This documentary is about a corporate scandal in japan that made waves world wide.  Olympus was a huge tech company and were exposed due to fraud for a ridiculous amount of 1.7 billion dollars. The people in charge of the company were Michael Woodford which stood as the president and Kikukawa which was the CEO. Irregulars payments due to acquisitions resulted in varying amount of money in the company account that when exposed by a magazine called Fact it then came to woodford attention. Woodford always felt like he didn’t belong in the company and over the course of some time he felt that something suspicious was going on in the company which started with 3 different payments of 700 million for an acquisition of some companies that didn’t make financial sense. His colleagues failed to explained the reason for this acquisitions making woodford suspicious only increased. It must have been really frustrating for a person of his position feeling that the company he works for and leads is doing something shady and corrupt. He decided to blow the whistle and expose them for who they were. He was definitely worried about his safety as people were killed for much less. He decided to meet with a journalist he knew and trusted showing him documents with evidence and make the story go public. The story was released and gathered global attention from every single media outlet around the world, portrayed the Japanese business market as corrupt. It was interesting to note that japan itself had little very coverage of this insinuating that japan didn’t want the Japanese business market to lose confidence and to operate as normal. The use of the media to change the way that they were portrayed in their own country raises alarms bells. The company ended up being exposed and it was found that they were hiding losses due to the wall street crash and the change of inflation rates. Kikukawa was sentenced to 3 years. Ethical and legal implications were thrown out of the widow with this and laws need to be less flexible to allow this kind of business to take place by creating rules. The fact that these people lack the respect about the negative impact that can have on people life’s is astounding and they should be hold accountable when they do decide to go under the table for selfish reasons.   

The documentary about Mercedes moves to Motown has taught me a lot about the struggles, difficulties and the process of mergers and acquisitions. A merger and acquisition in essence is when companies combine their assets through different financial transactions. A merger is when two companies seek to solve their business problems together and the board of directors of both companies need the shareholders approval vote for the merger to occur. Once this happens both companies become one. An acquisition is one a company acquires a majority stake ownership of the other, the majority stake varies depending on how diluted the ownership is. This does not need to be approved by the shareholders. So why do companies would like to do a merger and acquisition? Why did Mercedes and Chrysler want a deal like this? Well you could say there is two reasons, diversification which is the ability and want to enter a new market or integration which defends or improves their stand on the current market. In this case we can see both. These two companies operated slightly differently, benz is complex, rigid and focused on german and European markets while chryler was focused on the American market , Chrysler structure was flexible allowing for lots of models to be built. Benz was intrigued by Chrysler flexible operations. When the companies merger and idea of merger of equals was questioned by the us, benz insisted that this was still in place but it was quite clear that Chrysler became a German company as that was how it was classified. This case study shows that sometimes a party can hide their true intentions until the very end and when you realise it can be too late. Its important to think thoroughly before a deal of this magnitude is considered if you care about the identity of the company.

Everyone believes that they will never fall for a scam but as human beings are we not the most vulnerable when in times of need? This is the opportunities scammers look for, to prey on the people that are naïve. This is how Madoff id responsible for probably one of the biggest financial scams to the point where it is actually very difficult to estimate how much money has actually been stolen. His scam worked because he had incredible social skills, hence he would meet people to make them comfortable with him investing their money. Impressions are everything and he portrayed himself as a nice and honest individual. The sales pitch was a return on their investment at low risk. The reason why the whole scheme did not work was because it became too much too handle. When people asked for their money back during credit crunch they were assured that the money was safe a week before he came out as a fraud. To be able to lie to these people he provided counterfeit documents that looked incredibly real.  The regularly of these added to the trust that people had for him. The business was ran by his family and a few extended family members therefore were they aware of his scheme, or were they just happy to tag along without asking many questions? In the end a confession from Madoff to his sons where he revealed everything, surprisingly his sons turned him in. Even though this scammer scheme was a appealing offer is it fair for people to put all their money into one single investment? Diversification by having multiple investment reduces risks and should be the approach taken.  An investment in multiple companies would be the right play by these people instead of relying solely on one single investment of Madoff.

When watching the documentary about the Royal Bank of Scotland about the financial crisis it became apparent that Fred Goodwin was a bit “over his head” in terms of not wanting to listen to other professional opinions when he become CEO and pushing RBS to buy too much.

Fred managed to be able to convince RBS to buy around twenty mergers and acquisitions in a few years which to be fair was a good idea and made the bank grow but the financial crisis of 2007 would then prove problematic as it saw their investments not working out which had then to involve the government to bail them out using tax payers money. This obviously did not impress the people at all. Fred biggest mistake was not looking into details of finances which is odd because that is what he was known for. It was odd that they were looking to invest a very large sum of money into a business without doing due diligence and look into the finer details and calculate all the risks and possibilities. This left them very vulnerable if a hard time were to occur and as the world knows it and felt the financial crisis of 2007 was a very big one. It’s interesting to note that just spending money on expanding, acquiring new mergers and acquisitions does not translate into success and left RBS with a lack of focus to the bigger picture. Investing in business that are not fully investigating including their markets and forecast prediction by industry experts shows a lack of respect towards their shareholders.

The fincancial crisis begun when the United states of America housing market collapsed. What followed was that one of the biggest investment banking companies in the world lehman brothers would then file for bankruptcy. This was the largest bankruptcy of the entire world and happened on the 15^th of decemebr of 2008. This included 639 billion in assets and 619 billion in debt. Many different reasons like poor risk management, awful business decisions, managerial greed and many others combined let to an inevitable crash that the economy just could not support. The world economy was unregulated, and at the time borrowing money was fast and easy without much trouble. Mortgage lenders were then approving preety much every single application including the riskiest in turn banks kept buying mortgage payment streams even when of poor quality. Poor quality of higher returns because the risk is higher. The chief executive tried to prevent the companies crash but it was inevitable. The chief executive tries to raise capital to refund itself and managed to raise 17.5 billion but it wasn’t enough to re-capitalise the company. The last resort was the acquisition of the company with negotiations with bank of America and the uk barcalys happening. Comments were made that lehman brothers couldn’t now be bailed out because they lacked collateral that could cover the bailout making it illegal to bail them out. The company at the very core is to blame for their own downful as executives greed reached new heights. Its possible to pull one over the markets but at what cost? Is making people homeless the legacy that you want leave behind? Why can a bank have so much money that it can destabilise the whole world should there not be limiters to stop this happening?