Our Assets, Ourselves

While human-capital management gets a lot of attention from CEOs, it seems to leave CFOs conflicted. Our recent survey found them agreeing that people are important and that training is worthwhile.But in many other respects, they seem to feel that hiring good people and paying them what they’re w...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Sept. 15, 2005

Dream Catalog

Kenneth T. Flynn, vice president and corporate controller at Proliance International Inc., an automotive heating-and-cooling products maker, fairly radiates confidence. That’s because whenever a customer needs to check the price or specifications of something like a heater core or an air-conditio...

By John Edwards • Sept. 12, 2005

Explore the Trendline➔

Tax policy shifts: What CFOs need to know to stay ahead

Discover how evolving tax policies are creating new opportunities and challenges for CFOs.

By CFO.com staff

The Costs of Katrina

Hurricane Katrina may cut into GDP growth for the second half of 2005 by between a half-point and a full percentage point, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO had previously forecast that the economy would grow by 3.7 percent this year and 3.4 percent in 2006, repo...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 8, 2005

Katrina Threatens Corporate Profits

Hurricane Katrina left a wake of destruction that is also expected to ripple through many sectors of Corporate America and cut into profits for the remainder of this year, according to Reuters.Many analysts agree that the devastation to oil and gas production along the U.S. Gulf Coast will cause ...

By Craig Schneider • Sept. 1, 2005

View from Europe: What’s Holding Europe Back?

A few days after the second wave of bomb attacks in London in July, The Daily Telegraph, one of the country’s biggest newspapers, ran a cartoon of the map of the city’s Underground. But this map was different from the one so familiar to locals and tourists. Summing up the mood of the city, it rep...

By Janet Kersnar • Sept. 1, 2005

Spend or Cut?

Most companies, most of the time, think they know when to cut and when to spend. But this is a peculiar time for American business, as companies watch their cash continue to build up even as they keep cutting costs (and tiptoe back into M&A?).Enter Nathaniel Mass, a senior fellow with the con...

By Marie Leone • Sept. 1, 2005

Q2 Growth Revised Downward

Economic growth in the United States was softer in the second quarter than initially thought, reported the Department of Commerce.Gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent, according to the Commerce Department, following a 3.8 percent rise in the first quarter. The second-quart...

By Craig Schneider • Aug. 31, 2005

Housing, Fuel Are Top CFO Concerns

Chief financial officers are more pessimistic than ever about the U.S. economy, pointing to the effects of a housing bubble that might burst, high fuel and health-care costs, increasing interest rates, and reduced pricing power. These are some of the findings of the September 2005 Duke University...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Aug. 31, 2005

Less Is More

When Frans Spaargaren arrived at Gemplus, an €865 million ($1.041 billion) Geneva-based maker of smart cards, it didn’t take him long to realize that not everything about the company was smart. Internally, managers and executives were drowning in data. The finance team foisted reams of informatio...

By Ben McLannahan • Aug. 31, 2005

Subpoena for Chicago Bridge

Engineering and construction company Chicago Bridge & Iron Co. announced that it has received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with the SEC’s investigation into a Halliburton project in Nigeria.In a regulatory filing, Chicago Bridge added that it was served...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 23, 2005

How Oil Prices Are Affecting Business

The relentless climb in the price of oil is starting to take a toll on the nation’s largest multinational companies, according to a new survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers.More than one-third of the 150 senior executives interviewed by the firm believe that their companies are vulnerable to rising o...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 19, 2005

Wall Street Mixed on Buyback Mania

In the second quarter of this year, 54 percent of the companies in the S&P 500 index reduced their total number of shares outstanding by buying back company stock. That’s half again as many companies as the 36 percent for the first quarter, according to The Los Angeles Times, citing Standard...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 17, 2005

Putting More ”E” in T&E

As technological endorsements go, “we didn’t realize the ROI would be so great” is as good as it gets, particularly when it’s coming from a finance person. And that’s exactly how Bob Mendence, finance manager for corporate services at Applera, describes his company’s adoption of a new travel-and-...

