EC Plans to Lighten Antitrust Rules

The European Commission may be easing up on huge multinational companies.An internal group, led by EC competition commissioner Nellie Kross, plans to make it more difficult for prosecutors to find large companies guilty of breaking antitrust rules, according to The Financial Times, which cited co...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 21, 2005

A Market for Ideas

“The granting [of] patents ‘inflames cupidity,’ excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits…The principle of the law from which such consequences flow cannot be just....

By Kenneth Cukier • Oct. 21, 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

From Push to Pull: The Next Frontier of Innovation

Ever since 1911, when Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, businesses have pursued efficiency with a focus that borders on obsession. Nearly a century later, CEOs and management authors are still writing hymns of praise to the benefits of executing operation...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • Oct. 19, 2005

Top Agenda Items for Directors

The top five issues on the agendas of corporate boards this quarter center on the impact of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the increasing cost of fuel, rising interest rates, employment needs, and board recruitment, according to a report by Christian & Timbers.The executive search firm, which b...

By Helen Shaw • Oct. 13, 2005

R&D Spending Doesn’t Spell Profit

Increased investment in research and development rarely buys the financial returns and growth that managers are seeking, according to a new study by Booz Allen Hamilton.The consultancy — which analyzed data from the 1,000 companies in the world that had the highest R&D spending in 2004 (and t...

By Craig Schneider • Oct. 11, 2005

Wedded to a Business

“You have got to be out of your mind,” said Stan Lawson to his wife, Gabriella Ambrosi, when she told him she was thinking of owning a business.At the time, Lawson — formerly the chief financial officer of Chinzano in Turin, Italy, and at DBS Industries in Middle Valley, California — was working ...

By Helen Shaw • Oct. 11, 2005

Cox on Cross-Border Fraud

Fraud doesn’t respect national borders, said Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox on Thursday in a video address to an international conference of the American Bar Association.In less than two weeks, reported MarketWatch, he will join Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 6, 2005

Good News, Bad News

First came the good news. At the July 26 interim results presentation at his company’s swanky new headquarters in London’s Canary Wharf, David Grigson, CFO of Reuters, Europe’s largest financial news and data company, told shareholders that he would be returning £1 billion ($1.8 billion) followin...

By Janet Kersnar • Oct. 6, 2005

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

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