401k money back into the company…instead they gave the executive committee huge bonuses (in the millions)…and many people who worked for the company lost EVERYTHING. And it was PERFECTLY LEGAL. Immoral, but legal.
Take a read of Enron and what they did to their employee’s 401k plan.
Well, technically speaking, E.S.O.P.s (Employee Stock Ownership Plans) are a type of socialism. And full disclosure, I still own stock in a company I bought through an ESOP 20 years ago. But it is a blue chip company.
As I have become older and wiser, I have soured on individual stocks and am gradually transitioning into mutual funds. The problem is an individual stock is an single point of failure. What the VW shareholders are going through now is the same as BP shareowners went through 5 years ago, and the stock still isn’t anywhere near where it used to be. When you own a few hundred or a few thousand shares of a company, you don’t REALLY know what’s going on behind the scenes. You wake up one morning and there’s some scandal or recall or disaster and 1/3 or 1/2 or maybe even all of your money is gone. I have experienced this first hand, more than once, and I have no appetite for it anymore, I work too hard for my money.
Sometimes a stock collapses and festers for years even when the company is still profitable. GE stock is less than half what it was FIFTEEN YEARS ago. And the dividend is still much lower too. They slashed the dividend during the financial crisis and they’re only raising it back up by a penny or two each year. It’ll probably be another 10 - 15 years to get back to where they were 15 years ago.
I have stock in my company…but NOT through my 401k plan. Stock I ow with my company is most through stock options and some stock I purchased privately.
That’s totally different then having ones pension plan invested in the company.
To more directly respond to meanjoe75fan and MikeinNH, I think the problem is one of education. People shouldn’t invest their money in something they don’t understand. The company I currently work for has a long history of shiesty business dealings and accounting scandals, and we seem to have new owners every few years, the company’s been passed around like a joint at a frat party. So the current owners have loaded up the company with so much debt they can’t sell it to anyone, the rumor is they are going to go public and let the employees buy stock. Most of my coworkers are excited about the “opportunity” to buy stock in the company, I think mostly because a handful of the old timers made out quite well back in the 90’s in the old ESOP plan. When the first corporate buyout happened, some guys doubled and even tripled their money. But since then its been one scandal, downsizing, buyout, name change, lawsuit after another.
Almost seems like they’re setting up the next Enron, and people are eager to buy into it because they don’t understand how the stock market works. They’re buying because they know of somebody who made money doing something similar. Of course I could be wrong. Maybe they’ve finally put their corruption and incompetence behind them and the stock will take off, but that’s a calculated risk I’m not willing to take.
All these guys who are signing up to buy stock now will be the same ones standing out in front of the padlocked gate later on crying to the lady from the Channel 10 News about how the company defrauded them out of their nest egg, when they had no business buying the stock in the first place. On the other hand, if they don’t buy the stock, they’ll probably “invest” the money in scratch-off lottery tickets instead. Oh well.
People shouldn't invest their money in something they don't understand.
There’s a difference between investing in an unknown situation…and downright theft…which were the examples I sighted.
The problem with Enron was they were cooking the books. What was reported to investors was NOT true.
I have no problem with employees buying stock…even if the company goes bankrupt. The problem I have is when the corporation out and out LIED to the employees and investors. Seems that some people don’t have a problem with that.
Of course all three of you folks are correct. Don’t put your money in individual company stock and their 401K plan, companies have raided the retirement funds, and at the same time there are many happy people that have invested in their company and the retirement fund is sound. There are examples of all of this and of course public pensions are no different. Some are quite healthy like Minnesota, and some have been raided by politicians to pay current expenses to avoid hard budget decisions like Illinois. Clearly some legislation would be in order to insure retirement plans are taken out of hands of the directors or jail time.
Employee skin in the game can be a good business practice and good for employees too. The can company where I worked for a while matched employee stock purchases. Quite a few employees had major investments in the company and were concerned about profits. Of course the stock bounced around from $15 to $70 and back again with the economy but that’s part of the risk. Even some Walmart employees have done quite well with their stock. I knew a guy that had everything in Proctor and Gamble and was quite happy, but its a risk.
So you just have to weed out the shysters and of course watch out for yourself, but some legislation is in order. There have certainly been instances where companies have been taken over purely to raid the pension funds and lets not even bring up the Teamsters and their problems.
MikeInNH, I agree, but a point I would make is that for those working at the bottom of the company, there’s little chance you will know about the lies and theft until it hits the news, and by then its too late to bail out. Darn it, there’s more I’d like to say, but I can’t think of a way to say it briefly and I’ll get dunned for being off-topic anyway. . .
If I worked for a company that had a 10+ year track record of steady and increasing dividends, I’d sign up to buy stock in a heartbeat. Remember folks, they can fake the sales, expenses, profit #'s, but they cannot fake the dividend. Either they have the money to pay or they don’t.
My other point being that owning an individual stock is a single point of failure. I don’t know if VW has ESOP plans, but if they do, I doubt if any of the factory workers knew about the fraud that was being perpetrated.
Or even when its not fraud; look at that BP oil spill. I read where a lot of retirees got hurt pretty bad because they owned BP stock for the rich dividend, which got eliminated for a time in the wake of the spill. So if one put their money in, say, an equity income mutual fund instead, the risk is spread out and if one or even a few of them run into trouble, you still collect most of your dividends and just ride it out.
MikeInNH, I agree, but a point I would make is that for those working at the bottom of the company, there's little chance you will know about the lies and theft until it hits the news, and by then its too late to bail out.
Many people near the top had no idea what was going on. My company is doing well…but I won’t invest my 401k in it. I have investments in the company…but not my 401k.
I know there’s risk with investment…the point and ONLY point I made was about out and out theft…Never ONCE made any statement about legitimate honest companies. Either some people didn’t read what I said…or really do think it’s perfectly OK for companies like Enroon to do what they did. I sure as heck don’t.
U.S. chief knew Volkswagen could be breaking emissions rules 18 months ago
REUTERS — 7:16 AM ET 10/08/15
By Andreas Cremer
"BERLIN (Reuters) - Volkswagen’s top U.S. executive will tell a panel of U.S. lawmakers on Thursday that he knew as long ago as the spring of 2014 that the German carmaker might be breaking rules on U.S. diesel emissions tests.
In written testimony submitted to a congressional oversight panel a day ahead of Thursday’s hearing, President and CEO of Volkswagen Group of America Michael Horn said: “In the spring of 2014 … I was told that there was a possible emissions non-compliance that could be remedied.”