By Connie Winkler • Aug. 16, 2005

SEC Weighs More Time for More Companies

The Securities and Exchange Commission is considering additional relief for small companies in complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.Last week, the SEC’s Advisory Committee on Smaller Public Companies recommended that small companies be given an additional year to meet the requirements of Sarbane...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 15, 2005

Small-Caps Eye Listing Abroad

U.S. small-cap companies are increasingly launching their initial public offerings or placing their secondary listings on foreign securities exchanges. Often, potential issuers are lured by what they see as more flexible regulatory regimes. But foreign markets also appeal to some companies becaus...

By Helen Shaw • Aug. 9, 2005

Gauging Success

When business-performance dashboards began to appear a few years ago, they were positioned as a way to put key business data into executives’ and managers’ hands, a neat approach to presenting the analysis that business-intelligence (BI) software packages had produced. Graphs, charts, and other f...

By Doug Bartholomew • Aug. 2, 2005

The Price of a Cheap Suit

It’s 10:00 p.m., and Charlie Kernaghan is driving around the garment district in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It’s well past quitting time for the fabric cutters and seamstresses who started work in the factories at 8 o’clock that morning. But the workers aren’t coming out of the gray, decaying buildings, ...

By Joseph McCafferty • Aug. 1, 2005

Picture Improves for Private-company Pay

Small private companies have long faced a David-and-Goliath battle with their larger public counterparts in the competition for senior executive talent, at least when it comes to compensation. But now that some public issuers are scaling back on offering stock options — in large part because of F...

By Lisa Yoon • July 26, 2005

China Revalues Its Currency

China will no longer peg its currency, the yuan, to the U.S. dollar.The Chinese government announced a new trading program in which China will float the yuan in a tight band against a basket of foreign currencies, according to press reports. For more than a decade the yuan has been pegged at 8.28...

By Stephen Taub • July 21, 2005

Symbol CFO Departs amid Poor Forecasts

Fresh off a high-profile accounting scandal, bar-code company Symbol Technologies Inc. announced that chief financial officer Mark Greenquist has resigned “to pursue other career interests.”In a conference call Thursday, chief executive officer William Nuti insisted that Greenquist, who had serve...

By Stephen Taub • July 15, 2005

Good Week/Bad Week: Whey Station Closed

Disclaimer: Good Week/Bad Week is presented by the authority of the Ponds Institute and The Sheboygan FOE. Funding for Good Week/Bad Week is provided by the Society for Relentless Esoterica and the not-for-profit Dyslexics of the Universe Untie! While items in this column are based on real news e...

By John Goff • July 15, 2005

Earnings Warnings Rise for S&P 500

On at least two measures, the second quarter is shaping up as the worst three-month period for corporate profits in several years.On the eve of the quarter’s reporting season, for every company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 that said things were looking better than anticipated, 2.5 companies w...

By Stephen Taub • July 12, 2005

Building the Healthy Corporation

“Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.” —Mark TwainGrowing numbers of organizations — including banks on both sides of the Atlantic, a global natural-resources group, and a leading U.K. retailer — are adding an important new “stone” to the 21st-century bus...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • July 12, 2005

Budgeting in the Real World

Exotic Newcastle Disease, one of the most infectious bird diseases in the world, kills so swiftly that many victims die before any symptoms appear. When it broke out in Southern California two years ago, it could have spelled disaster for the San Diego Zoo.“We have one of the most valuable collec...

By Tim Reason • July 12, 2005

Concern for KPMG Extends to E.U.

European regulators are apprehensive about the potential global consequences of a Department of Justice investigation into U.S. tax practices of KPMG, according to the Financial Times.The regulators are particularly concerned that the outcome could damage an already-concentrated audit market by t...

By Craig Schneider • July 11, 2005