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markets
by leon on January 1, 2008
So will the subprime crisis drag the US into a recession in 2008? Depends who you ask.Some Wall Street experts say there's no more than a 30 to 40 per cent chance of the R-word taking hold. Still...
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risk
by leon on December 29, 2007
When the history of global warming is written, 2007 will stand out as the turning point. That was the year several reports on climate change were released, there was a deal of sorts at Bali and for t...
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risk
by leon on December 28, 2007
Photo: BK Bangash/AP
The global impact of benazir bhutto's assassination should not be underestimated. All of this has to be seen in context. Oil prices have now soared edging closer to $100 a bar...
Read more of Bhutto and geopolitical risk
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corporate crime
by leon on December 28, 2007
Siemens continues to try to clean itself up and move on from the bribery scandal but the elaborate money trail suggests it's not going to be that easy.Last week, the company sacked Siemens Hellas...
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markets
by leon on December 27, 2007
Last week, Pimco managing director Bill Gross was saying the US had already entered a recession."You know, if I had to be bold, and I can do that, a la Dow 5,000, if I had to be bold, I'd sa...
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corporate crime
by leon on December 27, 2007
The rise in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or FCPA enforcement continues with Alcatel-Lucent agreeing to pay $2.5 million to settle charges that it violated anti-bribery laws by footing the bill for h...
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corporate reputation
by leon on December 26, 2007
As another year draws to a close, it's worth remembering the misstatements and stupid remarks of CEOs during the year. Which makes Wired magazine's 2007 Foot-in-Mouth Awards worth checking ou...
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litigation
by leon on December 26, 2007
What a difference a financial crisis makes! Back in July, I looked at data showing that the number of securities class actions in the US had fallen significantly to well below average. At the time, I...
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corporate reputation
by leon on December 25, 2007
What a year it's been! Some chief executives have done some seriously questionable things this year, from the fallout over stuff that's plainly illegal to the idiotic.Portfolio.com presents t...
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corporate crime
by leon on December 24, 2007
Denmark's Christmas tree growers have been charged over claims of price-fixing and running a cartel.Allegations that costs were deliberately hiked up by 25 per cent follow a police investigation....
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corporate crime
by leon on December 24, 2007
Earlier this month, I raised questions whether BP was getting off too lightly with the proposed $50 million penalty for BP for its negligence that led to the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion that k...
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corporate crime
by leon on December 23, 2007
Back in September, I did a blog entry looking at Jeff Skilling's attempts to get either a retrial or acquittal.He has again asked to be free on bond while his case is appealed and you can read th...
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risk
by leon on December 21, 2007
"Trust us - your personal information is safe". That's probably the biggest e-business lie, according to Professor Michael Parent.After reviewing the privacy and security statements of ...
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executive pay
by leon on December 21, 2007
Bonuses might be down but the subprime mess has not stopped the party on wall street.True, some are "doing it hard". After Morgan Stanley, for example, announced it would write down its mor...
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Accounting
by leon on December 20, 2007
Debiting accounts receivable and crediting sales are the most popular methods of cooking the books. Reimbursing air travel expenses based only on itineraries supplied by travel agencies is a particul...
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litigation
by leon on December 20, 2007
Bear Stearns' annus horribilus has just got worse with Barclays Bank suing the Wall Street firm, claiming it used two hedge funds that collapsed last summer as places to unload troubled assets. B...
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corporate crime
by leon on December 20, 2007
Just over five years ago with the stench of Enron around him, President Bush declared that corporate criminals would no longer have it easy. "Every corporate official who has chosen to commit a...
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markets
by leon on December 19, 2007
Mixed reaction to Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke's plan to stop mortgage lenders from conducting the type of practice that led to the current sub-prime mortgage crisis. Boiled down, there ...
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markets
by leon on December 19, 2007
Here's a warning for the boomers. The 2007 Financial Report of the US Government has found that the ageing baby boomer generation and rising health costs are going to drag down the US economy. An...
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corporate crime
by leon on December 19, 2007
Senior executives of German electronics and engineering group Siemens AG today met with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with the bribery scandal at Siemens. At the meeting, CE...
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Ethics
by leon on December 18, 2007
The US Senate is set to vote on giving phone carriers retroactive immunity for surveillance of US citizens. Just a little something to make life easier for the National Security Agency (NSA). All of ...
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Ethics
by leon on December 18, 2007
These are extraordinary times. After weeks of stonewalled talks, there has been a breakthrough deal at the climate change negotiations in Bali.Still claiming it was a world leader, the the US - the o...
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corporate crime
by leon on December 16, 2007
Earlier this year, I did a blog entry explaining that the fight against corporate wrongdoing always eases up when there is a stock market bubble.The Economist confirms that argument in the piece Goin...
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corporate crime
by leon on December 16, 2007
Less than a week after Siemens announced that Hannes Apitzsch was its new finance chief, the company has suddenly revoked the appointment because of concerns about a union funding scandal.Meanwhile, ...
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strategy
by leon on December 15, 2007
More and more companies are now using personality testing to predict job performance. And personality testing is now a huge industry.But a new study, reported here, suggests that the link between per...
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corporate reputation
by leon on December 15, 2007
I have talked about how corporate reputation risk is on the rise. This is a high risk area because it can take years to build up a reputation, and it takes no time to destroy it.The problem is that f...
