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corporate crime
by leon on April 1, 2008
Is fraud affected by investor beliefs about business conditions? How is that reflected in the data from IPOs?A study by Tracy Wang and Andrew Winton from the University of Minnesota, and Xiaoyun Yu f...
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Ethics
by leon on April 1, 2008
When it comes to ethics, nonprofits have always been held out as organizations that have the moral high ground. Now there's evidence showing that's not right.A new Ethics Resource Center surv...
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Accounting
by leon on March 30, 2008
KPMG's problems seem to go from bad to worse.Earlier during the week, we had reports that the US Government was pushing hard to revive its tax shelter case, promising to play fair this time. Yeah...
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markets
by leon on March 28, 2008
The book by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams describes Wikinomics as the "new art and science of collaboration". Actually, it actually has strong echoes of CK Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy...
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markets
by leon on March 28, 2008
If the Fed thought orchestrating the sale of Bear Stearns to JP Morgan for a bargain basement price would make the problem go away, it was dead wrong. The shockwaves from the US-government backed sal...
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SOX
by leon on March 28, 2008
Drugmaker Biovail's $10 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle some seriously bad fraud charges makes fascinating reading. And it's a lesson for anyone who t...
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risk
by leon on March 27, 2008
Earlier this month, I did a blog entry looking at the massive impact that climate change will have on the financial services sector, particularly the banks.Now, global law firm Winston & Strawn h...
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corporate crime
by leon on March 27, 2008
Conrad Black might be behind bars but the saga continues to unfold. CFO.com reports that Hollinger, the old holding company that used to control his newspaper empire, has settled a Securities and Exc...
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markets
by leon on March 25, 2008
The Fed's bail out of Bear Stearns continues to raise questions about "moral hazard". The term "moral hazard" applies to the situation where a party believes it won't have...
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Ethics
by leon on March 25, 2008
With plans for a special summit on the need to promote diversity in law firms, the question needs to be asked about how much discrimination goes in the legal world.With that in mind, we turn to a new...
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markets
by leon on March 24, 2008
Worrying news with reports that ratings agency Standard & Poor's has a report that 93 American companies are at risk of defaulting on $53 billion in debts, most of it coming from giant levera...
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markets
by leon on March 24, 2008
Appalling revelations in the Daily Telegraph over the weekend about how a London-based hedge fund set up a "dirty tricks unit" to manipulate share prices and get information illegally about...
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Accounting
by leon on March 24, 2008
Accounting tools like budgeting and sales projections can be dangerous.According to new research out of Wharton, they can lead people astray because they do nothing in themselves to dispel biases, an...
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Accounting
by leon on March 23, 2008
Late last year, I did a blog entry at how the US Government was not backing down on its determination to prosecute foremr KPMG partners for peddling dubious tax shelters. That was after Judge Lewis K...
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SOX
by leon on March 21, 2008
There has been a dramatic increase in restatements over the last few years. It's been estimated that the number made in 2006 was three times the amount from 2003. But what's driving the incre...
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markets
by leon on March 20, 2008
The credit crisis and housing crunch are hurting the rich, reports The New York Times.The affluent who took out massive mortgages and geared themselves up to lifestyles they could not otherwise affor...
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corporate crime
by leon on March 20, 2008
End of the honeymoon period for Siemens' new boss Peter Löscher. He is trying to clean up the company following the bribery scandal but has been forced to issue a surprise profit warning because ...
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risk
by leon on March 19, 2008
How will global warming shape our world 20 years from now?There will be massive changes.First, it will be a world where companies will have to pay for the right to pollute. That means there will be a...
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SOX
by leon on March 19, 2008
So a new survey commissioned by the Center for Audit Quality has found that most audit committee members believe audit quality is superior post-Sarbanes Oxley. According to the survey, 53 percent of ...
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strategy
by leon on March 19, 2008
That was the question asked last week at the World Health Care Congress Europe.And according to Maggie Mahar at the healthbeat blog , it presented a lot of surprising answers. The conventional wisdom...
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markets
by leon on March 18, 2008
There is a certain sense of deja vu watching US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke pump more liquidity into the US market to try and keep it afloat.In his damning book, Greenspan's Bubbles, Wi...
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risk
by leon on March 17, 2008
Climate change ranks as the biggest business risk, says Ernst & Young.According to Ernst & Young's Strategic Business Risk Insurance 2008, the changing weather patterns brought on by clim...
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strategy
by leon on March 17, 2008
What is the true cost of the Iraq war? Interesting analysis from former State department official and Kennedy Administration Middle East expert William Polk. And it's a chillingly business-like a...
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corporate crime
by leon on March 16, 2008
Conrad Black fights on. Just days after being sent off to prison for engineering a major fraud on shareholders in his Hollinger media empire (the picture above taken by AP shows him holding his wife&...
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SOX
by leon on March 16, 2008
The subprime crisis has some eerie parallels with Enron and WorldCom, say the two Sarbox co-authors.In an interview with the Indian media, they say what's needed is more regulation. Sarbanes-Oxle...
