No. Because after all who could possibly have predicted that corporations would use an excuse like brexit to maximise profits?

Quite. It's so easy to point at mega corps and say "well they're evil anyway aren't they" but actually no they're not, morality doesn't fit into it really - their job is to maximise profits for shareholders, because that's the environment that decades of neoliberalism have fostered.

So if you come up with an excuse to help them achieve that, that's on you (government) and if they are merely following rules which help them maximise profit, then that's also on you.

You want to change the way corps make money, pay tax, their focus on short term shareholder return etc? change the laws and regulations. You want them to charge consumers more and improve short term shareholder return? come up with a bunch of excuses like Brexit

On top of that, it's actually illegal for a company to act in a way that is not the most beneficial to shareholders.

The Daddy wrote:

On top of that, it's actually illegal for a company to act in a way that is not the most beneficial to shareholders.

Citation needed

Richard Murphy disagrees.

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2013/01/07/companies-do-not-have-a-legal-duty-to-maximise-profit-or-to-avoid-tax/

I think that's a myth going around years... but it might as well be true for a company with shareholders because in most cases the share holders  only want to see return on their investment and might not care about the product, or any morality associated with its production and sale.

edit - point being, the board is answerable to shareholders so they can mandate that the business focus purely on maximising profit ... I think. I remember there is something to do with a case involving ebay and craigslist about this but don't know the details.

Roujin wrote:

I guess one of the places this gets murky is multinational corps? Dunno though as I'm not really up at all on corporate law. I wonder what they have in the US, or in like weird tax haven countries where businesses are registered?

It’s not true in the States either:

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits

Can’t speak for any weird tax haven countries.

Am I right in thinking it was probably just some BS to justify sashing work force hours, roles and / or pay?

I imagine it would be very hard to prove a company was absolutely maximising its ability to generate profit. There is always some way to earn more by either expanding or cutting, its as much based on the long term plan of a company and what it wants to do and where it wants to grow to.

Does the pressure also come from investors and share holders? Eg if the ceo sandbags on the amount of money generated they can make then they can get sued by the shareholders or be booted out.

I remember seeing this story a while ago where a guy sold Sierra (who published Half life 1) to what felt like a bear trap because if he didn’t sell at the ridiculous price to a company that was doing phenomenally on paper he would get sued for not doing it. So there can be pressures that are not essentially government law but can be legally binding.

Yossarian wrote:

The last two paragraphs of that NYT article point towards a likely source:

So, where did the mistaken idea that directors must maximize shareholder value come from? The notion is especially popular among economists unburdened by knowledge of corporate law. But it has also been embraced by increasingly powerful activist hedge funds that profit from harassing boards into adopting strategies that raise share price in the short term, and by corporate executives driven by “pay for performance” schemes that tie their compensation to each year’s shareholder returns. In other words, it is activist hedge funds and modern executive compensation practices — not corporate law — that drive so many of today’s public companies to myopically focus on short-term earnings; cut back on investment and innovation; mistreat their employees, customers and communities; and indulge in reckless, irresponsible and environmentally destructive behaviors.

Sounds about right.

Maximising profit is a pretty open term. Investing is needed to maximise the profit you can get in the future but cuts back will also work (mostly in the short term) As I said - how could you prove it either way in a court?

Corporations will kill you if it is profitable.

I seem to have lost my reply which kinda said what the NYT thing said (though with less conviction given it's been over a decade since I last accounted!). Frickin phone, but thanks yossi.

It's pretty clear that capitalism or pressure towards maximising profit though, ofc...

My favourite story around investing and wallstreet is the story around the banks individual servers being added to the stock exchange server room. 
Tldr. Milliseconds count in modern trading so companies would fight and bid to install their servers as close to the main server as possible so as to have the shorter cable connection possible. After much hoohaa the nyse decided to say fuck it and instead made everyone install their equipment, and have the same length of cable connecting it to the main server, so there was no favouritism.

Considering the 0.3% cap on fees came from:

some FT article I found after 30 seconds googling wrote:

The EU introduced a cap in 2015 after concerns the hidden fees were leading to hundreds of millions of euros in costs for companies and higher prices for consumers.

Now it's going up to 1.5% because MasterCard and Visa say that now the payments between the UK and European Economic Area are now deemed inter-regional. It kinda seems like the EU did a reasonable job of protecting consumers and small businesses if the fee increases FIVE FOLD when you aren't inside the EEA.

Also since i woke up in a particularly nihilistic mood this morning, I really hope the EU does have a legit claim to some of our vaccine production and some has to go to them, I would love to see the limp dicked fury on display from all the fucking morons who absolutely fucking ruined this country with their incredible stupidity and inability to do any basic fact checking or look up a single thing about the EU prior to voting for brexit. Everyone who contributed in any way towards the brexit vote winning gets a big lmao good work, you idiot, from me.

MasterCard and Visa ARE the credit card service payment processing providers apart from like American Express or some shit.