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corporate governance
by leon on December 14, 2007
Last week, I did a blog entry talking about the problems charities and other non-profit agencies face with governance.Now a new book Forces for Good by Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant det...
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Accounting
by leon on December 13, 2007
Big week for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. Earlier in the week, it sent a warning to the Big Four accounting firms by pinging Deloitte $1 million for violating audit standards. The f...
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executive pay
by leon on December 12, 2007
The media spends a lot of time bagging CEOs for outrageous salaries and perks. But a recent study suggests the media might be just as much to blame.The study by University of Colorado researchers, re...
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Ethics
by leon on December 12, 2007
Worrying Deloitte survey suggests that teenagers claim they are ethical but are still prepared to lie and cheat to get ahead.While most teens surveyed (71 percent) said they felt fully prepared to ma...
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corporate crime
by leon on December 11, 2007
Interesting developments in the two big corporate bribery cases, Siemens and BAE Systems. The heat is on both companies and despite their best efforts, it's not going away.First to BAE and we hav...
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strategy
by leon on December 11, 2007
The breakaway success of the Chinese economy is one of the most remarkable economic stories of the last decade. No-one could have predicted that a communist state would have turned into one of the gr...
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corporate crime
by leon on December 11, 2007
In the lead-up to his sentencing, an unrepentant Conrad Black declared that jail would be a bore. Now he has just discovered he will have up to eight years of boredom behind bars.Judge Amy St Eve has...
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Ethics
by leon on December 11, 2007
About one in 10 people around the world had to pay a bribe in the past year and reported bribery has increased in some regions, such as Asia-Pacific and South East Europe. Bribery is particularly wid...
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corporate crime
by leon on December 10, 2007
Why do law, accounting and consulting firms break the law? Why is it that some firms go off the rails when others manage to stay on the straight and narrow?Some interesting insights from some Dutch a...
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markets
by leon on December 10, 2007
Lost in all the talk about "subprime", "credit crunch" and "securitization"? William Safire says part of the problem is the way cliches are used to numb us into not thin...
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strategy
by leon on December 9, 2007
Want to take a look into the future to plan your future strategy? That's anyone's guess. But Memebox.com now offers the Future Scanner, a vaguely Digg-tool that gives some hints of future dir...
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Accounting
by leon on December 8, 2007
Several weeks ago, I did a blog entry highlighting how Iraq was an accounting black hole that's vulnerable to fraud and corruption.Now we have revelations from CBS that $1 billion of military equ...
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Accounting
by leon on December 8, 2007
The public company Accounting Oversight Board has a proposed policy statement that would allow it to rely hand over to its international counterparts inspections of non-US audit firms going over the ...
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corporate governance
by leon on December 6, 2007
So Coca Cola has announced that it's President and Chief Operating Officer Muhtar Kent will succeed Neville Isdell as chief executive.For the record, it's worth noting that in the 1990s, Kent...
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risk
by leon on December 6, 2007
How things have changed.Executives expect environmental issues, including climate change, to affect shareholder value far more than any other societal issue during the next five years. Their concern ...
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Ethics
by leon on December 6, 2007
Interesting campaign being run out of Australia which could give some lessons for offices all over the world in the lead-up to Christmas.The Kick the Kringle campaign, run by Our Community which is t...
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strategy
by leon on December 6, 2007
Fresh after acquiring Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal reports that Rupert Murdoch has bought Beliefnet, the largest online faith and spirtuality network.The mind boggles when you think of how you ...
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corporate crime
by leon on December 5, 2007
It's dark days for Samsung, one of Asia's pre-eminent family empires, with reports of the Korean Government moving to investigate whether the nation's largest conglomerate created a slush...
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corporate governance
by leon on December 5, 2007
On one reading, not-for-profit have really lifted their governance since the implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley.According to Grant Thornton's fifth annual National Board Governance Survey for Not-f...
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corporate crime
by leon on December 5, 2007
The proposed $50 million penalty for BP for its negligence that led to the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 workers is letting the British-based petroleum giant off lightly, says the...
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Accounting
by leon on December 5, 2007
A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the world bank assessing which countries have improved their tax systems found that the US tax system is behind the pack.The report, Paying Taxes 2008 The global...
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executive pay
by leon on December 4, 2007
Interesting post last week from Herb Greenberg at Seeking Alpha on whether Wall Street should hand back its bonuses to subprime victims."During my Power Lunch stint on CNBC yesterday, one of the...
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strategy
by leon on December 4, 2007
Why do smart executives make dumb decisions? Why do boards of directors head off in certain directions when you know the result will be spectacularly bad?A lot of it is because of Groupthink, the ter...
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risk
by leon on December 4, 2007
More signs of recession coming with Bloomberg reporting that US corporate corporate profits, as measured by the Commerce Department, have fallen at an annual rate of $19.3 billion in the third quarte...
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markets
by leon on December 3, 2007
A few days ago I did a blog entry saying Citigroup had given itself Junk bond status with it paying 11 per cent for The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority's $7.5 billion bailout. And I warned it was ...
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Accounting
by leon on December 2, 2007
The fallout from Rudy Giuliani's "Shag Fund", revealed last week in Politico.com concerning those mysterious and buried costs surrounding his extramarital affair with Judith Nathan when...
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corporate crime
by leon on December 2, 2007
Conrad Black might be facing decades in the slammer but he has vowed to return in this interview on BBC Radio 4 which you can listen to here.I'll be back, he says, no matter what happens. "I...
