The White Stuff

After acrimonious debates over Barack Obama’s appointments to head the Treasury, the Department of State, and the Department of Defense, there was little energy left in the Senate this week for a fight over who should head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency that oversees U.S...

By Economist Staff • March 18, 2013

Three Ways CFOs Can Drive Innovation, Growth

The need to innovate is never more important than during an extended period of slow economic growth, such as the one we’re in now. The decisions that go with it are some of the toughest a CFO will encounter.Where should capital be deployed to best position the organization for growth without tak...

By Frank Friedman • March 14, 2013

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

Taxi Wars!

Tiffany “Topcab” Mitchell, who co-owns and manages Top Cab & City Cab, Boston’s largest taxi fleet, with more than 500 cars, began getting phone calls almost every day last year from entrepreneurs pitching mobile apps for hailing cabs. Call it e-hailing.Students from Harvard, MIT, and Babson ...

By David Rosenbaum • March 13, 2013

CFO Optimism Blooms

CFOs are shaking off the winter doldrums, feeling much better than they were in December when worries about the fiscal cliff overshadowed the last Duke University/CFO magazine Global Business Outlook Survey and put a damper on expectations. Now it seems CFOs are looking forward to the year ahead,...

By Kate O'Sullivan • March 13, 2013

Cloudmageddon

In a recent report, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, the U.S. National Intelligence Council writes that cloud computing will “provide global access and pervasive services” that will challenge organizations, governments, and society as a whole to “capture the benefits of new IT technologies...

By Rob Livingstone • March 12, 2013

Federal-Contractor CFOs Brace for Sequestration

Across the country, federal contractors are swallowing. Hard. It’s the day they hoped would never come.The debate as to whether and how much sequestration could damage the economy is in full force. But there’s not much debate that many of the contractors have trouble at their door or that their C...

By David McCann • March 1, 2013

Sequestration: Growth Juice for Alternative Lenders?

Frantic talks continue today in Washington to head off the now-famous sequestration mandating some $85 billion in blanket federal-spending cuts scheduled to begin at midnight Friday. But there are some people who may be less than upset about the inability of Democrats and Republicans in Congress ...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 28, 2013

Waiting for the Chop

When Barack Obama and the Republicans in Congress agreed on January 1 to let a payroll tax cut expire and tax rates rise on the rich, they rolled the dice with the economy. They in effect bet that America’s recovery was solid enough to withstand higher taxes and spending cuts, including a “seques...

By Economist Staff • Feb. 28, 2013

Yahoo Boss to Employees: Get Back to Work!

Friday will be Employee Appreciation Day.  It was established as an annual event in 1995 by Recognition Professionals International, in collaboration with Workman Publishing. To celebrate the day, RPI suggests that employers ask employees to “write down six ways you’d like to be rewarded,” while ...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 27, 2013

Asset-Based Loans: Not Your Father’s Pawn Shop

A Canadian businessman had a chance to buy a franchise. To raise cash, he borrowed from friends and relatives, and invested a chunk of his own savings. That covered his initial costs, but to get the business running the way he wanted it to, he needed to invest another $50,000–$100,000. That money...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 26, 2013

CFOs Can Help Themselves by Helping Sales Improve Forecasts

Many chief sales officers are notorious for making pie-in-the-sky forecasts that can lead their company to overspend. CFOs who provide sales forecasting modeling — and train the sales leader on how to use it — can save their company from financial calamities. They can also save their chief exe...

By Robert Sher • Feb. 20, 2013

PE’s Big Worry: Values Already Too High

Debt is cheap, abundant, and free of stiff covenants. But private-equity executives say that if an M&A boom develops, it won’t be financial sponsors that are gorging on companies and piling debt on targets’ balance sheets as they did in 2005 to 2007.At Columbia University Business School’s Pr...

By Vincent Ryan • Feb. 20, 2013

Big Data Getting Smaller, Cheaper

This is why they call Big Data big: IDC, a research firm, predicts that the Big Data market — including technology and services — will grow at a 31.7% compound annual rate through 2016, becoming a $23.7 billion market by 2016.IDC also says the digital universe — all the data stored in the world’s...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 14, 2013

Would Minimum Wage Hike Hurt Small Biz?

