The U.S. likely will fall back into recession if scheduled spending cuts take effect and Bush-era tax cuts are allowed to expire this year, the Congressional Budget Office said. If the U.S. falls off this “fiscal cliff,” the economy will probably contract 1.3% in the first half of 2013, the CBO said. CNN Financial Times / Alphaville New York Times NPR Reuters USA Today Wall Street Journal Yahoo! Finance Is there an upside? Depends if you like disco. Styx’s Tommy Shaw: “Around ’75 when the recession hit, club owners started going to disco because it was cheaper…
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“With New Firepower, S.E.C. Tracks Bigger Game,” Ben Protess and Azam Ahmed report at the New York Times Dealbook. Embarrassed after missing the warning signs of the financial crisis and the Ponzi scheme of Bernard L. Madoff, the agency’s enforcement division has adopted several new — if somewhat unconventional — strategies to restore its credibility. The S.E.C. is taking its cue from criminal authorities, studying statistical formulas to trace connections, creating a powerful unit to cull tips and assign cases and even striking a deal with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to have agents embedded with the regulator. In one of the agency’s first efforts,…
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Why Most Investors Don’t Measure Returns Correctly At the NY Times Bucks: Making the Most of Your Money blog, Carl Richards opines: There’s an old saying that you should take a look at your checkbook and your calendar to see what you really value as opposed to what you say you value, because the calendar and the checkbook never lie. Dollars and cents are easy to count in the checkbook. Happiness, on the other hand, isn’t a line item in the ledger. It’s much more difficult to say we’re happier today than yesterday because we coached our children’s sports team…
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Lawyers and Accountants Once Put Integrity First So asserts Mark W. Everson, commissioner of the IRS from 2003 to 2007, in an opinion piece for the Sunday NY Times: Three or four decades ago, investors and regulators could rely on these professionals to provide a check on corporate risk-taking. But over time, attorneys and auditors came to see their practices not as independent firms that strengthen the integrity of capitalism, but as businesses measured chiefly by the earnings of their partners. . . . Recent decades have seen a new model take root: a business plan tied to partner earnings. Obviously,…