Driving a Hard Bargain

If you’re wondering how the financial crisis is rippling through the European economy, just log on to Broadspeed.com. Since November, the Essex, England, online auto broker has extended an offer that even cash-strapped customers can’t refuse — buy one car, get one free.With new car sales in the U...

By Janet Kersnar • Jan. 1, 2009

Layoffs Take a (Brief) Holiday

The rapid pace of layoffs slowed a bit as Corporate America — with its record November for job cuts just past — plans to ring out 2008. Could it be the sign of a bottom? Or, perhaps more likely, that few companies have the heart to fire workers during the holidays and preparations for New Year’s ...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 31, 2008

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

No End to the Nightmare

The sense of relief in Detroit that greeted the $17.4 billion federal lifeline thrown by President Bush to General Motors and Chrysler just before Christmas is unlikely to last long. The terms of the bridging loans amount to a gun at the heads of the two carmakers and their stakeholders. Unless t...

By Economist Staff • Dec. 31, 2008

Economy Puts Sports on Defensive, Sort Of

C.C. Sebathia’s seven-year, $161-million deal with baseball’s New York Yankees notwithstanding, the global recession has the sports world down in the count, as well.While some companies cancel their corporate sponsorships, some football and baseball teams are freezing ticket prices for the durati...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 11, 2008

Business Outlook Survey: Rock Bottom

For those searching for a glimmer of hope in the current economic news, the latest CFO Magazine/Duke University Global Business Outlook Survey is not the place to look. With CFO optimism plummeting to its lowest level in the 12-year history of the survey, 81 percent of finance executives say they...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Dec. 10, 2008

Business Outlook Survey

“This time is different” is the most expensive phrase in finance, according to European strategists at Morgan Stanley, who cite a long history of bursting bubbles in a recent report. Nonetheless, they add, “every now and then a true shift takes place.”Could this be one of those rare occasions? Ac...

By Jason Karaian • Dec. 8, 2008

Debunking Decoupling

Last month, Fitch Ratings degraded the sovereign debt of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Kazakhstan. The move put paid to the theory of “decoupling,” at least for now. Few still cling to the idea that the fallout from wobbly markets in the west will bypass emerging markets in the east.For western ...

By Gabor Taroczy • Dec. 8, 2008

What Goes Down Will Come Up

Only last April, Michael Graff of Graff Trucking predicted catastrophe if diesel prices climbed higher. “I’m at the point where I’m questioning my ability to continue to operate,” he said. While the current respite may have dialed back such angst, volatility has not vanished. Nor has the continge...

By S.L. Mintz • Dec. 1, 2008

Unhappy First Birthday, Recession of 2008

Some say the current recession is a noisy newborn, even if it arrived in recent months with screams and yelps of pain. But the National Bureau of Economic Research says it is already a churlish one-year-old this month.The NBER, a private nonprofit research organization dedicated to promoting unde...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 1, 2008

With a (Very) Little Help from the Feds

When the nation’s largest financial companies were deemed too big to fail, the Treasury Department swooped in with a $700 billion–plus rescue package. But what about businesses that are deemed too small to rescue? They can only hope that their homegrown approaches — pruning costs, postponing grow...

By Josh Hyatt • Dec. 1, 2008

And in This Corner, the Price-Fighter

At first glance this may not seem like the ideal time for you to greenlight a new product launch. After all, consumers have neither cash nor credit, they fear for their jobs (if they still have them), and they’re waving the financial equivalent of white flags in record numbers (as of June, person...

By Josh Hyatt • Dec. 1, 2008

View from Asia

There is no longer any doubt. Just a month ago, many executives in Asia were still arguing that the region could escape the worst of the financial crisis. But now that the U.S. banking disaster has become a global slump, companies from Beijing to Bangalore are suffering.Some Asian operations have...

By Don Durfee • Dec. 1, 2008

CFO Pessimists Outpoll Optimists 16- to-1

The pessimism felt by CFOs and senior-level executive CPAs about the U.S. economy surged in the fourth quarter after three previous periods of increasingly negative feelings, according to a survey by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the University of North Carolina busin...

