Corruption. Well said. I don't need to be in the lead in picking countries that will outdistance my own. (For example, I had a choice of chinese or US solar companies a couple of years ago, and I took the USA bet.) There are plenty of USA value stocks and dividend stocks to choose from.
Maybe OT: I just finished an enlightening book. "Backstabbing for Beginners"..
From amazon "Soussan, a former program associate for the United Nations, provides an insider's perspective on the U.N.'s oil-for-food scandal in this absorbing memoir. The author was a 24-year-old idealist when he went to work for the U.N.'s recently launched program to provide aid to Iraqi civilians suffering under the economic sanctions imposed after the Gulf War. He found a culture of incompetence where there is no truth but consensus and initiative is highly risky. Amid the turf wars and bureaucratic timidity at the U.N., Saddam Hussein was able to subvert the oil-for-food program with a regimen of bribes and kickbacks. Unable to persuade his superiors to expose the fraud, Soussan resigned in frustration after three years. When the massive fraud surfaced after Saddam's fall, the author published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, which launched an independent investigation that uncovered billions of dollars in bribes and implicated global corporations, sovereign governments and U.N. officials...
me: Everybody was on the take. Saddam was allocating below market oil deliveries to everyone -- france, turkey, russia, and who knows who else. Example: putin's buddies got large allocations of oil. They'd sell them and keep their share of the cash (and give some cash to putin, I am sure - not proved) and they would send cash back to saddam via secure diplomatic pouch). In a surprise ending, when you think that incompetence was holding the UN back from exposing all the kickbacks, it turns out the author's boss, an honcho undersecretary at the UN, was on the take too. He bottled up investigations and exposure, and the author thought is was normal incompetence. It would have gone on forever but saddam was overthrown and the kurds got some files and started the exposure ball rolling.
The point is -- US executive are also greedy bastards, as we all know. But why compound the investing problem by investing in areas that are even worse? Of course, there are many large overseas companies that do not have such corruption risk, TOT, BHP, RIO, and the like. Anyway, I avoid the foreign small fry.
amazon.com |
