Originally published in 2011, this volume examines the Enron-era scandals and several corporate governance issues that were raised as a result of these scandals. It then describes developments in the securities and derivatives markets, covering hedge funds, venture capital, private equity and sovereign wealth funds.
A Brookings Institution Press and American Enterprise Institute publication A few years ago, Americans held out their systems of corporate governance and financial disclosure as models to be emulated by the rest of the world. But in late 2001 U.S. policymakers and corporate leaders found themselves facing the largest corporate accounting scandals in American history. The spectacular collapses of Enron and Worldcom—as well as the discovery of accounting irregularities at other large U.S. companies—seemed to call into question the efficacy of the entire system of corporate governance in the United States. In response, Congress quickly enacted a comprehensive package of reform measures in what has come to be known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ followed by making fundamental changes to their listing requirements. The private sector acted as well. Accounting firms—watching in horror as one of their largest, Arthur Andersen, collapsed after a criminal conviction for document shredding—tightened their auditing procedures. Stock analysts and ratings agencies, hit hard by a series of disclosures about their failings, changed their practices as well. Will these reforms be enough? Are some counterproductive? Are other shortcomings in the disclosure system still in need of correction? These are among the questions that George Benston, Michael Bromwich, Robert E. Litan, and Alfred Wagenhofer address in Following the Money. While the authors agree that the U.S. system of corporate disclosure and governance is in need of change, they are concerned that policymakers may be overreacting in some areas and taking actions in others that may prove to be ineffective or even counterproductive. Using the Enron case as a point of departure, the authors argue that the major problem lies not in the accounting and auditing standards themselves, but in the system of enforcing those standards.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the U.S. Government and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in early 2011, is the official government report on the United States financial collapse and the review of major financial institutions that bankrupted and failed, or would have without help from the government. The commission and the report were implemented after Congress passed an act in 2009 to review and prevent fraudulent activity. The report details, among other things, the periods before, during, and after the crisis, what led up to it, and analyses of subprime mortgage lending, credit expansion and banking policies, the collapse of companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the federal bailouts of Lehman and AIG. It also discusses the aftermath of the fallout and our current state. This report should be of interest to anyone concerned about the financial situation in the U.S. and around the world.THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION is an independent, bi-partisan, government-appointed panel of 10 people that was created to "examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States." It was established as part of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. The commission consisted of private citizens with expertise in economics and finance, banking, housing, market regulation, and consumer protection. They examined and reported on "the collapse of major financial institutions that failed or would have failed if not for exceptional assistance from the government."News Dissector DANNY SCHECHTER is a journalist, blogger and filmmaker. He has been reporting on economic crises since the 1980's when he was with ABC News. His film In Debt We Trust warned of the economic meltdown in 2006. He has since written three books on the subject including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books, 2008), and The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail (Disinfo Books, 2011), a companion to his latest film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time. He can be reached online at www.newsdissector.com.
The first comprehensive financial history of the United States in more than thirty years. Accessible to undergraduate level readers, it focuses on the growth and expansion of banking, securities, and insurance from the colonial period right up to the incredible growth of the stock market during the 1990s and the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. The author traces the origins of American finance to the older societies of Europe and Northern Africa, and shows how English merchants transferred their financial systems to America. He explains how financial matters dominated the founding and development of the colonies, and how financial concerns incited the Revolution. And he shows how the Civil War began the transformation of America from a small economy largely dependent on foreign capital into a complex capitalist society. From the Civil War, the nation's financial history breaks down into periods of frenzied speculation, quiet growth, periodic panics, and furious periods of expansion, right up through the incredible growth of the stock market during the 1990s.
