Currency Competition

Once a decade or so, economists ask whether the dollar’s reign as the world’s number one reserve currency might be at the start of a slow decline. These musings usually coincide with a fall in the dollar’s value. In the past 30 years, the dollar has had four bouts of marked depreciation. During t...

By Economist Staff • Oct. 5, 2005

View from Asia: Complexities of Reporting

Asia’s phenomenal growth has a logical corollary: multinationals have equally phenomenal expectations for their operations in Asia. CFOs there complain that managers half a world away expect the same precision in planning that they would enjoy elsewhere. Truth is, the diversity and unpredictabili...

By Tom Leander • Oct. 5, 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

Hurricanes Destroyed 108 Offshore Platforms

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed 108 oil and natural-gas offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, and another 53 might not be repaired until next year, according to press reports of assessments by the Department of the Interior.The destroyed platforms accounted for about 1.7 percent of Gulf...

By Dave Cook • Oct. 4, 2005

Know Thy Company’s Self

In the eyes of the law, a company is a person. It has various legal rights: it can own property, it can sue or be sued, and so on. But does a company have a personality in more than a legal sense?Yes, say some observers, though their understanding of what makes for a corporate personality varies....

By Edward Teach • Oct. 4, 2005

And That Was Before

Even before Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, CFOs were uneasy about the economy. According to the Duke University/CFO Business Outlook Survey conducted in August, CFOs were less optimistic about the economic prospects of the United States than they have been in four years. Only 29 per...

By Joseph McCafferty • Oct. 1, 2005

Trouble on the Town Green

Four years ago, Bill Bambrick was looking for a little seed money. Literally. A horticulturist living in Augusta, Georgia, Bambrick had recently formed his own company, Loblolly Bay Landscape. Like most start-ups, Bambrick’s needed cash to pay the bills and a line of credit to help nurture the bu...

By Helen Shaw • Oct. 1, 2005

The Great Thrift Shift

On March 10th 2005, Ben Bernanke — a former Princeton professor who at the time was a governor of America’s central bank — addressed a gathering of economists in Richmond, Virginia, on America’s gaping current-account deficit. Its causes, he argued, were to be found abroad rather than in American...

By Economist Staff • Sept. 29, 2005

Consumer Confidence Suffers Huge Blow

Consumer confidence plummeted to its lowest level in nearly two years and suffered its biggest one-month drop in 15 years, according to the Conference Board. The 19-point drop in the board’s monthly index — to 86.6 in September from 105.5 in August — was the largest single-month decline in consum...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 27, 2005

SEC Delays Small-Company 404 Compliance

As expected, the Securities and Exchange Commission has granted small companies another year — until July 2007 — before they must report on their internal controls under Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, according to the Associated Press.That is the second time the SEC has given small compan...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 21, 2005

Katrina and the Housing Market

New-home construction fell 1.3 percent in August, the second straight month it has declined, according to the Department of Commerce. Last month also marked the first back-to-back decline in housing starts since early 2004, the Associated Press reported.“We see a flattening of housing starts and ...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 20, 2005

Fed Raises Rates Despite Katrina

The Federal Reserve has continued its tightening policy by raising the federal funds rate another 25 basis points, to 3.75 percent. This is the 11th hike in the fed funds rate since June 2004.A minority of experts thought the Fed might pause until its next meeting, in two months, given the effect...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 20, 2005

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

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