For those who haven't heard , Nortel Networks has filed for Bankruptcy protection this morning.

(..this does not mean that we are actually bankrupt, but rather,
that the company is asking for "protection" from Creditors aksing for their money...
Air Canada did this 10 years ago and turned it around,
...but I'm unfortunately not as hopeful for Nortel...  )

There are several of us here a Nortel  (Me, Sylvain, Tuborg, Newf112,  [others? ] )
who are probably dusting off their CV's this morning ... sighh...

Nortel's fall from grace is now nearly complete.

From  a stock price of $1250 back in Aug 2000, down to 7cents this morning
(...so my $5000 investment is now worth 35 cents ! ).

Our Market Cap (value) is a now a mere $35M.
A bargain considering we have over $1B in assets...

You should see the mood at work this morning.... seeesh !

Steph

Got to piss a man off when you see guys like John Roth run away with the bank.

Sorry to hear that guys but who knows, sounds like on price to book alone someone will pick you guys up and maybe turn things around.

Sad.   My way of looking at it is, is for every Tim Horton's coffee I buy today, its the equivalent in cash as being able to pay cash for a basic $20,000 car...

I liked the CBC radio interview - as I could relate to both parties very well - although the VP's were not impressed - although the interview is within the company guidelines:
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2009/200901/20090112.html

Hope it goes well for you.

Had a similar experience in October; it's not fun.  

Quoted from necro_nemesis

Got to piss a man off when you see guys like John Roth run away with the bank.

Alot of Execs got ALOT of money from Nortel.

Roth was just the first to make it so blatant.

The next guy (Frank Dunn [2001-2004]) is actually the one who the cooked the books
to give himself a HUGE performance bonus.
He's the one that did most of the damage to Nortel's reputation.

The next guy  (Bill Owens [2004-2005] ) was actually the only honorable one,
but got turfed by the Board of Directors because he wasn't a "Visionary" ... !

Then came Mike Z.  (Zafirowski [2005-present] ) who cost Nortel $12M in penalties
to get him from Motorola.  He then got a $5M/yr salary and boatloads of stock.
He then initiated an Employee Performance Ranking system,
which only rewards to the top 5% of employees, and then proceeds to rank HIMSELF
as a Top Performer to get more bonuses.

He also hired about 20 high-priced Execs from other companies
(...paying them BIG bucks to coerce them to come to Nortel ),
and then had to let them go with HUGE Severances because
most of them made bone-headed decisions which accelerated the downfall ).

Nortel's failure is self-inflicted because of an unbelievably inept Executive corps.

... oh wait, do I sound bitter...   ?    

/rant off

Steph

This is the state of affairs in the publicly traded world of markets. More derivatives than actual assets and more B.S. than you can shake a stick at to see the upper echelon get rewarded like no other point in the history of mankind.

What angers me is the retirement investment vehicles that are sheltered from taxation to push your hard earned money into the market.

How about people investing in their own future and getting the tax shelter huh? How about letting guys write off paying down their mortgage or reducing their debt i.e. reward people for getting out of debt and make them not want to take on more. How about being fiscally responsible so we don't need to borrow huge sums of money to fuel world economies.... breaks into the chorus of Imagine at this point.

I think we could do much better than these crooks. Don't you?

Quoted from necro_nemesis

I think we could do much better than these crooks. Don't you?

YES. I could've run Nortel into the ground for a mere 2 million.....


I wish everyone at Nortel the best, things at alot of other large corporations are not going much better, it's really sad.

Really sorry to hear about that and hope things pick up for all affected.

And be sure that while thousands lose their job, about 8-10 of the top clowns are laughing their asses off while sitting on a beach, counting their (YOUR) money.

That is the sad reality of today. If you hold up a convenience store for a couple of hundred bucks, you are more a nuisance to the store owner than anything... no one is hurt, he claims it on his insurance or merely writes it off with little consequences.

But greedy corporate leeches like these guys, and others like Vincent Lacroix (the Norbourg scandal), and in the US, Tyco, Worldcom, Enron, and all those heads of banks and mortgage companies walk away with BILLIONS, and get even more BILLIONS from the governments, and get away with slaps on the wrists, or in the worst case, same jail time as the poor idiot that robbed a convenience store. These guys ruin thousands, if not millions of lives, and get little to nothing for it.

Corporate greed. It will kill the US economy, and pretty much everyone elses as well. Until accountability is enforced, this is what we live with. We just pray we don't get reamed in the process.


Hang in there guys... if I win the lottery, you will all be my top execs for my pinball company.

Quoted from Steph

Alot of Execs got ALOT of money from Nortel.

Roth was just the first to make it so blatant.

The next guy (Frank Dunn [2001-2004]) is actually the one who the cooked the books
to give himself a HUGE performance bonus.
He's the one that did most of the damage to Nortel's reputation.

The next guy  (Bill Owens [2004-2005] ) was actually the only honorable one,
but got turfed by the Board of Directors because he wasn't a "Visionary" ... !

Then came Mike Z.  (Zafirowski [2005-present] ) who cost Nortel $12M in penalties
to get him from Motorola.  He then got a $5M/yr salary and boatloads of stock.
He then initiated an Employee Performance Ranking system,
which only rewards to the top 5% of employees, and then proceeds to rank HIMSELF
as a Top Performer to get more bonuses.

He also hired about 20 high-priced Execs from other companies
(...paying them BIG bucks to coerce them to come to Nortel ),
and then had to let them go with HUGE Severances because
most of them made bone-headed decisions which accelerated the downfall ).

Nortel's failure is self-inflicted because of an unbelievably inept Executive corps.

... oh wait, do I sound bitter...   ?    

/rant off

Steph

Quoted from necro_nemesis

How about letting guys write off paying down their mortgage or reducing their debt i.e. reward people for getting out of debt and make them not want to take on more.

If you could allow debt payment write-offs, then wouldn't that encourage people to gather debt just to pay it off and get the tax credit?

PM SENT!

Quoted from jonny_eh

If you could allow debt payment write-offs, then wouldn't that encourage people to gather debt just to pay it off and get the tax credit?

I was taking more of a clean slate approach. Take the current personal debt situation and give people an incentive to get it down, but take away the incentive if you borrow more. With interest rates so low there is no incentive for fiscal responsibility. Instead of an incentive to throw money at these CEO's to squander, at least we could pay down our debts.