The Finance Pig

Currently in the market crisis, the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board is requesting changes to its auditing standards that describe the rules of any Sarbanes Oxley audit. These new challenges for the auditors are to assess and respond to risks during an financial statement audit. The audit risk is the material that the auditors […]

Being in finance, I often field a lot of questions about the various markets.  One of the most repetitive questions I’ve heard is, “what happens of the stocks keep going down?” Well there are various answers to this.  When you enter the market, you often answer questions about how conservative or aggressive you want to […]

There is currently a belief that financial risk is easily measured. That we can stick some sort of risk-meter into the financial system and get an precise measurement of the risk of complex financial instruments. The poorly misguided belief that this risk-meter exists plays a key role in getting the financial system into the mess […]

Every so often, accountants get asked some dumb questions.  Some of the questions I’ve received are “I never signed up for insurance, so why does medicare keeps getting deducted from my check?”  Or “can I get paid in cash so I don’t have to pay my child support?”  Even ones like “I don’t have a […]

As finance executives are having a hard time finding the silver lining in the credit crisis, its no wonder that the recent problems on Wall Street have forced them to revisit their bank relationships, redo their forecasting, rethink their cash management strategy, and worry a lot more about what tomorrow will bring. But under the […]

Fantastic!  The SEC issued an interpretation of an accounting standard that could make it easier for banks to report smaller losses, or perhaps even profits, when they announce results for the third quarter, which ended Tuesday. So far, the move on Tuesday drew praise from the ABA, which whined to the SEC that auditors were […]

This Wednesday, the SEC will finally let us know a date for US Companies to be allowed to start using IFRS as their reporting standards. It’s essentially going to be a roadmap that the SEC commissioners will consider, and then of course open it up to the public and watch the fireworks begin.

The U.S. Senate is proposing two bills to get a stronghold on the abuse of offshore tax havens.  For those of you not sure of what this is, an offshore account is a bank account located outside the country of residence of the account holder, and typically in a low tax jurisdiction that provides financial […]

That sounds like sweet music to my ears!  Of course, the SEC has yet to suggest a date by which U.S. companies have to adopt IFRS rules, and the thought of such a massive switch is the current topic of discussion at some of the hard partying accounting functions in the country (think fraternity keg […]

As the opening bell was rung by Don Montanaro on May 8th, the creator of Fixed Return Options (FROs), he was hoping to see a new era of trading by bringing in a more simple way of option trading.  FROs, simply put, pays out in either an all or nothing structure that alleviates the pains […]