The Bright Side of Bubbles

The American economy is forever blowing bubbles. Housing seems to be the investment bubble du jour, coming on the heels of the Internet bubble, which popped seven years ago. The two are linked: as the dot-com economy slowed, Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan steadily lowered the feder...

By Edward Teach • May 1, 2007

Long-term Thinking

Spend enough time sorting through the intricacies of long-term-care insurance and you may decide that John Maynard Keynes’s famous axiom, “In the long run, we are all dead,” is positively comforting. While almost no one would dispute that longevity is good, it comes at a price: as baby boomers in...

By Marie Leone • May 1, 2007

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

A Sense of Things to Come

The military uses for wireless technology are persuasive. For example, pilots can fly above a war zone and drop thousands of small wireless sensors, the size of a small pebble and costing a dollar apiece, over the terrain. As soon as they settle the devices start communicating with each other, we...

By Economist Staff • April 30, 2007

How to Dance with Angels

Serial entrepreneur Sam Yagan considered financing his third start-up company with venture capital, but passed. Instead, he secured $6 million in funding for his free online dating Website, OkCupid, from five angel investors. One of his primary motives for eschewing VC money was that he wanted th...

By Theresa Sullivan Barger • April 27, 2007

Could Small Biz Get Another Sarbox Reprieve?

More than 6,000 public companies face a serious dilemma about their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance: Should they use the current version of Section 404 now in reviewing internal controls over their financial reporting? Or should they wait until the Securities and Exchange Commission and Public Company ...

By Sarah Johnson • April 19, 2007

Six Sigma in Shenzhen

When Jack Welch embraced Lean/Six Sigma in 1990s, it made perfect sense. GE has long been a company that values perfection and self-improvement, and LSS, as the process is known at GE, is the ultimate perfectionist’s tool.Three years ago, LSS jumped from GE’s manufacturing operations to GE Money,...

By Don Durfee • April 13, 2007

Survey: CFOs’ Confidence Up

CFOs are confident that their companies will do better this year, according to a recent survey from audit firm Grant Thornton. Sixty percent of 134 CFOs said their firms’ financial prospects will improve in 2007. That’s an improvement over last fall, when the audit firm last surveyed finance chie...

By Sarah Johnson • April 13, 2007

Sun Microsystems: Expanding Its Universe

Michael Lehman, the finance chief of Sun Microsystems, a high-end computer-maker that rose and fell with the dotcom boom of the 1990s, recalls a typical customer visit from about a year ago. A delegation from America’s navy, a big client, sat down in Sun’s Silicon Valley offices. The admiral’s fi...

By Economist Staff • April 12, 2007

Midmarket Companies So-so on Prospects

Despite robust market activity last year, not all executives at “middle market” companies are sanguine about the prospects for the year ahead, according to a new report.Investment bank DAK Group and Columbia Business School surveyed 703 owners and senior managers at privately held companies with ...

By Alan Rappeport • April 10, 2007

Looks Like Cheese, Smells Like Fraud

Two former executives of now-defunct cheese manufacturer Suprema Specialties have been convicted by a federal jury of booking millions of dollars in phony sales to defraud the company’s lenders and investors.Co-founder, former chairman, and former chief executive officer Mark Cocchiola, as well a...

By Stephen Taub and Dave Cook • April 3, 2007

Investing in Oils

Twenty-five years ago as a nearly broke graduate student, Walter Manninen gazed upon a dreamy vision of four courtesans and knew he had to have them. So the aspiring banker borrowed $2,000 and purchased a 1914 Theresa Bernstein oil painting entitled Lilies of the Field.Thus began a lifelong love ...

By Alix Stuart • April 1, 2007

View from China: Shanghai Confidential

A colorful embezzlement scandal has toppled political and business leaders in Shanghai and elsewhere in China as the country launches a major drive to stop white-collar crime. For CFOs of multinational corporations, the drama has played out at arm’s length. But a highly publicized series of sting...

By Wu Chen • April 1, 2007

Business Outlook Survey

It’s springtime and finance executives are ready to sow a few seeds. With renewed confidence in the economy, companies report that they are investing in their businesses — ramping up hiring plans and increasing projections for capital spending.According to the most recent Duke University/CFO Busi...

