The Unjustly Neglected “Margin Call” Ross Douthat at the New York Times thinks the Oscars missed crediting an important film this year: Speaking of Noah Millman, reading his Oscar post reminds me that my own comments on the year in movies neglected to mention what was perhaps the most striking injustice of the Best Picture nominations: The lack of any love for “Margin Call,” which was, as Millman writes, “not only extremely well-written and well-acted … but an extremely rare effort to accurately depict the culture of Wall Street.” (Be sure to check out his perceptive take on the movie’s moral and professional dilemmas.) The movie did…
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Corporate Investigations Increasingly Aided with Digital Forensics Digital investigators can do more than retrieve data from devices. They can also use data to reconstruct past events to explain how computers were used to perpetrate wrongdoing. Info4Security has introduced a new column, the Forensic Technologist, which will be written by Ernst & Young’s Simon Placks and explore how computer forensics are used to assist corporate investigations. Computer forensic practitioners excel at reconstructing the past into a timeline. Like archaeologists, they excavate digital media and find the artefacts to evidence how that computer was used. We’re very good at finding out how things…
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Blame Disaster on Bad Inputs. Black-Scholes Works. The last few years have given us plenty of reasons to hate financial models. Models that promised to increase efficiency and manage risk became substitutes for common sense and justifications for greed. The real estate bubble was of course justified by them. Yet people at hedge funds and trading firms, using models to mint money, remain passionate believers. Another supporter is George Szpiro, a mathematician turned writer who recently released a book called Pricing The Future, about the history of the Black-Scholes equation, the most famous model in finance and the one that launched…
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Increased Scrutiny for Private Equity Valuations The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has started an informal inquiry of private equity firms, asking for a broad range of documents on how the funds value assets and who invests in them, reports Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek. The agency’s Los Angeles office last year sent letters to several firms asking for details on fund investments and the valuation of assets, as well as communication with clients, according to the copy of a letter obtained by Bloomberg News. Firms were asked to produce the documents by the end of last year. Private equity firms have come…
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How Divorce Can Affect Business Valuation Stanley Morganstern at the Ohio Family Law Observer reports that recent case in Ohio illustrates the difficulty of valuing business assets in a divorce. Courts should avoid “double dipping,” or counting a business’ income toward valuation and spousal support. Instead, judges are to separate current and future income from the business’ material assets before making the calculation. I previously discussed the issue of “double dipping” as it primarily pertained to the property nature and income component of retirement plans. As I mentioned, the issue is also relevant to business interests, particularly small business entities. The marital…
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Why PE and the Middle Market Tied the Knot Robert Teitelman at The Deal explains: . . . This is the first of six special issues The Deal magazine will dedicate to the middle market in 2012, with a particular emphasis on a participant that, over the past four decades, emerged from that vast and diverse pool of midmarket companies: private equity. The current political debate tends to overlook the fact that private equity was gestated within the middle market for a very good reason: Midmarket companies, unlike large-cap corporates, have long been relatively starved for capital. Family-owned companies wanted…
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The IRS’s ‘Dirty Dozen’ are Getting Old So opines Gail Perry at AccountingWeb: I for one am getting pretty bored with the tax scams on this list – they hardly change at all from year to year. It’s time for some creative criminals out there to come up with something new. From the comments section: My brother ran a Schedule C Anvil Repair Shop from his garage in order to claim home office deduction, depreciation, etc. He told me the freight bills were a killer. 🙂 Posted by John Hiatt from Valley Forge, PA on Feb 16, 2012 – 4:55 pm…
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The Ten Biggest Family Businesses in the U.S. Business Insurance lists them: Wal-Mart Wal-Mart is the world’s largest retailer and most successful family business of all time. In 1962, founder Sam Walton took his knowledge of discount retailing and opened the first Wal-Mart store in Rogers, Ark. It wasn’t long before Sam expanded his business and opened up hundreds, then thousands of stores worldwide. After Walton died in 1992, his empire was passed on to his wife and children. Rob Walton succeeded his father as chairman of Wal-Mart, and his brother, John, served on a company committee that oversaw Wal-Mart’s…
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Accounting for Nuts: Blame a misalignment of incentives for the scandal at Diamond Foods. The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins opines: “Business people talk about “alignment of incentives.” The lesson here may concern a peculiar misalignment of incentives.” He explains: Here’s the executive summary: Diamond was a cooperative owned by California walnut growers until it became a publicly traded company owned by shareholders in 2005. Lately reporters and a shortseller-connected analyst have been poking around a $60 million payment the company made to growers in September 2011, which some growers apparently understood to be a “topping up” payment because…