Financial Reform: New Foundation, Walls Intact

Even Merton Miller, a Nobel prize-winning economist with a passion for financial arcana, found it “deadly dull.” But if ever there was a week when financial regulation set pulses racing, this was surely it-at least for those too young to remember the great reforms of the Depression.Having spent m...

By Economist Staff • June 19, 2009

Liquidity, Crime Woes Shake Up Chief Risk Officers

Without a doubt, companies have had to change how they view risk over the course of the financial meltdown. Risks that were either ignored or considered a low priority have now risen to the top of their lists of musts-to-avoid.At Constellation Energy Group, which had a cash scare last year, liqui...

By Sarah Johnson • June 5, 2009

The Cost of Climate Change

Seventy-one of the S&P 500 companies could take a 10% hit to their earnings from the cost of emitting greenhouse gases under the so-called cap-and-trade legislation wending its way through Congress.Some of them — Allegheny Energy, American Electric Power, Ameren Corp. — could see their earnin...

By Sarah Johnson • June 2, 2009

Lloyd’s of London: Eggs and Baskets

When American International Group (AIG), the world’s biggest, meanest, and supposedly safest insurer, collapsed into the government’s arms in September 2008, there must have been a few cheers from its rivals. Many hoped to win its customers, particularly large firms paranoid about having high exp...

By Economist Staff • June 1, 2009

Earnings Guidance Takes a Dip

The murkiness of the economic future has discouraged some companies from making earnings forecasts — but they’re still in the minority. In a survey released today by the National Investor Relations Institute, 60% of respondents are giving their shareholders earnings guidance this year, compared t...

By Sarah Johnson • May 18, 2009

Business Sweats on Climate Bill

With climate change legislation heating up, liberal advocates are taking aim at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been skeptical of recent legislative moves to deal with global warming.A petition organized by MoveOn.org that asks the chamber to stop lobbying against President Barack Obama’s...

By Roll Call Staff • May 14, 2009

Rude Awakening

What does it take to jolt you into life each morning? A strong cup of coffee? How about an army of competition officials marching into your office without warning?In March, the European Commission led such a dawn raid — “unannounced inspections,” to use the commission’s terminology — on the headq...

By Tim Burke • May 11, 2009

Companies Spent 7% Less on Legal Fees in Q1

Companies have sharply cut back their outside legal budgets so far this year, ending the steady growth law firms were experiencing over the past four years. While businesses will spend more of their legal budgets on hiring law firms to help them with regulatory, bankruptcy, securities, and employ...

By Sarah Johnson • May 11, 2009

Rapid Reaction

Like ripping off a plaster instead of slowly prolonging the pain, companies are reporting unaudited results — the good, bad and (often) ugly — faster than ever before. According to a new report by BPM International, a consulting network, Europe’s largest listed companies shaved time off the year-...

By CFO Editorial Staff • May 11, 2009

On Edge

It was a matter of when, not if, as far as Wolfgang Rigler was concerned. Months ago, the veteran finance executive for Mars in central and eastern Europe (CEE) could see there was trouble ahead. “We always knew there was a certain risk in the region,” says Rigler, Mars’s Vienna-based corporate s...

By Janet Kersnar • May 11, 2009

SEC Top Cop Talks Tough

One day after a government report leveled serious criticism at the Securities and Exchange Commission’s policing of financial markets under past-Chairman Christopher Cox, the agency’s new top cop promised a reinvigorated enforcement division.Robert Khuzami, who was appointed director of enforceme...

By Tim Reason • May 7, 2009

GAO: Cox’s SEC Discouraged Corporate Punishment

In a report released publicly today, the Government Accountability Office said that policies put in place during the tenure of former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox were thought within the agency to have hampered investigations, discouraged staff from pursuing penalti...

By Tim Reason • May 6, 2009

Swine Flu Hits Financials, Safe Harbor Statements

Swine flu made its first appearance in company financial reports yesterday, one day before the U.S. government reported the first death in the United States resulting from swine flu, a 23-month old boy from Mexico who died in a Houston, Texas hospital.The most prominent company to refer to swine ...

