Berto 'd Sera wrote:
Hoi!
My observation would be that it is exactly the publicly traded companies that the financial pages are concentrated on.
Besides... in many countries the same companies do OWN the media that are publishing info about them. Not always in the open, from Italy you get accounts of a total of several hundred people sitting in ALL main national Boards. Even if the companies are legally independent from each other you can hardly expect Mr. X to attack company Y from company K, since he is sitting in company's Y Board himself...
Interlocking Board membership is certainly worth writing about, and not just in Italy. So too are ownership patterns of subsidiaries who are themselves owned by other companies. So too are the relationships of big-name sportswear companies to third world manufacturers using low-paid child labour to produce high price goods. That whole corporate world is completely alien to believers in open economics.
Drawing up other people's money to pay one's CEO salary can hardly be used as a criterion for excellence. But it's hard to find one that would fit. Enron and Parmalat did look stable, didn't they? Most such monsters are certified by friends of relatives of friends... so if all you want is nice data you'll get tons of it :)
I'd say that the safer thing for an encyclopedia would be avoiding judgments altogether. Pointing users toward an article explaining what criteria are basically used by banks and agents to attract consumers' money would be far more interesting.
There's more to writing about companies than such POV exposés.. We also need to know which compnies are taking unfair advantage of witless investors and consumers. Having unduly rigid entry requirements for an article about a company leaves us trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with half of the pieces missing.
Everything else is 100% POV. Maybe a fortunate POV that can make you a rich man, but nevertheless it's POV. Financial reports are made to meet fiscal and marketing requirements, what sort of objectivity would you expect from a capitalistic version of the soviet Pravda? :))))
Financial reports say what they say. Your desire to substitute your POV about companies for theirs does nothing to advance knowledge of companies. Our coverage of corporations is seriously deficient.
Ec