Originally Posted by Flatballer

I'm talking about investor owned utilities. They have a monopoly. The margin is guaranteed in their rate case as a percentage of capital spend. For the first 100 years they were considered safe dividend paying stocks, run by engineer CEOs who understood the business and the long time frames involved in the business, and mostly told Wall Street to enjoy their dividends and shut up.

Then business people CEOs got in and saw they could make a killing using all of the assets and stock to turn it into a growth company.

In this case it really is kind of simple.

Deregulation has been a factor too, for sure, but it doesn't explain most of the issues.