With a situation like that, it seems like trying to throw somebody else under the bus and/or fake your death would be the best means of survival--not setting off a holocaust.

And again, knowing that any AAA might respond with "Well screw you guys, I'm retreating to my bunker and raining down thor shots!" means the first thing the corporate court will do is attempt to neutralize any scorched earth capabilities the target corp has.

Which is why I'd expect a gigawatt laser to light up the room when the person running the CC meeting says "Now I move we vote..." because they are not stupid either, and without that vote that was 'tragically aborted' by a 'terrorist attack'....

Here's the thing with that scenario, it requires:

A) That the corp doing the lasering know ahead of time that there's going to be a vote on issuing an omega order against them at that meeting

B) That they manage to defeat the combined resources the rest of the corporate court are putting towards preventing just such an occurrence

and

C) That they hide their involvement so well that the combined resources of the rest of the corporate court fail to catch on during the ensuing investigation

I can see A happening, and maybe B if they're really lucky, but A, B, and C all at the same time? Fat chance, omae.

Lets get this nailed down a bit...

The CORPORATION does not deserve to continue, and is therefore being actively dismantled by the Corporate Court. Yes, there will likely be violence, but that does not mean that the INDIVIDUALS in the Corporation are targeted for termination on sight. And even if a FEW are, it will not be all of them. Those not targeted in the Corp will likely work very hard to never be included in that list, and will therefore work actively against those who might do something as stupid as Global Annihilation 2.6.

Not necessarily true.

First of all, the upper heads of the corporation will be on the hit list. If you go after Ares with an Omega Order, Damien Knight will be at the top of the list, and he knows it. By no coincidence, the people with the power to unleash global Armageddon will be the same people. So, people with power will have their backs to the wall.

Everyone else, will depend. Let's leave aside the worker drones, and focus on the executives. For them, no matter how it goes, their career is effectively over. If they're not on the hit list, and if they survive with another job, it will almost certainly be a demotion, and they'll never be trusted again. They will never get another promotion, be lucky if they get CoL raises, and they'll lose all their investments, fancy stuff, etc. That's the same as dying for many of them, so they could easily choose to go down fighting, no matter what.

Not necessarily true... The Upper Heads MAY be on the List. And they May Not. It all depends upon a lot of variables (far to many to enumerate). As for the Executives, yes, their career in Targeted Corporation is definitely over. That does NOT mean they will not find a place in another Corporation. You are making some broad sweeping statements that MAY or MAY NOT actually be true. It is pretty much conditional on more things than we would likely want to debate over. Lets look at the Stock Market Crash and the resulting Great Depression. People of all economic strata were devastated over the financial losses that they incurred. They did not go out of their way to make sure everyone else around them suffered as they did. Nope, those who thought they could not live with it jumped from the 30th Floor of their high-rises to their deaths (or chose some other inventive way to get away from it all). I think you will see more of that than you will see mass retaliatory strikes out of spite. People can recover from the things you describe, and the human spirit is far more resilient, even in the Dystopia of Shadowrun, than you are giving them credit for.

The upper heads *will* be on the hit list; the only question is how far down the chain the hit list goes. When Ares took over Cross, Lucien Cross knew he would die if they succeeded, as did his top people, such as the head of the Seraphim. Their assistants? Maybe, maybe not; but uncertainly can make people desperate too.

As for the executives who aren't on the hit list, have you seen what happens after a hostile takeover? The invading company, as soon as possible, fires all the entrenched management they can. The ones they keep are almost never fully trusted, and don't get promoted very much. For many of them, their advancement and their careers is effectively over.

firing all the management is an absurdly unlikely thing. mostly because having replacements waiting is an absurdly unlikely thing, unless you don't care about having competent and qualified replacements. in which case, you may as well not bother acquiring the company, as it will almost definitely cost you more in the long run due to the bungling and incompetence of those involved. and then, suddenly, hey guess what... there's an opening in the marketplace and a bunch of people with the skills and contacts needed to fill that opening. betcha someone else will hiremost of them to fill that opening that you just created by not keeping those valuable resources.

we're not talking about firing a few people. we're talking about firing a sizable percentage of the world's population, and then trying to find replacements for all of those people when a massive percentage of the world's population is already employed by your direct competitors. if you fire everyone, you can't plausibly replace them all quickly. and by the time you're ready to replace them, they'll probably have spent time working for your company and you'll have new acquisitions that you're looking to replace key jobs with people you know are loyal.

this is shadowrun. people swap corporations all the time. megacorporations pay tens or hundreds of thousands of nuyen to get a targeted employee into their own corporation.

if being a former employee for another company was such a serious problem, nobody would be paying to be extracted, and no corporations would be paying you to extract anyone. essentially, the corporation is merely extracting an organization instead of an individual. they'll probably do some background checks and psychological testing to make sure there new employees aren't sleeper agents of their former employees and such, but for the most part, they won't have the personnel available to replace everyone. if you're not in the very top of their list of people to fire, they'll probably not get around to firing you any time in the near or potentially even distant future. which means you've got time to arrange to be extracted on your own terms if you expect to get fired, and people do that as a standard career move in shadowrun already, so it can't be that bad.