By Tim Reason • April 29, 2009

Rating Agencies: The Wages of Sin

By misreading the risk in mortgage-backed securities and other “structured” products, the rating agencies Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch played starring roles in the failure of finance. Their punishment? Oddly, the further entrenchment of their dominance, thanks to the Federal Reserve.T...

By Economist Staff • April 27, 2009

CFOs Put Away Their Crystal Balls

Fewer CFOs will be offering investors short-term guidance during this earnings season. The heavy fog that settled into the U.S. economy more than six months ago has made it harder for them to see how 2009 will shape up and gives them an opportunity to end, at least temporarily, the pressure to pr...

By Sarah Johnson • April 21, 2009

SEC Settlements Rise 16% in Q1

The Securities and Exchange Commission made 182 new settlements in the first three months of 2009, a 16% increase compared to the same period last year, according to NERA Economic Consulting.The SEC had made 123 settlements in the fourth quarter of 2008, during the waning weeks of Christopher Cox...

By Sarah Johnson • April 16, 2009

Leadership in Finance: Unibail-Rodamco’s Peter van Rossum

A lot has changed since Peter van Rossum last spoke with CFO Europe in November 2007. Then, the finance chief was busy ploughing through the integration of French commercial-property group Unibail and Dutch peer Rodamco Europe, confident that the enlarged group’s focus on cash flow would see it t...

By Tim Burke • April 15, 2009

Former Deputy to Head SEC’s Corporation Finance Division

Meredith B. Cross, a former Securities and Exchange Commission official, has been named the new director of the commission’s corporation finance division, the SEC announced late Monday. She fills a gap left when John White stepped down late last year as head of the division, which oversees annual...

By David Katz • April 14, 2009

SEC: Moving Deck Chairs on the Titanic?

Inside the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, about 1,750 employees are in the midst of a long, drawn-out version of musical chairs costing nearly $4 million.The SEC has been moving the staffers’ workspaces, going on the assumption that if people within the same d...

By Sarah Johnson • April 9, 2009

Some CFOs Are Ignoring the Credit Crunch

Some CFOs aren’t losing sleep over the credit crunch, at least not yet. For now, finance chiefs of start-up energy companies are more worried more about equity financing and rolling out new technology than they are about borrowing.Eventually, “we may have to cross the valley of death into commerc...

By Marie Leone • April 7, 2009

The Grass Is Always Greener

“Think of what’s happening in countries like Spain, Germany and Japan where they’re making real investments in renewable energy,” Barack Obama instructed Americans earlier this year. “They’re surging ahead of us, poised to take the lead in these new industries. This isn’t because they’re smarter ...

By Economist Staff • April 3, 2009

Need for Speed

With all of the strain that companies’ physical supply chains are under (see “Breakdown”), it comes as unwelcome news that an important link in the financial supply chain—insurance—may also be nearing breaking point. Though no insurer has yet been laid as low as AIG, whose disastrous investments ...

By Jason Karaian • April 2, 2009

Outward Bound

Few CIOs will be surprised to find their budgets slashed today. As Bill Floydd, CFO of IT group Logica UK, points out, finance chiefs are taking a much closer interest in their companies’ IT strategy during the downturn, pushing their CIOs “to deliver a savings plan and to do this quickly.” In fa...

By Tim Burke • April 2, 2009

Substandard

“Bob took a bit of a beating, and we have a lot of sympathy.” That’s how a source within the International Accounting Standards Board describes the rough treatment suffered by Robert Herz, chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the American accounting standard-setter, at a congress...

By Jason Karaian and Marie Leone • April 2, 2009

Staples CFO: Going Green Means Saving Green

Companies that have not done much work on “green” initiatives will likely get going now because of their declining business fortunes. So said John Mahoney, finance chief of Staples, at the CFO Green Conference yesterday in New York.Do sustainability efforts save money? The question of whether tha...

By David McCann • April 1, 2009