Sarbanes-Oxley has been one hellish nightmare for the free market. I work for a very large public company, in the auto industry, in the corporate finance group, and we concentrate on North America, Mexico, and (formerly) Singapore. With our 4Q financials and year-end, financial reporting wrap-up, the SarbOx nightmare is at the forefront of my
In spite of my criticism of the auto industry for its banking business models, there’s some good going on in the auto business, too. With one eye studying for an exam, and the other eye flipping through the boob tube channels, I came across an interesting interview. The local PBS show I love to watch, Autoline Detroit , had as its guest Dieter
Debt, that is. 40-year mortgages? My friend Eric Englund on the highly-leveraged, Fannie Mae, and especially, its balance sheet . The debt-to-equity ratio is a stunning 43-1 (with 10-12 being an acceptable range for this indistry). In non-banking terms, TWA, I think, had a 10-1 ratio at the point it sank. I think the S&P 500, as a whole, nowadays,
Because your father never had to deal with Sarbanes-Oxley. A great article in the new issue of Strategy + Business : “Not Your Father’s CFO.” The CFO is no longer a bean counter with a few ties to tax and treasury. CFOs, nowadays, are strategic activists with roles in strategy and operations, as well as bean countering. It is interesting that the
On C-Span2’s Book TV this past Sunday, author John Perkins offered up a fascinating talk about his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man . Perkins, a former government loan shark, has spent twenty years contemplating this book, and has struck a goldmine with the timing of its release. I suspect he is a political moderate, though he occasionally
I’ve been reading through a book I came across in my city library called The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System . The author is from NYU, and his name is Siva Vaidhyanathan. In a section titled “Intellectual Property is Neither,” Siva states: Intellectual property
An interesting turn of events in the bond market. Fitch Ratings, desperate to be as recognized as the big boys — Moody’s and Standard & Poor — is holding the line on GM bond ratings . The US automaker, with $45.5bn of corporate debt, has been teetering on junk bond status, as speculation has long been that S&P would force GM bonds out of
While studying colonial period business practices and property rights issues, for a business & finance history class, I read Carl Watner’s Libertarians and Indians: Proprietary Justice & Aboriginal Land Rights , in a 1983 issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. Watner smartly refutes the thesis that states, as Roderick Long puts it , “given
[Michigan] Governor Jennifer M. Granholm today issued the following statement on the announcement that Delphi has filed for Chapter 11: I am profoundly disturbed by Delphi’s decision and what it means for the nearly 15,000 Michigan employees, many of whom have worked for decades for the company based upon the promise that they would have a pension
From the Washington Post : In Brookhaven, Miss., for example, where Wal-Mart operates a vast distribution center, the company had 45 trucks full of goods loaded and ready for delivery before Katrina made landfall. To keep operating near capacity, Wal-Mart secured a special line at a nearby gas station to ensure that its employees could make it to
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.