(unless of course you're in a division that's basically turned into a money pit. those people are screwed, but then, they were already screwed, and were also probably not even remotely involved in anything worthwhile enough to deserve an omega order, or indeed worthy of receiving any attention from the opposition at all).

You don't fire workers, you fire administrators, especially since there's overlap in a takeover. This happens all the time; I just read in the news how Microsoft is firing 18,000 people, mostly employees that they got from their Nokia takeover. Just look at any takeover and see for yourself. Corporate war is even more hostile.

HP has laid off 50,000 workers over the last few months. This wasn't a takeover, this just to cut costs.

so, you're suggesting that nokia had 18,000 top-level executives that needed to be gotten rid of?

because i bet a massive massive majority of those 18,000 employees didn't have any decision-making power at all, and probably most of the top-level executives being replaced, microsoft has been preparing replacements for several months while they wait for all the legal stuff to clear up.

in an omega order, there won't be months of legal issues. there won't be careful planning, or time to figure out which jobs are expendable.

so, like i said... those top-level executives figure out they're on the chopping block. they've got a while to get themselves extracted. because in shadowrun, that happens. people are happy to take employees from another company. it's not unusual. it's a career choice that people make sometimes of their own volition.

I'm kinda under the impression that an Omega Order is a bigger deal than just dismantling the target. That's huge, yes, but it's not an Omega Order. An Omega Order is when the target is slated to be terminated with extreme prejudice, the ground sewn with salt and everyone relevant to the target feeling the full and unmitigated wrath of the CC. An OO is the last resort, because there are so many better options available to the CC.

According to what I read, it's mostly Nokia execs who are being cut. In most other takeovers, it's administration that's now doubled, so those are where the cuts usually land.

Take a look at any takeover. There's always huge job cuts, usually at the leadership level-- the new management doesn't want to fight with the old. Of the execs who stay, they seldom have much of a future with the new corp. This is just how history goes.

In a corp war, things are bloodier-- literally. With an Omega, it can be fatal.

I went to Wikipedia for some research. I know it's not the most reliable source, but here's how a typical hostile takeover works: After the invading company tenders an offer and is rejected, one very common move is to get enough voting stock or proxies to replace the board with one that'll accept the offer. That fight can get ugly, especially as the board knows they're going to lose their jobs in the process. Once the takeover occurs, anyone who looks loyal to the old management is purged, and they're replaced by loyalists from the new owners. Of the ones who are left, they're usually watched like a hawk, since they might still be working with the disgruntled ex-management. Their odds of raises and promotions are correspondingly low. As for the rest, there are usually huge layoffs, sometimes exceeding 50%, like in the Peoplesoft takeover.

So, in a corp war, where "heads will roll" takes on a literal meaning, the invaded company employees will defend to the death. They stand every chance of losing their jobs, and maybe their lives. An Omega Order? The odds of death are much higher, and they know the attackers won't hesitate to declare them collateral damage.

so, *after the offer is rejected* things get nasty.

oh hey, look, i've been saying they wouldn't want to go scorched earth after an omega order, and do their best to make friends with the new corp, because if they go scorched earth they've basically guaranteed they don't have a future with anyone.

and again, nobody is going to have enough loyal and qualified people on hand to replace everyone when they take over. we're talking about taking over a mega (or more likely, parts of a mega). you don't just expand your workforce by 10% when it's as big as a mega's worforce is trivially. nobody has hundreds of thousands of people qualified to do the jobs of the competition just sitting around waiting for an omega order to be issued so that they can actually produce some revenues for the company instead of just being a money pit.

in the event that the megas *do* fire hundreds of thousands of people from their new acquisitions, take a guess at who's going to be available to replace the guys you just fired... oh right, it's the guys who all just got fired. because again, there are not hundreds of thousands of people looking for jobs all the time... in fact, the only reason there are now is because you just arbitrarily fired everyone for no good reason, and now the vast majority of what's available to hire in terms of competent experienced employees are the people you just pissed off by firing them. of course, you could just avoid the pain in the ass that it will be to interview and hire replacements (who will be angry at you for firing them) by the simple expedient of not firing them in the first place, at least until you have a replacement ready... which means that they'll probably have months, perhaps even years by the time you get around to replacing them, for you to find someone interested enough to hire you (either by extracting you, or when you're fired). and just like how your new corporation didn't have the guy waiting around to replace everyone sitting in the wings, they also don't have the security forces to watch every last one of their new employees like a hawk.

