Feature Article
China: Can Business Define
Politics?
For many
decades, communist states had a well-deserved reputation for never
allowing politics take a back seat to anything. Yet in the 1980s,
China's Communist Party leaders seemed to grasp the unintended irony
in this quip from Vietnam's foreign minister: "We are not without
accomplishment. We have managed to distribute poverty equally."
Economic growth has become the new national cause in
China, and the country's break from its grimmer past looks more
permanent each year. Still, some see China today as a far greater
threat to the U.S. than it was during the Cold War years, in both
military and economic terms.
What does the future
hold?
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DeKaser's
Financial Market Outlook
Whither House
Prices?
The reason for heightened uncertainty is that, apart from the
usual vagaries that plague most economic forecasts, house price
predictions are fraught by an additional element:
the incidence, or not, of a price
"bubble."
Uncertainty in the housing
market
DeKaser's: The
Region
A
quarterly publication on the economic developments in the Great
Lakes area.
Perspective On Auto Industry Job
Cuts
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Business &
Planning Strategies
Amex
Leads Parade of Buybacks
Several companies have announced stock buybacks but
apparently not for the usual reasons.These companies have not
suggested that it was
repurchasing shares to avoid dilution following recent stock-option
exercises. The stock market's recent sell-off also seems to play
little or no part. A number of the companies, however, are
apparently flush with cash, thanks in part to recent sales of assets
or business units.
Companies
counting
millions
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Legislative &
Regulatory
A SarbOx
Surprise
CEOs love to
hate the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, complaining that its new requirements
are a costly overreaction by Congress to the big accounting frauds.
More than two dozen companies have come under investigation this
year, among them UnitedHealth, KLA-Tencor, and McAfee, on suspicion
of fiddling with option grant dates to give millions of dollars of
extra pay to executives.
New scandal: the backdating of stock
options
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Human Resources
& Benefits
Firms Should Consider Mulitple
Risk Factors in Freezes
About 60% of businesses would freeze their
pensions if they endangered cash flow, while 48% would do so if they
threatened the bottom line and 43% would do so if they could harm
credit ratings. In fact, 32% of companies were turning away new entrants to
combat further liability growth in pensions, according to a Towers
Perrin survey of 100 financial executives at firms with pensions.
In deciding whether to
freeze a pension plan, Cecil Hemingway, managing principal at Towers
Perrin, recommends coming up with a precise definition of risk and
measuring it.
What did 100 peers have to
say?
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Finance & Treasury
Execs' Letters Rip FASB Pension
Draft
Many senior
finance executives fear that the Financial Accounting Standards
Board's plan for overhauling pension accounting will place an
onerous crunch on year-end closes that have already grown
frantic. Currently, they can use
measurements taken up to three months before the companies' fiscal
year ends.The proposed statement by the accounting board could upset
companies' annual budgeting and create chaos at year's end,
employers contend.
Two-part plan to overhaul retiree
benefits
accounting
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Personal Investing
Change for The
Worse
Sarbanes-Oxley,
intended to clean up Wall Street, has imposed huge costs on smaller
companies. A study by the Government Accountability Office, released
in early May, found that onerous new auditing requirements are
pushing companies to go private. The Sarbox reform is going to be
not much of a blessing for investors if it removes a large chunk of
the capital market from their reach, leaving profits from smaller
firms in the exclusive possession of private-equity
players.
Change is not always for the
best
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Economics
The
Inflation Cloud Lifts
The
government's revision to a previous quarter's report on gross
domestic product is a pretty humdrum event. On the surface, the May
25 update of first-quarter real GDP, to an annual rate of 5.3%, up
from 4.8% when it was first estimated a month ago, seemed to fit
that mold. But watch with special attention to the income numbers
all that production generates for both households and businesses.
Those trends signal important implications for the paths of consumer
spending, capital spending, inflation, and Federal Reserve
policy.
It pays to look
deeper
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Sales & Marketing
Connect With What
Matters Most
"C-level
life", complete consumer control, has arrived. Consumers now have
unprecedented access to excess-entertainment, infotainment,
utilitainment and everything in between. It has put chief marketing
officers and their marketing minions in the hot seat.
The
"big ideas" that keep consumers coming
back
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International & Trade
U.S. and U.K. Hold Talks of Cross-Border
Mergers
Transatlantic
co-operation between stock exchanges moved a step closer as the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission met its U.K. counterparts.
Officials from the two agencies said they had discussed "the
implications of cross-border exchange mergers" and other "common
areas of regulatory interest".
Regulating global
exchange
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Trends & Technology
How To Avoid A Business Cycle
Wipeout
One very big
obstacle to effective business cycle management is the "functional
silo" nature and compartmentalization of most corporations and the
lack of knowledge transfer across departments. It's the CIO who can
build and maintain a business cycle-sensitive forecasting and
strategic-action infrastructure that reaches horizontally across the
functional areas and vertically up and down the organization. As my
research illustrates, by fulfilling this function, the CIO can serve
as the "glue" that binds other functional areas strategically to one
another, as well as the "grease" that moves forecasting information
freely through the organization.
CIOs riding the economic
cycles
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Small
Business
Know The Benefits
Your Business Provides
What we have here are differences in what we value and the
benefits we derive from those values. People don't buy products and
services; they buy the benefits those products and services offer.
And, they walk through your door because they know you have what
they want. And, you have it because you know they want it. An
entrepreneur who wants to keep people walking through the door must
know who his customer is and offer the value-added benefits that
will attract and keep that customer.
Why value-added benefits are based on
lifestyles
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Women Business
Owners
Bad Habits
Everyone has bad habits that can affect one's
personal life, but what if your bad habits are related to business?
We spoke with several women business owners about their own bad
habits, how the habits affected them professionally, and how they
overcame them. Leslie Groene, business coach and author of the book
"Picture Yourself & the Life You Want" (Tiger Publicaitons, LLC,
2003), emphasizes a focus on time management and prioritization.
What if your bad habits are related to
business?
Woman Business Owner of the
Month
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