“They’re still trying to hide the weenie,” thought Sherron Watkins as she read a newspaper clipping about Enron two weeks before Christmas, 2001. . . It quoted [CFO] Jeff McMahon addressing the company’s creditors and cautioning them against a rash judgment. “Don’t assume that there is a smoking gun.” Sherron knew Enron well enough to know that the company was in extreme spin mode… Power Failure is the electrifying behind-the-scenes story of the collapse of Enron, the high-flying gas and energy company touted as the poster child of the New Economy that, in its hubris, had aspired to be “The World’s Leading Company,” and had briefly been the seventh largest corporation in America. Written by prizewinning journalist Mimi Swartz, and substantially based on the never-before-published revelations of former Enron vice-president Sherron Watkins, as well as hundreds of other interviews, Power Failure shows the human face beyond the greed, arrogance, and raw ambition that fueled the company’s meteoric rise in the late 1990s. At the dawn of the new century, Ken Lay’s and Jeff Skilling's faces graced the covers of business magazines, and Enron’s money oiled the political machinery behind George W. Bush’s election campaign. But as Wall Street analysts sang Enron’s praises, and its stock spiraled dizzyingly into the stratosphere, the company’s leaders were madly scrambling to manufacture illusory profits, hide its ballooning debt, and bully Wall Street into buying its fictional accounting and off-balance-sheet investment vehicles. The story of Enron’s fall is a morality tale writ large, performed on a stage with an unforgettable array of props and side plots, from parking lots overflowing with Boxsters and BMWs to hot-house office affairs and executive tantrums. Among the cast of characters Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins observe with shrewd Texas eyes and an insider’s perspective are: CEO Ken Lay, Enron’s “outside face,” who was more interested in playing diplomat and paving the road to a political career than in managing Enron’s high-testosterone, anything-goes culture; Jeff Skilling, the mastermind behind Enron’s mercenary trading culture, who transformed himself from a nerdy executive into the personification of millennial cool; Rebecca Mark, the savvy and seductive head of Enron’s international division, who was Skilling’s sole rival to take over the company; and Andy Fastow, whose childish pranks early in his career gave way to something far more destructive. Desperate to be a player in Enron’s deal-making, trader-oriented culture, Fastow transformed Enron’s finance department into a “profit center,” creating a honeycomb of financial entities to bolster Enron’s “profits,” while diverting tens of millions of dollars into his own pockets An unprecedented chronicle of Enron’s shocking collapse, Power Failure should take its place alongside the classics of previous decades – Barbarians at the Gate and Liar’s Poker – as one of the cautionary tales of our times.
Provides a comprehensive financial history of the United States which focuses on the growth and expansion of banking, securities, and insurance from the colonial period right up to the incredible growth of the stock market during the 1990s and the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.
Financial risk has become a focus of financial and nonfinancial firms, individuals, and policy makers. But the study of risk remains a relatively new discipline in finance and continues to be refined. The financial market crisis that began in 2007 has highlighted the challenges of managing financial risk. Now, in Financial Risk Management, author Allan Malz addresses the essential issues surrounding this discipline, sharing his extensive career experiences as a risk researcher, risk manager, and central banker. The book includes standard risk measurement models as well as alternative models that address options, structured credit risks, and the real-world complexities or risk modeling, and provides the institutional and historical background on financial innovation, liquidity, leverage, and financial crises that is crucial to practitioners and students of finance for understanding the world today. Financial Risk Management is equally suitable for firm risk managers, economists, and policy makers seeking grounding in the subject. This timely guide skillfully surveys the landscape of financial risk and the financial developments of recent decades that culminated in the crisis. The book provides a comprehensive overview of the different types of financial risk we face, as well as the techniques used to measure and manage them. Topics covered include: Market risk, from Value-at-Risk (VaR) to risk models for options Credit risk, from portfolio credit risk to structured credit products Model risk and validation Risk capital and stress testing Liquidity risk, leverage, systemic risk, and the forms they take Financial crises, historical and current, their causes and characteristics Financial regulation and its evolution in the wake of the global crisis And much more Combining the more model-oriented approach of risk management-as it has evolved over the past two decades-with an economist's approach to the same issues, Financial Risk Management is the essential guide to the subject for today's complex world.
Business scandals are always with us from the South Sea Bubble to Enron and Parmalat. As accounting forms a central element of any business success or failure, the role of accounting is crucial in understanding business scandals. This book aims to explore the role of accounting, particularly creative accounting and fraud, in business scandals. The book is divided into three parts. In Part A the background and context of creative accounting and fraud is explored. Part B looks at a series of international accounting scandals and Part C draws some themes and implications from the country studies.
The explosion of the global financial crisis in 2007–08 reignited the urgency to reflect on the origins and causes of financial collapses. As the events in the above period triggered an economic meltdown that is still ongoing, comparisons with the Great Crash of 1929 started to abound. In particular, the externalities that a broad spectrum of societal groups had to bear as a consequence of various banking failures highlighted the necessity of a more inclusive and balanced regulation of firms whose activities impact on a wide range of stakeholders. The book is centred on the proposal of a paradigm, the “enlightened sovereign control”, that provides a theoretical, institutional and substantive framework as a response to the legal issues analysed in the book. These stem primarily from the analysis of two sequences of events (the 2001–03 wave of “accounting frauds” and the 2007–08 global crisis) which represent the background upon which modern financial scandals are explained. This is done by highlighting a number of common denominators emerging from the case studies (Enron and Parmalat, Northern Rock and Lehman Brothers) which all led to financial instability and scandals and illustrated the legal issues identified in the book. The research is grounded on the initial recognition of theoretical themes in the field of corporate and financial law, which eventually link with the more practical events examined. Through this multifaceted approach, the book contends that the occurrence of financial crises during the last decade is essentially rooted in two main problems: a corporate governance one, represented by the lack of effective control systems within large public firms; and a corporate finance one identified with the excesses of financial innovation and related abuses of capital market finance. Research conducted in this book ultimately seeks to contribute to current debates in the areas of corporate and financial law, through the proposals of the “enlightened sovereign control” paradigm.
