Financial Crisis Means Rougher Flying for Boeing

Running Boeing Co. these days must seem like managing air-traffic control at O’Hare on a stormy day full of delays and re-routings. And like an overworked controller, CEO Jim McNerney tries to sound calm when asked whether credit-strapped airline customers may be forced into canceling orders, or ...

By Roy Harris • Sept. 25, 2008

Equipment Financing Hits a Skid

Companies are pulling back on financing equipment for their businesses as tight credit and diminished demand is showing new signs of spreading throughout the economy. The August survey by the Equipment Leasing and Finance Association shows that new business volume dropped by 14.5 percent, falling...

By Alan Rappeport • Sept. 25, 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

Leaping Layoffs, and Not Just on Wall St.

The financial services industry may be imploding and combining, with untold layoffs yet to come. But a number of companies seemingly far-removed from banking already have announced sizable layoffs this week.The mounting number of unemployed hardly bodes well for the overall economy, which recentl...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 17, 2008

A Turn for the Worse

THE second quarter of this year was the most profitable ever for Big Oil: the six largest Western oil companies reported a 40% jump in profits, to a combined $51.6 billion. Exxon Mobil, the biggest of them all, banked $11.7 billion, the highest-ever quarterly profit reported by an American firm, ...

By Economist Staff • Sept. 12, 2008

Internal Controls Flummox Small Companies

More than one-third of small, publicly traded companies reported they had ineffective internal controls this year, the first in which they had to comply with the controls provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Only half that many larger companies said the same about their first experience with Sarb...

By Sarah Johnson • Sept. 10, 2008

E&Y Study: Small Caps Ripe for Picking

A decline in market capitalization among companies listed in the Russell 2000 Index of small-cap companies is driving strong mergers and acquisitions activity, according to an Ernst & Young analysis of the index’s annual reconstitution.A total of 137 companies were removed from the index beca...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 10, 2008

Feeling for the Bottom

CFOs predict job cuts and scant capital spending throughout the remainder of 2008 and the first half of next year, with most CFOs thinking a recovery is not likely to begin until next summer at the earliest, according to the results of the latest quarterly Duke University/CFO magazine Global Busi...

By Tim Reason • Sept. 9, 2008

Baidu CFO Jennifer Li

Last December, Baidu, China’s top Internet search provider, suffered a blow — the death of its popular CFO, 40-year-old Shawn Wang, who saw the company through its 2005 Nasdaq IPO. In March, Baidu tapped another 40-year-old, Jennifer Li, the North America controller of GMAC, the financing arm of ...

By Don Durfee • Sept. 8, 2008

Two Airlines Cut Fuel Surcharges

What goes up may just come down — even fuel surcharges.A large number of energy guzzlers, from airlines and cruise companies to truckers to chemical companies, were quick to institute fuel surcharges as the price of oil surged earlier this year, topping out at more than $147 per barrel. Now that ...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 5, 2008

Braced for Change

Plenty of M&A deals have an unwanted impact on someone, be it the executive who loses out in a boardroom reshuffle or the shareholder whose holdings are diluted. In the technology industry, there’s another knock-on effect: a deal can aggravate the acquired company’s customers, whose CFO and C...

By Tim Burke • Sept. 3, 2008

Credit Check

Read the rankings of Europe’s 100 largest debt issuers by Moody’s KMV.Wolfgang Reithofer was exasperated. When presenting a stellar set of 2007 results, the CEO of Wienerberger, a €2.5 billion Austrian building materials group, lamented how the firm’s share price had “disconnected” from its finan...

By Jason Karaian • Sept. 3, 2008

Top Ten Concerns of CFOs

Though his company makes fuel tanks for commercial vehicles, Ludwig Gold is as concerned about what goes inside the containers as the tanks themselves. The head of corporate finance and controlling at Salzburger Aluminium, like most finance executives around the world, cites the cost of fuel as o...

