The reason I add in Inc., is because of the corporate shareholder equity relationships, versus the metaphorical hole in the middle of many of their products. The Wikipedia history for Krispy fails to point out accounting fraud irregularities, but unfortunately for them, the internet is filled with the reality of many stories detailing the decline in that entity (that empire) and of course stock performance charts are easy to obtain as well.

The comparison of Krispy to wall street in aggregate can be summed up from this NY Times story: FYI: The report states that every Krispy Kreme employee or franchisee who was interviewed "repeatedly and firmly" denied deliberately scheming to distort the company's earnings or being given orders to do so.

"The number, nature and timing of the accounting errors strongly suggest that they resulted from an intent to manage earnings," the report said.

The 10-month inquiry was led by a special committee of two Krispy Kreme board members – Michael Sutton, a former chief accountant at the S.E.C.; and Lizanne Thomas, a senior partner in the Atlanta office of the law firm of Jones Day.

That story can be found at:
Report Details Some Failures That Hurt Krispy Kreme

By MELANIE WARNER
Published: August 11, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/11/business/11place.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

> The point that needs made over and over, is that wall street continues to be a cesspool of corruption that is in essence an unregulated casino run by a shadow mafia that fails to be accountable to anyone around the globe. The post Enron era and subprime fraud have brought us all to another point in time, where wall street blew it again, only this time, the scale is so vast, that it may be possible that the casino goes under.

IMHO, if our own corrupt government can't begin an investigation into multi-Trillion accounting fraud and come to terms with the failure of capitalism in this current distorted form — then the system will fail. If Krispy had been able to run wild and to fuel itself on unlimited and unregulated chaos, what would the result have been, other than collapse? Krispy may have been able to phyisically expand donut making operations into some dysfunctional warped nightmare where they could have partnered with wal-mat in a donut monopoly — backed by lobby groups supported by taxpayers that would willingly subsidize the frosting on the offshore donuts.

That seems like a fairly stupid fantasy, but that is what we have with wall street today, as taxpayers are being asked to pay for spa treatments AIG employees! Our society is being asked to look the other way, while these crooks run our civilization into the gutter, yet it seems that few people really care, few people want to point fingers, because that would take effort and energy, and denial is far easier.

In retrospect, many people were concerned about the $777 Billion bailout written on the back edge of a cocktail napkin, but then as it exploded into a pork filled bonanza — citizens in America shrugged it off to business as usual, shrugging off the devil-in-the-details and writing off this soap opera as politics or something that was too hard to understand.

The mistake in all this is to not have accountability and to let the crooks go about expanding their domain, like the cancer it is. If Americans want accountability, they can't walk away from the people in The Senate and Congress that are elected to protect us — I think Americans should demand accountability for not just $777 Billion, but we need to begin a discussion as to what the value of America is and how much it will cost to lose our heritage and our future!

Also See: On March 29, 1989, financier Michael Milken was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and fraud relating to an investigation into insider trading and other offenses. Milken was accused of using a wide-ranging network of contacts to manipulate stock and bond prices. It was one of the first occasions that a RICO indictment was brought against an individual with no ties to organized crime. Milken pled guilty to six lesser offenses rather than face spending the rest of his life in prison.
On September 7, 1988, Milken's employer, Drexel Burnham Lambert, was also threatened with a RICO indictment under the legal doctrine that corporations are responsible for their employees' crimes.

Anticipations of debt deflation have moved back into the mainstream over the past months. And there is a chairman of the Fed whose is on the record as suggesting both that debt deflation must be avoided at all costs, and that in the last resort the technology of the printing press means this can be done.

Of course, foreign central bankers may simply think Bernanke is wrong, and will end up pushing on a string — or indeed they could think that his more extreme remarks were simply jawboning to massage expectations. But it is hard to be confident that they rule out the possibility that he might have a viable strategy to reduce what could well be a crippling burden of domestic and international debt on the U.S. economy, and that this would involve a radical depreciation of the dollar.

In this case, as it would be those holders of Treasuries who got out first who lost least, we might well have a state of unstable equilibrium. As long as nobody anticipated that Bernanke was going to activate such a strategy, the dollar would be stable. But as soon as one major player began to suspect that the dollar was going to be trashed and reacted accordingly, everyone might join in the rush for the door.

And this might happen with very little warning.

A recent story by the China Editor of the Asia Times noted that China was expected to be a big buyer of the Treasuries required to fund the Paulson plan. A Hong Kong Daily was quoted saying the Chinese would buy at least $200bn. worth, but the Bank of China spokesman declined to confirm this.

(See http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/JJ08Cb01.html.)

But this is the kind of thing which the Chinese would suggest they were going to do, whatever their actual plans were. If they explained that they were not proposing to stop buying new Treasuries, the rush for the door might start. So they could be expected to make reassuring noises, without formal commitments, quite irrespective of what they intend to do.

If any major holders of dollars had concluded that Bernanke was going to collapse the dollar and they had to preempt, they might be no more inclined to give advance warning than the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor.

Agree fully. The herd needs culling, NOW

How much money would be shoveled into campaigns if the politicians were DIRECTLY involved?

Nationalization is naïve, foolish, and economically crippling. It’s better to have this crash now and let capitalism weed out the week and incompetent than to have government prop them up.

Unfortunately, even that just starts the credit cycle anew. What we really need is a return to Breton Woods and a transformation back to a production based economy.

Are the Japanese retaliating?

Isn’t the ultimate derivative hedge US treasuries So that if the CDS’s belly up and cause things to happen in other areas of these things, won’t that ultimately end up with people trying to pull cash out of Treasuries to cover expanding losses elsewhere.

That might be how a run on Treasuries would get started, by people trying to raise cash to cover other “holes”.

US Treasuries is the ultimate bubble, and unless a drastic global action plan comes out from this weekends’ meetings in DC, the ultimate bubble will burst a la Vesuvius burst leaving the world of Pompeii behind…

A great tragedy indeed by few “smart money managers of ultimate greed”…

And may I say Yves, you are doing a phenomenal public service to masses across globe.

Merci bien.

Albatross