They don't have a future anyway. Microsoft's buyout of Nokia was a friendly one, and now Nokia is losing around half its work force. Most of that in at the executive level; Microsoft only wanted their smartphone R&R department, and it's everyone else who's being jettisoned.


You don't have to replace factory workers. What you replace is administration, mid and upper ranked suit jobs. By a coincidence, they're the ones with just enough power to fight back.

You're looking at this the wrong way. If they fire hundreds or thousands of people, it's because they don't *need* to replace them. For example, if you take over a company that has a manufacturing plant very similar to one you already have, there's no reason to operate both-- you shutter the acquired plant, and put thousands of people out of a job. This happens all the time. If you do want to keep running the plant, you fire all their executives and administrators, and replace them with people from your own organization. Don't believe me? Feed "Hostile takeover" into Wikipedia (I'd do it, but I'm on my phone) and see for yourself.


That's why it's easier to fire them and replace them. But if you are forced to keep them, there are plenty of ways to keep tabs on them without assigning a guard 24/7 such as sharply limiting their computer access, keeping a rider on all their computer use, tracking and recording all their calls on the company server, and many others. Shadowrun has become the age of Big Brother, so none of this is unreasonable.

In other words, you better make a good show of loyalty to the inevitable winner. Or at least present them something that makes you valuable, aka pull a von Braun.

That might not be enough. You'll still be viewed as a traitor, no matter what you bring. This has happened a couple times in Shadowrun; once IIRC with Lannier, and once with Vogel. Even though they played very loyal and helpful to their new corp, they were ill-trusted. For people further down the chain, it was even harder.

If you're smart as an non-hitlist exec, you will have anticipated such an event and already made connections to move to a different corporation.




-k

in the shadowrun setting, nobody has a problem with "traitors" apparently. they are in fact willing to pay someone else tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars so that they can acquire traitors. if they were so undesirable, nobody would be paying that kind of money to extract them.

also, if most of those 18,000 people are executives, then nokia was doing something horrifically wrong. particularly since a quick check i did indicated that the move was cutting their nokia workforce in half, though that's with very little research done.

honestly, if half your workforce are executives, you probably don't have a job future even if there wasn't a takeover.

I would note that when corps acquire extracted employees, it's almost never going to be someone who is useful because they're a good HR mook, or a good head of logistics.

Nobody is extracting Bob, from Accounting, because they need a good accountant. They're extracting him because Bob from Accounting knows financial secrets about his employer that they wish to extract from his brainspace. They extract researchers and star scientists, obviously, because of course you want those people, the same way the U.S. wanted Werner von Braun. But that doesn't mean that they're getting a pay raise and a better 401(k), usually it means they're going to be working under guard while their family (if the new corp got their hands on them,) are held under guard somewhere else with the threat that they'll be executed or tortured if the scientist or researcher doesn't do as they wish. (And, come to that, they'll probably be told their family are in that position even if the new corp didn't get them at all.)


Likewise, when executives are extracted, it's not because somebody else wants them to executive for them, it's because they know lots of dirty secrets about their mother-corp that the new corp wants to extract from their head.

That is definitely ONE way for Extractions to be handled, but it is not THE ONLY Way.

Ask him how he got his secretary pool sometime.

You don't extract Joe HR, you extract valuable research scientists and executives with useful secrets. Even then, you usually don't promise executives jobs and promotions, you promise them enough money so they can retire, in exchange for said valuable secrets.

But you're still wrong. When Lanier jumped to Renraku, he brought over tons of valuable secrets and techniques, and helped Renraku nearly take control of the entire corporate court. He played his part perfectly, and he still was never trusted.

As for Nokia, basically the only department that isn't getting totally cut is their smartphone R&D department, specifically the group that works on Windows phones. Their HR department is totally unneeded now, Microsoft has their own, so they're getting axed. Most upper management is going away as well, again because Microsoft has a lot of those.

