Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

somereallyfungi t1_jacrm30 wrote

There is a silver lining to this distribution, though. Norfolk could be driven to bankruptcy without a significant hit to most portfolios. Unfortunately, this doesn't actually solve the problem at hand. But, the punishment could be so severe as to actually be a deterrent for cost cutting.

2

HandsyBread t1_jactqpm wrote

This accident will not bankrupt Norfolk, let’s assume they had to purchase in full every single house (which won’t happen) you would be looking at $250M-1B at most, and then let’s say the total clean up cost was $1-2B. And let’s add another $500M-1B for other misc legal fees, damages, political bribes, etc. the total damage your looking at is $2-3B maybe $4B if they are able to squeeze them for every possible thing and the courts slap on additional fines. Heck even if they needed to give $1M per person to cover life long health costs, and other personal damages that would tack on other $4-5B at most.

That would just mean that they would take a loss of profits for 1-2 years. This won’t bankrupt the company or get close to bankrupting the company. And that outcome is likely to never happen, we would never see a company held responsible to this degree, but even if we did they would still be fine in the long run.

6

Squire_II t1_jadbf54 wrote

> That would just mean that they would take a loss of profits for 1-2 years.

5 billion isn't even a year of profit. They're spending more than that on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends this year.

10