Thomas Cook Collapse leaves 600,000 Travelers stranded abroad

More than 600,000 travelers, including at least 150,000 British citizens, are stranded abroad after the 178-year-old British travel agency Thomas Cook announced bankruptcy. Thomas Cook, the world's oldest travel firm, has collapsed stranding hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers around the globe and sparking the largest peacetime repatriation effort in British history. The firm runs hotels, resorts, airlines and cruises for 19 million people a year in 16 countries. It currently has 600,000 people abroad, forcing governments and insurance companies to coordinate a huge rescue operation. The UK's Civil Aviation Authority said Thomas Cook had now ceased trading and would work with the Government to bring the more than 150,000 British customers home over the next two weeks. The problem is that the company that has been around for 178 years had the misfortune of having incompetent management that ran it into the ground. Strange how the British government comment on the fact that they don't intervene in private businesses(even on a temporary helping bridging basis) before the new Chinese owners do the deal in this case. But if a bank puts itself in the shit well, that is a totally different matter....after all, it's only the taxpayers money ,right?. The fact that Thomas Cook was run by a Go-Go Girl who now heads up IBM In Asia and thought running up Debt of £1.6 bn was a neat way to acquire non-performing assets might be a cause for concern. The fact she was outplaced in 2014 suggests her deputy who is now CEO did not have much luck if he depended on refinancing £1.1 bn but could only get £900 million to tide him over the dead winter months. Debt Junkies die when Cash runs out . the company had a debt burden of £1.25 billion and warned that Brexit-related uncertainties had hurt bookings for summer holiday travel." Shitty management, overextended, hoping for government bailout, spending money on share buybacks... typical mismanaged airline. And of course, there will be golden parachutes for the executives. I doubt any of these very smart London School of Economics and Harvard executives at Thomas Cook had any idea they would take these people's money and then leave 600,000 of them stranded across the world. i mean, what executive and CEO looks at the maff and finances these days . That's why these Big Companies hire IVY League brains. If they had some accounting major from Suffolk County Community College, he might have actually read the numbers and gave a warning. Look for this unfortunate situation to be played out hundreds of thousands of times in the future as heavily indebted corporations buckle from their short sighted, greedy & self serving borrowing habits! The canary in the coal mine has fallen! Normalize interest rates by just 50% and half of the NASDAQ and 25% of the S&P 500 will disappear just as quickly & brutally! Thomas Cook is a leading indicator that is foreshadowing an epic economic tsunami that will wash upon all over-indebted levered companies, industries & individuals! All those will be washed out to sea while the mainland struggles with an incomprehensible rebuild! Hard & painful lessons of restraint, discipline & propriety will be learned once again! Australia and the USA have blamed Iran for this bankruptcy and therefore must be invaded before any more Western companies go under. These are just the beginning , we'll see more and more financial collapses of businesses , personal finances and eventually countries . If you think things are bad now , we'll all be crying about the demise of American financial power . The Thomas Cook company survived two World Wars but it could not survive the double whammy of Debt and its Executive Suite.









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