And your numbers are correct. Nokia, pre-takeover, had about 25,000 employees, about average for a medium tech company that doesn't do its own manufacturing. Microsoft is laying off 18,000 people, of which about 13,000 are former Nokia employees. That is about half the Nokia workforce; pretty much everyone except smartphone designers are going away.

ah, so now we're going from "most of them are executives" to "most of them are anything except for the R&D department, which is the only reason the company was bought anyways, and in fact probably only a small portion of them were executives". good to know.

also worth noting that 5,000 of microsoft's employees were also being let go, for reasons which were not made clear but could potentially have been because they just got 25,000 nokia employees, and some of them ended up being a better choice to keep than the microsoft employees they replaced... but that's just speculation. it's entirely possible that if microsoft hadn't acquired nokia, those people would have been let go anyways.

additionally, there's still the part where this is happening months after the actual acquisition, and quite likely there were even more months before that where a lot of planning was being done. possibly even years, depending on how much red tape there was to deal with.

in a corp war, you aren't going to have much time in advance of taking over the corporation to get all your stuff in order. you grab it now, before someone else can grab it first, and then after you've got what you want you can start planning who stays and who goes. which also means that if you've just been taken over, then so long as you weren't stupid enough to try and go scorched earth and need immediate death, you can start planning for what happens to yourself as well, rather than having all of a few days.

if an omega order is declared on your corporation, you'd be insane to fight it. it gets you killed, there is virtually no chance you'll do any significant damage (because if there is a chance of that, they're allowed to just drop a tungsten telephone pole on your head to prevent it), and not fighting gives you time to figure out what you're going to do, whether that is finding a way to retire rich by selling secrets, trying to start a new life in the new corporation, or eventually trying to do damage (which you can do by revealing damning secrets about your own corporation, which just got taken over... in other words, you can still scorched earth the acquisition, but you can let them spend all their money on taking over first, and *then* make the company not worth keeping). and hey, if you're still fixated on causing a lot of damage and then getting killed, well, you can still get yourself killed later. you might not cause much damage, but then, that was never *really* in the cards anyways.

from the attacking corporation's perspective, you don't know who you can get rid of and not lose anything yet. you don't know who has important contacts in the industry, or who has important knowledge that you need to track. you don't even really know who's extremely loyal to the old management yet, and who might have been disillusioned and may even welcome new management. you haven't had time to train replacements, or even hire people with the expectation that they'll someday become replacements. you're not ready to just blindly fire tens or hundreds of thousands of people at that point... and you're going to have a massive backlog of work to do before you are ready because you just acquired a whole heck of a lot of businesses (most of which you would have been somewhat familiar with, otherwise you probably wouldn't have targeted them for acquisition.... but none of which you have had time to do a detailed analysis of which employees could go if you were to acquire the company tomorrow).

Microsoft's total workforce is over 125,000; the loss of 5000 jobs isn't even a significant blip for them.

You're ignoring history, Jaid. In every hostile takeover I can think of (and most takeovers, period), there have been huge job losses, mostly at the administrative level. You don't need the incoming company's HR and payroll division, you have your own, so they're always axed (and explains why HR people are so paranoid about their jobs). Most administrative and executive jobs also become redundant. In a hostile takeover, they become a liability-- loyalists to the old guard can become entrenched and cause problems for the new leadership, so they're fired without a second thought.

And in a corp war? If someone isn't famous enough to be listed as a special asset, they're just a statistic, and can become a casualty without a moment's hesitation. Nobody cares if you're the greatest accountant in the company, there's too many other accountants out there, they'll kill you without a second thought. Basically, if the invading corp thinks the cost of re-indoctriniating you is greater than the cost of a bullet, they'll shoot you and won't look back.

I think that, while extractions are a reality, most are done with a carrot rather than a stick. It's been proven time and again that people will work better, harder, and smarter for the extra 401k, that better budget for their projects, and better schools for their kids than the risk of a bullet in the head. To be frank, the hardest part of an extraction isn't getting Prof. Choadmeister, it's getting the good doctor and his family that he loves out at the same time that is the bitch.

That said, you shouldn't just forget the stick exists, it just should be immediately obvious that the nice, juicy carrot is the real thing extractees can and will focus on.

if you're just going to kill everyone in the target business, you're not exactly going to acquire much. killing 1/2 of the employees isn't exactly going to be very good for morale, and firing people blindly sounds like an incredibly stupid idea. firing hundreds of HR employees *just before* you start hiring thousands of other employees likewise doesn't make an awful lot of sense.

microsoft was making an acquisition to add something to their business.

but when you take over the food company owned by the target, you're not just looking to add a research division to your own food company. you're looking to add another food company to your product line. and if you just fire everyone, well, you can expect not to have a good time of the next few years, because you're going to have to rebuild all the connections those people had (especially difficult in some places in the world; for example, i seem to recall the hong kong book basically noting that if you are starting off fresh with no connections, you may as well not even exist in many people's opinions).

you can forget about keeping the money flowing, and you can expect to see major difficulties in meeting the demand for your product. if you tried to take over discreetly to prevent people from noticing the change (particularly important if you want to, for example, sell to the people in aztlan, for whom aztechnology is practically a religion), you can pretty much forget that, too, because you just tipped your hand in a big way.

there are major benefits to not just firing everyone blindly.

as to extractions, there are willing extractions made. either loyalty is as important as you say it is, or it isn't. and signs point strongly to the fact that corporations are perfectly willing to hire someone who once worked for another company.

