Business Pundit

The New York Times reports that money makes marriages go ’round: Marrying for love is a relatively recent phenomenon. For centuries, marriages were arranged affairs, aligning families for economic or political purposes or simply pooling the… Read more

Calling today Black Monday would be somewhat unoriginal. The day, which promises to be a pivotal one in US economic history, has only just begun. So far, it’s looking like a Funeral Monday, with the fates of three major Wall Street… Read more

For entities with cutesy names, Fannie and Freddie sure are complicated. What if we swapped MBSs and stimuli for a bedtime story? If your youngin’ asks what the Fannie and Freddie fuss is all about, try out this tale: Dear old Fannie and… Read more

Sunday was certainly a big financial news day. In a move defying the Christian sabbath, the government announced its nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while a beleaguered Washington Mutual shared news that CEO Kerry Killinger will… Read more

From the BBC: Savers putting their money in funds investing in UK stocks and shares would have made more money since 2000 by putting it in savings accounts instead. If £1,000 was invested at the start of the decade, it would now be worth… Read more

Budgets, like paperwork, bills, and expenses, fall into a class of business terminology that immediately makes my eyes glaze. The problem with that Pavlovian reaction is that budgets are utterly essential for any business owner. They’re the… Read more

From the New York Times: Throughout America yesterday, communities and businesses were abuzz with the news of the widening insider-trading scandal on Wall Street. ”There is a feeling,” said one Cleveland executive, ”that there have… Read more

From the Financial Times: Morgan Stanley plans to use up to $1bn saved from cutting 4,800 jobs this year to hire top-level executives and bolster its presence in areas such as derivatives, risk management and proprietary trading. Morgan… Read more

According to a 2005 research study, executives with equity incentives (stock options and restricted stock grants) were more likely to “smooth” earnings so that they met or barely beat analysts’ projections. And the longer the continuation of the… Read more

Okay, one more tax related post and then I’ll shut up. Promise. Huffington Post, Forbes.com, and others reported earlier this year that actor Nicholas Cage is being accused by the IRS of improperly using his production company, Saturn, to write… Read more

We’ve all been there.  You know you spent hundreds on office supplies, but how much?  It’s so much easier to create a simple system for tracking expenses than to scramble for receipts, or worse yet – guess, come tax time.  Review these… Read more

CFO.com has a great article on the coming changes in the way financial statements are presented.Last summer, McCormick & Co. controller Ken Kelly sliced and diced his financial statements in ways he had never before imagined. For starters, he… Read more

The Journal of Accountancy has an interesting story about the challenge of accounting for gift cards. Since no merchandise changes hands, cash from gift card sales should not be recorded as revenue under normal retail accounting. But chalking it up… Read more

Here is an interesting paper that claims accounting manipulations cluster in certain industries and in firms with certain characteristics.We examine the characteristics of manipulating firms and analyze the ability of (i) financial statement… Read more