By Roy Harris • Nov. 24, 2008

Uncertainty, Not Tight Credit, Chills Small Biz Lending

A pair of bankers at a recent Securities and Exchange Commission panel on small-business capital formation said they are ready, willing, and able to lend to small businesses. The problem, they believe, is that vexed small businesses display little demand for credit.“We tell people we’ve got money...

By Kate Plourd • Nov. 21, 2008

Forecasters Gloomy, Too

Consensus estimates show that professional forecasters have turned sharply negative on their outlook for the economy for the rest of this year and 2009.Real GDP will decline at a 2.6 percent rate in the final quarter of this year and will decline again in the first quarter of next year, by 1.3 pe...

By Stephen Taub • Nov. 17, 2008

Winnowing the Work Forces

This article was updated to include late-breaking announcements by U.S. Steel and Citigroup.The financial crisis continues to land hard on the nation’s work force. Jobless claims last week surged by 32,000, to a seasonally adjusted 516,000, and layoff announcements continued to thin out payrolls ...

By Stephen Taub • Nov. 13, 2008

Icons No More

“HAVE lunch, or be lunch.” The Silicon Valley mantra coined by Scott McNealy, the outspoken former boss of Sun Microsystems, a troubled computer-maker, still rings true as the technology industry heads into recession. At particular risk of being lunch are Sun and another once-mighty technology fi...

By Economist Staff • Nov. 11, 2008

Road to Reform

Margaret Hansen expects to be in big demand on the corporate speaking circuit. Not that she’s the author of a top-selling self-help book or a reformed wrong-doer with salacious stories to tell. Rather, she’s the procurement director for global travel at Chicago-based consultancy AT Kearney. She r...

By Gabor Taroczy • Nov. 4, 2008

Dare to Compare

What caused the credit crunch? In large part, it can be explained by a lack of trust, most notably between banks. A similar lack of faith often hampers corporate benchmarking efforts, a subject addressed at a conference held by the Global Benchmarking Network (GBN) last month in Budapest.Robert C...

By Gabor Taroczy • Nov. 3, 2008

An October to Remember — or Forget

The October nightmare lives on as reports stream in about how bad the situation was for corporate finance. In the latest reminder, the October Credit Manager’s Index plummeted to a record low, according to the National Association of Credit Management.“The misery was spread all around but manufac...

By Stephen Taub • Nov. 3, 2008

Up in the Air

Airlines are piling on the luxury, presenting a dilemma for business travellers. As financial conditions worsen, how committed are flyers to cutting costs when their own personal comfort is at stake? CFOs can expect the strain on their corporate travel policies to be particularly severe.So far, m...

By Esther Shein and Gabor Taroczy • Nov. 3, 2008

Top Concerns of CFOs

“How deep will the downturn be? Honestly, I don’t know. If I did, I wouldn’t be here.”Wrenching market movements have humbled a host of hedge fund managers, investment bankers and other assorted masters of the financial universe in recent weeks. For CFOs such as Claude Changarnier of Microsoft In...

By Jason Karaian • Nov. 3, 2008

Higher & Higher

In recent years, product pricing warranted daily discussions between CFO Alan Hippe and his colleagues at Continental, a €16.6 billion German tyre maker. Today, those conversations are just as likely to be taking place by the hour. Amid rising raw material costs, “pricing is key,” Hippe says. “It...

By Tim Burke • Nov. 3, 2008

The Great Green Hope

Amid much talk in this election year about blue states and red states, another color is being heard from: green. Politicians, mindful of soaring unemployment and wildly fluctuating oil prices, are advocating job creation in clean-energy-related fields. Pundits like Thomas Friedman (particularly i...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Nov. 1, 2008

Or We Could Just Teleconference…

Yet another sign of the times: no more fancy steak dinners on the company’s tab. Morton’s Restaurant Group, which derives 80 percent of its revenues from business travelers, stands to take a hit in 2009, thanks to serious cuts in travel spending, Jefferies & Co. analyst Jeff Farmer warned inv...

By Kate Plourd • Nov. 1, 2008