In SR world, a corp isn't just a company, it's a country. For example, how long did it take for everyone in Germany to stop fighting when they were facing the entire world? Have you ever seen pictures of what Berlin looked like in May of 1945? I certainly wouldn't expect Aztechnology to go down any easier. And it will be bloody. That huge Stuffer-Shack distribution site in Ann Arbor? It's extraterritorial Aztechnology corporate property. It's probably a coincidence that all the loading dock doors are on the side that faces Ares HQ.

In all this discussion has any attention been paid to the fact that the bulk of any AAA's corporate structure is made up of subsidiary companies owning other companies to who knows how many nested levels? Surely the farther down you go in the network the less the company cares who owns it.

Jaid, you're still ignoring most of the history of takeovers, and confusing executives and management with workers.

You're assuming that a corporation will take over a manufacturing plant, with hundreds of laborers. First of all, manufacturing jobs are increasingly rare now, in 2072 automation will remove even mors of those. Most jobs are in administration, which every company has. Those are the jobs that will be cut.

You argue that it doesn't make sense, but if you look at the history of hostile takeovers, you'll see I'm right. In order for a hostile takeover to succeed, the president, CEO, and most of the board of directors needs to lose their jobs. Anybody who looks supportive of them is removed as a matter of course, and any executive or employee whose job can be done by the incoming company's existing staff is fired as redundant.

So, people who actually make things have less to worry about. But most megacorps today (and arguably, all the ones in Shadowrun) don't actually make anything. They just own and manage other companies that do. Just walk into any corporate headquarters-- you won't find any manufacturing or production facilities. What you find is hundreds of administrative workers, exactly whose most likely to be fired in a takeover, with no replacement.

Yup. Today, many of the big "manufacturing companies" in the US don't make much of anything in the US. For example, the number 4 on the Industry Week list of "Top 500 US Manufacturers" is Apple. 95%+ of their stuff is made in contract factories in China. Number 9 in HP. Which is the same. Number is 26 is Cisco, which makes nothing in the US last I heard.

That made me curious, so I went onto Forbes.com for a list of the biggest companies in the world. They list their formula for deciding what qualifies on the site, but here's the top 5, as well as what area they work in:

1. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China – Banking
2. China Construction Bank, China – Banking
3. Agricultural Bank of China, China – Banking
4. JPMorgan Chase, United States – Banking
5. Berkshire Hathaway, United States – Conglomerate

So, four of the five biggest companies in the world are in banking, and don't manufacture anything. The last one is Warren Buffet's conglomerate, and they're largely in investments. They don't make anything either, they just own other companies that do.

On a fundamental level, banking corporations obey different accountancy rules from industrial corporations. They're not really playing the same game.

The assets of an industrial corporation are the sum of material assets like the buildings, the machines and the infrastructures, and immaterial assets like the know-how, the patents, brands and intellectual properties. Things that the corporation likely had to spend its own money to acquire in the first place.

The assets of a banking corporation are the sum of those things (though they likely don't have have a lot of machines and patents), plus the loans they granted. But the money banks loan is not their own money. It is money they can create (yes, out of thin air) as long as not in excess of a fraction of their customers' deposits (around 8%, but the rules are a bit more complicated). And that money is destroyed when the loan is repaid, while the bank keep the interest.

The assets of a typical large industrial corporations would be twice its equity (what the shareholders can expect to get back if they terminate the business now). The assets of a typical large banking corporations would be ten to twelve times its equity.

In other words, an industrial corporations assets value is strongly related to the amount of money its shareholders invested in. Only a small numbers will have intellectual properties whose value will be way superior to the money spent to create it. And anyway those values erode (because equipment just as technology age). A banking corporations assets value is strongly related to the amount of money its customers brought. And unlike the latest technology, loans will always be.

Calculations that factor in assets, like Forbes ranking does, will put likely have banks in good positions. Which can be done on purpose, when attempting to rate something as intangible as power or influence. And banks sure have plenty of that (a large bank can have the leverage to put an industrial corp out of business, while the opposite is seldom true).

Also, it's commonly held that Chinese banks accountancy may not be as reliable, to say the least, than their western counterparts.