By Joseph McCafferty • April 1, 2007

Dream Factory

Anyone working in the Indian film industry probably knows a GaneshGaitonde. The antihero of Sacred Games, the new bestseller fromnovelist Vikram Chandra, is the head of the Mumbai mafia whosefondness for Hindi movies gets him into film financing with strings attached.Eventually, Gaitonde arm-twis...

By Abe De Ramos • March 28, 2007

Six Stigma?

When Robert Nardelli was ousted as CEO of Home Depot, one unusual side effect was the attention paid to his advocacy of the Six Sigma process-improvement methodology. Consultancies, particularly those with competing approaches, were quick to offer opinions, surveys, and research intended to show ...

By Laura DeMars • March 28, 2007

John Noble, Best Buy International

Relaxed is the corporate mode of Best Buy, the U.S. electronics retail giant withU.S.$11 billion in sales and 940 stores in North America. John Noble is no exception. Dressed in a yellowturtleneck sweater, jeans, and sneakers, the CFO of Best Buy’s new international division exudes astately calm ...

By Tom Leander • March 22, 2007

Manager, Offshore Thyself

Ask fans at the cricket World Cup, which starts in the West Indies on March 11th, where Wisden Group, the sport’s best-known publisher, is headquartered and most would guess London. Its heritage and brand are quintessentially English. Britain is still its biggest source of earnings. But its futur...

By Economist Staff • March 8, 2007

Return of the Phantom

Given its long and illustrious history, you would expect visiting the headquarters of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars in the English countryside to be like stepping into a museum. But there’s only one classic model on display at the building, a 1928 Phantom I Sedanca de Ville, originally supplied to the D...

By Jason Karaian • March 5, 2007

Beware the Fine Print

The web version of this article has been expanded to include the sidebar “Second Time Around,” which did not appear in the March print edition of CFO magazine.At a family gathering this past Thanksgiving, the head of the household suddenly announced that he was planning to invest in a variable an...

By Marie Leone • March 1, 2007

On or Off?

What exactly is an offshore financial centre? At its broadest, it is any financial centre that takes in a large chunk of foreign funds — in other words, almost every financial capital in the world. Much of the business conducted in places such as New York, London or Hong Kong is from outside Amer...

By Joanne Ramos • March 1, 2007

Moving Pieces

It was as if America had swallowed Sweden. Since George Bush signed into law a one-off tax amnesty in 2004 that slashed corporate-tax rates from 35 percent to just over 5 percent, American companies have repatriated close to $350 billion in previously untaxed foreign profits, according to estimat...

By Joanne Ramos • Feb. 27, 2007

What It Takes to Succeed

The Jersey cow, a small, honey-brown bovine that is prized by farmers for the abundance of buttery, high-fat milk it produces, is one of the fastest-growing breeds in the world. From its origins in Jersey, a rocky island 14 miles (22km) off of the western coast of France, it now wanders fields in...

By Joanne Ramos • Feb. 23, 2007

Places in the Sun

If the deal over North Korea’s nuclear-weapons programme holds, Kim Jong Il may be able to indulge his penchant for fine wines and Hollywood blockbusters again. Banks around the world had severed ties with North Korea after America last September blacklisted a Macau bank accused of doing business...

By Joanne Ramos • Feb. 23, 2007

Kerry Eyes Fed Pool for Sickest Workers

With an eye towards making it more attractive for small businesses to provide health insurance benefits, Sen. John Kerry plans to introduce a bill to create a federal reinsurance pool to help employers pay for the care of seriously ill employees.Under Kerry’s proposal, which he touted during his ...

By Sarah Johnson • Feb. 14, 2007

WPP 2.0

If Nick Grouf wanted to impress his new financial backers, he probably outdid himself. At a meeting late last year with top executives from WPP, the global marketing services titan that had taken a stake in Grouf ‘s Los Angeles-based startup ad agency, Spot Runner, the young entrepreneur wanted t...

By Janet Kersnar • Feb. 12, 2007