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Ethics
by leon on March 14, 2008
Ethical consumerism is on the rise. A new study by London-based Datamonitor, reported here, has found that Fair-trade sales across Europe, the US, Australia & New Zealand and Japan have experienc...
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markets
by leon on March 14, 2008
It's a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. That's how BusinessWeek has described Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's policy recommendations to solve the credit crisi...
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Ethics
by leon on March 13, 2008
The headline on The Wall Street Journal says it all: Wall Street Cheers As Its Nemesis Plunges Into Crisis. Andrew Sabin, a friend of Dick Grasso who Spitzer had sued to recover most of $190 million ...
Read more of Spitzer's demise is Wall Street's gain
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risk
by leon on March 13, 2008
Climate change will affect all facets of the financial services industry and all classes of investing. For investors and finance companies, it presents significant risks. It's likely to have a ma...
Read more of Climate change and banks
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corporate reputation
by leon on March 13, 2008
Trust in business has jumped to 58 per cent but fewer people now trust Government, according to the latest Edelmen Trust Barometer.That might have something to do with the war in iraq and the low app...
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markets
by leon on March 13, 2008
So the market has rallied on Ben Bernanke's latest rescue plan. The Fed is says it will lend $200 billion of Treasuries to the securities firms that trade directly with the central bank in return...
Read more of Will Bernanke's rescue plan work?
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corporate crime
by leon on March 11, 2008
Is there a link between fraud and overconfidence?Certainly seems to be the case, according to research out of Wharton.The interesting part about this research is the way it points to the Slippery slo...
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corporate governance
by leon on March 11, 2008
Late last year, I looked at the concept of Groupthink, the term coined by Yale psychologist Irving Janis that describes the situation when people act like sheep and just follow the crowd. No-one rais...
Read more of Tackling Groupthink: red flags and solutions
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corporate crime
by leon on March 10, 2008
I have talked about how subprime was a ripe area for fraudsters here and how the FBI was investigating.So it's not surprising that Countrywide is now under investigation for securities fraud. As ...
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corporate crime
by leon on March 10, 2008
Towards the end of last year, I raised the question of whether it was now an easy time for corporate crooks. The data showed that most fraudsters spend only two years in jail. So much for the Bush ad...
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Accounting
by leon on March 9, 2008
Last month I asked the question: are accountants recession-proof?. It seems that the beancounters have honed their processes and sharpened them up to the point where they could ride through and even ...
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risk
by leon on March 9, 2008
Companies are taking a very slack approach to managing fraud risk, according to the latest research by risk consultants Protiviti.The research, published here, shows that only 49 per cent of executiv...
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risk
by leon on March 8, 2008
Further evidence that businesses and politicians are struggling to come up up with a way of dealing with climate change and the risk it presents to to society, and business.First, we have the Interna...
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Accounting
by leon on March 7, 2008
Significant changes on the boards of the American Accounting rule settlers. But are they for the best? And might they make things worse?As Reuters reports, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (F...
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Ethics
by leon on March 7, 2008
Investment bank Goldman Sachs has an interesting initiative that mixes ethics and business opportunity. It's a program designed to show that ethics can be good for business.The 10,000 Women proje...
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litigation
by leon on March 6, 2008
Just a few weeks, I did a blog entry looking at the stupidity of the courts in dealing with Wikileaks. The case arose from a complaint from Swiss bank Julius Baer which had filed a lawsuit claiming W...
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corporate crime
by leon on March 6, 2008
Siemens says it's making progress rooting out corrupt practices in the fall-out from its bribery scandal.Siemens general counsel Peter Solmssen has told The Wall Street Journal that a special amn...
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SOX
by leon on March 5, 2008
Welcome to the nightmare. The biggest gripe about Section 404 controls is that they will not get easier and will not reduce over time. No matter how long companies have to get used to it.Now five yea...
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markets
by leon on March 5, 2008
Here is the paradox of markets: they are bigger, more liquid and more lucrative than ever but mistakes by a handful of companies send shock waves around the world. All created by complex financial in...
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Ethics
by leon on March 5, 2008
More companies are turning to philanthropy as a means of connecting with communities and markets and meeting consumer expectations. But there are questions whether these programs are hitting the mark...
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strategy
by leon on March 4, 2008
Dell's woes continue. Last week, it announced a fall in net income, wiping out completely any increase in sales. The share price, which was up around $30 in November, hit lows at the end of the w...
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regulators
by leon on March 3, 2008
Fascinating to watch the battle unfolding between Liechtenstein and the rest of the world involving a world wide tax fraud investigation of its banks covering billions of euros.Bloomberg reports that...
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Compliance
by leon on March 3, 2008
Plenty has been said about the growth of compliance costs. Now we have further evidence that compliance spending is rising faster than net income for financial institutions, according to the latest s...
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executive pay
by leon on March 2, 2008
Directors and institutional investors don't agree on whether the executive pay system has produced better performance. But they do agree on one key point: it's resulted in CEOs getting paid t...
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boards of directors
by leon on March 1, 2008
Sitting on a dysfunctional board is soul-destroying. But what are the pathologies? Some good insights from Beverly Behan at BusinessWeek in her piece Boards Behaving Badly.Types she identifies are th...
Read more of Pit bulls and other directors