1.) "Book money" is not an asset for any of the parties involved, since it is always balanced by liabilities. The bank "creates" 500 ¥ in their books by transferring 500 ¥ to Ares, net result 0 ¥. Ares receives 500 ¥ as well as a liability over the same sum, which again boils down to zero.
2.) The "created" money does not exist in vacuum, it is used by the industrial corporation to buy means of production (to borrow that term), raw materials which get turned into goods, pay personnel, yadda yadda. Corporations spend money from the vault in the boss' basement to build a new plant? If that was the case, why exactly do banks still exist?
3.) When talking about big corps, good luck finding one that is purely industrial and does not have a finance arm. If people buy your stuff in installments, why have the interest rates go to somebody else?


TL;DR: The dichotomy between "productive capital" and "bank capital" is not just factually wrong, it also puts you in rather unfavorable company. Feel free to criticize the criteria for handing out loans, the fraction of deposits required, or even the system of loans and interest in general -- but for goodness' sake, don't act like this was some kind of ersatz money banksters generate for their own pleasure and nothing else.

Well, well. It took six pages to get a Nazi reference.

Well, that's rather the point. Megacorps in Shadowrun aren't exactly playing the same corporate games we see today either, they're on a different level entirely. As such, the megas themselves aren't really that big: they're largely holding companies that only exist on paper. It's that they own so many frakking smaller companies that gives them their power.

Because of this, you might be able to eliminate everyone in a megacorp and leave all the subsidiaries intact. They're just another layer of administration. Yes, they have so many holdings, a megacorp proper would need thousands of pencil-pushers to keep everything running smoothly; but those jobs can be easily absorbed into an invading company's admin team.

Taking this to corporate war levels, it would be feasible to simply kill everyone and take over the remains, since you wouldn't actually be destroying any important facilities. On an Omega level, where collateral damage is a requirement, you might start with cruise missiles and then send in troops to stomp on the remains. The people in the company, knowing their lives are forfeit, are likely to fight to the death.

Again, it isn't. Being allowed to do run around in a Borat mankini does not make it a required uniform.

Ares has a liability for the sum and the loan fees. And the bank adds the loan fees to its assets.

Banks create money "out of thin air" as I put it, rather than by mining gold or silver as it was done in the past (they no longer even print a sheet of paper).

Banks (both central banks and commercial banks) exist to manage fiducial money (money whose value does not reside in what it is physically made of, the opposite being called commodity money): to create it, to stock it, to transfer it temporarily or permanently, and to destroy it. As far as economic knowledge goes, fiducial money is better than commodity money to regulate the amount of money flowing through the economy.

Fiducial money creation through lending is currently considered the best known/available/practical way to create money because a) it doesn't have the practical limit of commodity money (like finding mineral deposits and mining them) and b) it includes a mechanism to destroy the money created after a time, upon repayment, allowing to decrease the amount of money circulating or at least slowing the increase (while the only way for goldcoins or banknotes to disappear is hoping that at some point they'll either tear down -but gold was specifically used in the past because it doesn't- or they'll be lost in a swamp, on seabed or behind furnitures).

A finance company is not a bank. Without a banking license, it can only lend its own money - wether the parent company excess cash, or loaning it from a bank at a better rate than the one it'll offer. Such finance arm assets will still depend on the parent company own funding, instead of customers' deposits like a bank. Actually, in a lot of countries, the law specifically ban banking license holders from non-banking commercial activities.

Accountancy rules differ between banking and industrial companies differ, which reflect on ranking like that of Forbes. Banking and industrial companies then also differ on the former ease to invest and withdraw its capital from activities to seek better opportunity. Would I consider it a "dichotomy"? Probably not. Would I consider one is morally superior to the other? No (though I'm willing to say there might possibly be a way to have a functional economy with industrial corporations and no bank, while I strongly doubt it could be done with only banks and no industrial corporations).

And, while I'm not opposed to finance capitalism like you say (and I likely won't until someone designed a new, flawless system for money creation), I don't consider such opinion should be discredited by association with crime against peace, wars of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity (as opposed to aforementioned Gottfried Feder, whose opposition to Jewish-owned finance capitalism should be discredited by association with crimes against humanity).

To the best of my understanding, you really didn't like the "out of thin air" idiom. But for goodness' sake, don't extrapolate one's thoughts from four words.

An Omega Order is the corporate court basically ordering the total destruction of a corporation. Even though there's many ways this can be achieved, what makes an Omega special is that the court is really pissed off, so they want to send a message along with the destruction: "This is what happens when you defy us." You better believe they wouldn't issue one unless they wanted excessive collateral damage as a warning.

Besides which, I think Bull would look rather fetching in a mankini.

Yeah well, renting stuff incurs rental fees.