By Jason Karaian • Sept. 3, 2008

The Taxman Cometh

After years of doling out tax breaks and incentives to support the domestic information technology industry that made offshoring a household word (and lured plenty of U.S. businesses to Bangalore and other high-tech hot spots), India’s government is looking for a little payback. The 2008 Finance ...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Sept. 1, 2008

Gunning for Global Graft

Anyone trying to grease a few palms abroad, beware. The Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Securities and Exchange Commission are on track to file a record number of enforcement actions this year based on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which prohibits the bribing of foreign officials....

By Kate O'Sullivan • Sept. 1, 2008

Roiled by Oil

It’s official: The price of oil is a problem. Even as the going rate for black gold set one record after another, finance chiefs seemed largely unconcerned. But when gasoline crested the $4-per-gallon mark this summer, fuel prices rose to the top of the list of finance executives’ concerns for th...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Sept. 1, 2008

View from Asia

As corporate growth grinds to a halt in the United States and Europe, the bosses of global companies are rediscovering their enthusiasm for emerging markets. Companies ranging from Sony to General Electric to General Motors stress that, despite gloom at home, prospects for their Asian operations ...

By Don Durfee • Sept. 1, 2008

Chinese Bank to Raise Almost $15 Billion

Industrial & Commercial Bank of China is considering selling as much as $14.6 billion of bonds after domestic loan growth and overseas acquisitions reduced its capital, Bloomberg News reported.The world’s largest bank plans to sell the subordinated debt in batches by 2011, according to the wi...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 22, 2008

Bankrupt Congoleum’s Net Goes Through the Floor

The turmoil in the overall housing market is making things worse for Congoleum Corp.’s struggle to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The maker of resilient sheet vinyl — commonly referred to as linoleum — reported a 75 percent decline in net income in the second quarter on an 18 perce...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 14, 2008

In a State of Shock

IT HAS been 33 years since the headline “Ford to City: DROP DEAD” was on the front page of the Daily News, but it has not been forgotten by New Yorkers. At the time, New York was on the brink of bankruptcy. The city defaulted on some bonds and owed $5 billion. One in five of all city jobs (includ...

By Economist Staff • Aug. 4, 2008

Despite Lower Oil Prices, Airlines Add Fees

Although the price of a barrel of oil may be down about $25 from its high of a few weeks ago, airlines and other companies are still citing the rising cost of energy as they hike nuisance fees.On Thursday, for example, Northwest Airlines Corp. said it would add fuel surcharges of up to $80 for ma...

By Stephen Taub • Aug. 1, 2008

More Energy Hikes? CEOs, CFOs Think So

Small and medium-sized manufacturers are bracing for even higher energy, raw materials and transportation costs in the near term, a survey of CFOs and CEOs by accounting and consulting-services firm RSM McGladrey shows.Nearly half (48 percent) the companies polled over the past 10 days were expec...

By Stephen Taub • July 31, 2008

Help from a $1B Revolver at Office Depot

Office Depot Inc. amended its revolving credit in the first quarter, and the struggling office-supplies retailer said it had obtained commitments for a fully underwritten facility in excess of $1 billion to be in place by the end of the third quarter.The amended credit agreement will be collatera...

By Stephen Taub • July 30, 2008

Which Way Will Capital Vote?

FOR a short while in his early 20s, Barack Obama edited reports in New York for Business International, a publishing firm that was later bought by The Economist Group. He did not much like it, so he quit to become a community organiser. That was his only first-hand experience of business. John Mc...

By Economist Staff • July 24, 2008

A Mess at Merrill

Merrill Lynch announced a string of disappointing news Thursday evening in an earnings call scheduled after the close of the markets. The struggling investment bank revealed a $9.4 billion write-down, $4.6 billion in second-quarter losses, the sale of its prized 20 percent stake in financial-info...

By Alan Rappeport • July 18, 2008

View from China

Has China, and particularly the factory-rich region of the Pearl River Delta in southern China, lost its edge as a low-cost manufacturing base? Local industry associations report that more than 10,000 factories have closed down. Equal numbers of Taiwanese and Hong Kong factory-owners have fled th...

By Wu Chen • July 15, 2008