Hindsight is always a wonderful thing, and in retrospect Groves...

Hindsight is always a wonderful thing, and in retrospect Groves was heading for a fall.

The rise and fall of ABS epitomises the path of many such previous high flyers - expansion at a breakneck speed, under-captilised and relying on debt to finance rapid growth, personal display of "new" wealth. All in an attempt to cram into a few years the natural evolution of a business plan/style that should logically take 10 years or so.

In a perfect bull market environment such an endeavour may succeed, but they leave themselves no room for negative external factors in their plans.

The best thing that can happen to ABS is to take a haircut and get back to a sustainable expansion plan.

Insofar as the "governments cannot allow a dominant player like ABS to go belly up leaving thousands of families stranded." - why shouldn't they?

The government (read yours and mine taxpayers money) has no place in trying to prop up a capitalists empire.

To be sure, if ABS was to fold tomorrow then there would be heaps of buyers for their child care centres. Moreover, such buyers would probably run the centres far better than ABS. Thats is to say they would be run on an individual needs basis rather than a Head Office imposed policy of efficiency in order to meet shareholder demands of returns.