The point is: Banks don't create their own money for the fun of it (or to have their balance sheet look better) while the industry are the ones possessing real values. The material assets in their balance sheet are there because at some point they were bought with a loan from the bank, and the taking of this loan is what actually makes that money appear. Therefore pretending that industrial assets are real and paid for by the company's investments while loans and stocks are numbers with no connection to reality and serve to make money as the bankers please is simply wrong. And while not anti-Semite in itself, it is an image which comes straight from some of the most persistent anti-Semite myths and still quite often leads on a slippery slope to "Rothschild, the Fed, and the NWO are after us". So tread carefully...


...which just means the bank has to be a incorporated separately. Just a few examples:
http://www.daimlerchrysler-bank.com/
http://www.ally.com/ (formerly General Motors Acceptance Corporation)
http://www.toyotafinancial.com/pub/home/
https://www.volkswagenbank.de/

From a banking point of view, what a loan or a stock is used for is irrelevant. In the best case, it will be taken into account to forecast yield. If a corporation borrows money to buil a brand new toy factory, the bank doesn't care if the loan is repaid in the end with money from toy sales or oil sales or another loan. Banks do create money for a purpose, but that purpose, as real is may be, is not their. It is their customers'.

With regard to the topic at hand, the discontinuity between loans and the physical assets they finance makes a huge difference. Physical assets can be targeted with a missile. Loans cannot. If you want to destroy an automotive business, bomb the factories, sully the brand name reputation. You can even try to destroy every copy of their car blueprints.
If you want to destroy a bank... Bombing its office will barely put a dent into its assets value. But erasing loans? That's one hell of a gift for its customer (and because of the underlying inflation created, a curse to all those who aren't). Attacking the customers to prevent the bank from being repaid? That'd trigger an alliance game that make the initial operation turn into a larger war.

No, it does not "just" mean that.

GMAC, for instance, used to be a subsidiary of General Motors until 2006. It ceased to be in 2006 as Cerberus private equity firm owned 51% of GMAC and GM 49% (however, private equity firm cannot consolidate majority ownership into subsidiary). But even GMAC had a "GMAC Bank", it wasn't legally a bank. It still was an "industrial loan company" under the Bank Holding Company Act. In 2008 (in the months before the name change), GMAC applied for "bank holding company" status, because it desperately needed the tools available to real banks to avoid bankruptcy. The Federal Reserve required Cerberus to reduce its stake to 33% and General Motors to 10%.

Toyota Financial still operates as an industrial loan company, which prevents it from accepting demand deposits, having more than US$ 100 millions in total assets, and operating outside of the seven states that allow them (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada, and Utah). The status is so widespread that there are about fifty of them currently in existence (this is irony), and it almost got shut down under the political pressure when Walmart submitted for one in 2006.

Mercedes-Benz Bank and Volkswagen Bank benefits from European regulations that are a lot less strict than in the US, leaving it open to the regulators to give or cancel banking license based on "appropriate" ownership and the "reputation and experience" of the managing officers. All in all, there's a few dozen of such companies in Europe. Volkswagen Bank has total assets of about 40 billions euro, which is about 10% of the entire Volkswagen group (#14 in Forbes Global 2000 in 2014) and weight around 2% of the large banks that actually top Forbes' list.

There's only a few corporations who were allowed to have a banking subsidiary in seven states in the US and a number of European countries. The current policies regarding banking licenses is that they're only to be granted to large corporations (especially, the automotive industry, which is traditionally considered as the biggest industry along with oil, and because they crossed the line early to enter the loaning market) and only if it remains a minor part of their business.
While a pure bank is going to have total assets equal to about ten times total equity, such banking subsidiary would have to stay with assets under ten times a tenth of the group equity. That's still allow the group as a whole to perform better that other corporations (Volkswagen as an assets-to-equity ratio near 4, while most corporations are closer to 2 or 3) but that's not going to make it perform better than pure banks in Forbes ranking.

This, of course, is not relevant to Shadowrun. First because sourcebooks outright read the megacorporation do own large banks. Also because the very point of megacorporate extraterritorial status is to ignore those pesky local regulations.

However, there is no definitive answer to give on what share of the megacorporations business these banks may represent. The very reason regulations try to enforce separation between banks and industries is the fear the bank would not be cautious enough when loaning money to itself. The same line of reasoning would make it very likely that only the Zurich-Orbital Gemeinshaft Bank can create nuyen. It has actually been also stated that ZO-G is where megacorporations loan their money from.
This would mean that megacorporate-owned banks' business is either to operate ATM, or to offer loans to employees and/or outside customers. But the very nature of the megacorporate economy makes it unlikely to find a lot of opportunity with outside corporate customers: if there is any sign their investment plan will pay off enough to repay the loan, should rather be either taken over or driven out of business.
Either way, the size of such banking subsidiary wouldn't matter more than the size of any other branch (which in turn would justify why some of the major megacorporations don't appear to have major banks in their line-up).