President Barack Obama called for Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour from the current $7.25 in Tuesday’s State of the Union address as one way to address income inequality. A 2011 study by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the “distribution of after-tax househol...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 13, 2013

Self-Insured Health Plans: Good for Small Companies?

As recently as 2009, only 13% of companies with fewer than 100 employees offered health insurance through self-insured plans, the Department of Health and Human Services says. The longstanding perception was that the smaller the company, the smaller the risk pool across which to dilute any catast...

By Tim Doherty • Feb. 12, 2013

CFOs: An IPO’s “Adult Supervision”

Zenprise, a mobile-device management firm, was acquired for a reported $355 million last month by multinational cloud-services provider Citrix. That made Zenprise’s investors very happy and enabled its CFO, Steve Valenzuela, to chalk up another success.Valenzuela has a long history of helping com...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 11, 2013

Eyes on the Price: How to Value Mergers

If Silver Lake Partners and Michael Dell pull off their leveraged buyout of Dell Inc. at a 25% premium, they’ll be getting a bargain if their price sticks: at least as merger and acquisition premiums go. In merger deals involving U.S. nonfinancial companies in 2012, the average premium paid was n...

By Vincent Ryan • Feb. 8, 2013

Don’t Forget about Forex Risk

For companies that do business in other countries, the best way to mitigate the risk of fluctuating currency rates is to lock in contracts and work with foreign-exchange experts rather than try to become one.John Brittain, managing director at Accordion Partners, a corporate financial-services fi...

By Caroline McDonald • Feb. 7, 2013

Slow and Unsteady

The U.S. CFO Optimism Index dropped yet again in the latest Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey, to 51 out of 100. Down from 52 last fall and 59 at the beginning of 2012, optimism levels among senior finance executives dipped late last year in part because of mounting conc...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Feb. 7, 2013

A New Breed of Salesperson

Nothing is immune to change, not even one of the world’s oldest professions — sales. According to a 2009 survey of more than 400,000 U.S. companies by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and South Korea’s SKK University, sales may be shifting toward an inside sales model. The survey predict...

By David Rosenbaum • Feb. 7, 2013

The Collaboration Conundrum

A remote workforce, distributed teams, and the use of contract labor are facts of operational life for almost all small and midsize businesses today. In order to collaborate, these far-flung teams are using a variety of free and paid services (for example, Dropbox, Google Drive, and others) both ...

By Neil Jain and Singu Srinivas • Feb. 6, 2013

The Truth about Technology Costs

The next time your IT staff comes to you with a purchase order for a server or storage and says, “The price is $2.1 million,” do your best Jack Nicholson impersonation from A Few Good Men and growl, “Is that the truth? I don’t think so. You can’t handle the truth.”The truth is the cost of that ha...

By Timothy Chou • Feb. 6, 2013

How to Sex Up Your Small-Biz Website

Caitlin Jewell, co-founder and creative director of Silverscape, a digital marketing agency, is also co-owner and marketing director of craft brewer Somerville Brewing, which makes Slumbrew beer. Given that Jewell runs a business that designs websites and helps companies market themselves online,...

By David Rosenbaum • Jan. 31, 2013

Crying Out for Dollars

The Industrial Canal Lock in New Orleans connects two of America’s highest-tonnage waterways: the Mississippi River — which handles more than 6,000 ocean vessels, 150,000 barges and 500 million tons of cargo each year, as well as much of its grain, corn and soyabean production — and the Gulf Intr...

By Economist Staff • Jan. 31, 2013

How CFOs Can Prevent Board Blowups

Few missteps can erode a CEO’s credibility faster than a board meeting in which directors shoot big holes in a sketchy growth proposal. The CFO can play a powerful role in gaining board support for a CEO’s growth concept.  Too often CEOs fall in love with their ideas, and then present them to the...

By Robert Sher • Jan. 29, 2013