Global news and insight for corporate financial professionals
WAGE GAP CLOSES AS GOVERNMENT EMBARKS ON SOCIAL REFORMS By Thomas Clouse China announced plans last month to reduce its wealth distribution gap through a series of measures—such as raising minimum wages, loosening lending and deposit rates and increasing ...
MILESTONE: SPAIN By Forrest Jones Spain wants to make life a little easier for its business sector. Recently, Madrid drafted legislation to make it simpler for companies to conduct business in different autonomous regions within the country ...
MILESTONES: UK By Anita Hawser After four years under a shadow, the UK’s Financial Services Authority is once again being held up as a model financial regulator — both for its principles-based approach to reporting and for its ability to ...
NEWSMAKERS: POLAND By Justin Keay Poland’s central bank governor, Marek Belka, marked the start of the New Year with an interview to a leading business newspaper in which he claimed Poland had experienced “the perfect slowdown” rather than the slump ...
NEWSMAKERS：US By Valentina Pasquali With high-stakes negotiations with Congress under way, US president Barack Obama is bringing in a new treasury secretary. Lew: An experienced political negotiator Jacob Lew, 57, was the White House’s chief of ...
MILESTONES: EUROPE By Valentina Pasquali On the tail of the European economic crisis, the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union is nearing a breaking point. While in Brussels some members are pushing for further integration, in ...
NEWSMAKERS: VENEZUELA By Valentina Pasquali As Hugo Chávez’s 13-year-long domination of Venezuelan politics is overshadowed by ill health, speculation over who will carry on his legacy is largely focused on vice president Nicolás Maduro Moros, whom Chávez himself appointed as his ...
NEWSMAKERS: SOUTH KOREA By Thomas Clouse South Korea will swear in 60-year-old Park Geun-hye as the country’s first female prime minister this month, after she narrowly defeated her more liberal competitor, Moon Jae-in, in the general election in December. ...
MILESTONES: EU By Anita Hawser The proposed Tobin Tax, or financial transaction tax (FTT), is a political hot potato that is being kicked around by various European countries in the wake of the global financial crisis as a means ...
MILESTONES: UK By Anita Hawser The ongoing controversy surrounding Libor, the global benchmark interest rate used for pricing financial contracts, has sparked a wider debate about the merits of using alternative reference rates. The Bank of England ...
End of FDIC Unlimited Insurance: Where Will Companies Stash Cash? Part of the problem, of course, is the potential counterparty risk in some short-term investment vehicles, such as certain money market funds. Many firms moved funds out of MMFs and ...
GIVING DILIGENCE ITS DUE By Karen Kroll Companies are using outsourced service providers, bringing in experts, and making use of new technology solutions to stay compliant with the increasingly complex global regulations. Despite some of the headlines ...
INNOVATION By Laurence Neville No list of influential figures of the past quarter-century would be complete without Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, US president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher—the three most important figures in ending the key ...
WHO'S REGULATING THE REGULATORS? By Justin Keay Regulation tends to be reactionary: Regulators get in on the game after events have already happened. The jury is still out on the effectiveness of a lot of the regulation introduced in the ...
NEWSMAKERS: UNITED STATES By Luca Ventura Sheila Bair is determined to turn up the heat on regulators and accelerate financial reforms. Bair: protecting the US economy from the next crisis Photo Credit : ALBERT H. TEICH/ Shutterstock.com ...
GOVERNMENT TO SELL OFF STAKES, REDUCE DEFICIT By Aaron Chaze The administration announced renewed efforts to sell stakes in government-run companies in order to reduce the fiscal deficit. It plans to raise INR300 billion ($5.4 billion) by ...
MILESTONES: GLOBAL By Joel Kranc With Spanish banks accepting bailouts to shore up their balance sheets and the eurozone crisis showing no signs of abating, global firms are looking for alternative financing options to maintain liquidity buffers. ...
POLITICS AND THE SOVEREIGN RATING By Michael Shari The debate rages on as to whether recent sovereign downgrades were politically motivated, or whether the ratings agencies were simply slow to act on decisions made long before. Stakeholders worldwide are ...
RESTORING TRUST By Paula Green Custodians are dealing with the impact of major regulatory reforms and a loss of confidence in investors' services safety after the devastation of the MF Global debacle. The expanding web of government ...
NEWSMAKERS: UNITED KINGDOM By Anita Hawser Hogg: Code will be catalyst In the wake of the financial crisis, which highlighted the need for higher levels of engagement between the boards of companies and significant shareholders, corporate governance is ...