The SR concept of Megacorps was based on the Japanese Zaibatsu, but it was a flawed understanding. The fact that they are formed around a huge bank (and insurance company etc) was a critical reason for the success of Zaibatsu (and the post WW2 successor, the keiretsu), but that is generally missing in SR. There are other issues too, for example the interlocking ownership which means that you really can't stage a takeover.

And at the same time, banks are far more vulnerable to digital attacks, or a general interruption of operations. If a construction company has to stop everything for two days at 2 seconds notice that's bad, but little value is lost (they'd need new cement mixers, though). If the same happens to a bank, they're broke and will suffer a bank run onc43e they reopen.

Which brings us to another kinda-physical asset banks have: The ability to pay out cash. During the height of the Euro crisis, the ECB had to airlift container loads of banknotes to the affected countries, because even a small shortage would have caused a disaster. Trust in an institution is as immaterial as it gets, but relies on very physical assets.



How about erasing the deposits?


@Cain:
To quote myself from earlier

Sengir: Again, you can destroy a company in many ways. An Omega means you destroy with extreme prejudice, in an attempt to send a message. I believe I even read somewhere that the Corp Court reimburses the attackers for their costs, which they cover by raiding the destroyed company's assets. So, excessive force carries little risk, and much reward in the form of political favor with the court.

I'm not sure that would be very useful. The main losses caused by such interruption would hit trading operations in the very first seconds, as they cannot be completed as planned (though some will still make benefits two days later by sheer luck). On the other hand, the Corporate Court put an Omega Order out a few hours ago, and it targeted that company, so chances are most trading operations were not going as planned anyway.

Then there's the hit to the bank reputation, that can cause a bank run. But guess what, the the bank just got an Omega Order put on it. I would hazard that, before asking the megacorporations to send the troops in, the Corporate Court would first simply requires them to cease any business dealing with the offending corporation. Banishment would hit a bank business harder than any actual attack: no external fund transfer of any sort, no transaction, no nuyen compensation with the ZOG, and so on. So I'm not sure the digital attack is any more likely to cause a bank run then a press release would.

Although there's a lot of people who don't like the idea of a cashless setting (and I'm actually one of those), it has been repeatedly stated nuyen is purely electronic, and cash is almost unseen by 2050, except for Tir Tairngire and maybe a few other countries.

This would hurt the customers much more than the bank. That could have tremendous economical effects on several countries and corporations, for little to no added value with regards to the actual objective of destroying the bank. It should be a hit to their reputation, and it will degrade their solvency ratio and their credit rating. But, again, the Corporate Court just had an Omega Order put on them, so their credit rating is kinda meaningless since there is not a single bank in the world that would loan them money anyway.

As far as the AAA prime megacorporations are concerned, that's just splitting the cost, since all the money spent by ZOG on the operation is less dividends for them at the end of the fiscal year. The AA megacorporations, on the other hand, may consider this a way to make their paramilitary assets less of a money sink (similar to how some countries contribution to UN peacekeeping operations is netting them more money that what the fielded units actually cost them).

There was a arc in Schlock Mercenary where they are hired to take out a television company. Here's one strip from the arc that is particularly topical: Reserve Forces.

Having you military doing "aggressive peacekeeping" in Mogadishu has the possibility of losses due to combat, possibly even pretty significant losses. It does not have a possibility that the Somalians will demonstrate how that really don't appreciate your military involvement by having one of their SSNs fire a few Mach 6 cruise missiles with megaton range warheads at some of your most valuable assets. Screwing with a AAA does have the possibility that YOU will be the object lesson they use to teach everyone else to sit down and shut up.

I was thinking about Corporate Court mandates at large, not specifically Omega Order against AAA prime megacorporation. Corporations could hardly have an established policy regarding something that has yet to happen.

If a megacorporation with strategic nuclear weapons was to be the target of an Omega Order (and that is a big if), chances are AAA prime megacorporations are not going to take any more chances than AA megacorporations about it. After all, all the corporation who voted the order would likely be considered as legitimate target even if they don't send their own troops in. So, if such situation was to occur, I would expect the order to be voted in secret and operations planned so as to make the first strike decisive. In this case, it's unlikely AA megacorporations would get to learn about it and to participate, whatever their motivation, at least before day two.

As a side note, it may worth remembering that the very idea of Omega Order was introduced in a sourcebook, Corporate Shadowfiles, which also described corporate military as small (the largest being regiment-sized). Hence the difficulty to reconcile Omega Order with the larger military forces suggested in other books, as it wasn't thought that way.

If an OO is out the target is done, how when and where are only matters of style.

@Cain: Excessive force may carry less risk, but what would be the gain?