Mortgages, student loans, credit cards: debt is a ubiquitous component of daily life in Canada. But our attitudes toward debt, and the people who incur it, are complex. Trustees at Work explores the role bankruptcy trustees play in determining who qualifies as a deserving debtor under Canadian personal bankruptcy law. When debt becomes unmanageable, the bankruptcy and insolvency system provides relief – though not to everyone. The architects of the system have restricted access to this benefit by developing methods to distinguish deserving from undeserving debtors. The idea of a deserving debtor is woven throughout bankruptcy law, with debt relief being reserved for those debtors deemed deserving. The legislation and case law invite trustees to assess debtors based on their pre-bankruptcy choices, but in practice, trustees evaluate debtors based on how cooperative the debtors are during bankruptcy proceedings. Using insights from the sociology of emotion, Anna Jane Samis Lund reveals how carrying out emotional labour shapes an insolvency professional’s assessments of a debtor’s deservingness. Trustees at Work also includes interviews and statistical data to explain how the financial and emotional pressures of trustees’ work shape their decision-making process. Ultimately, it shows how insolvency trustees’ conceptions of a deserving debtor are shaped by the financial, legal, and emotional contexts in which they work.
An expert guide designed to help university trustees become effective leaders. Honorable Mention for Eric Hoffer Award (Business Category) by The Hoffer Project We expect college and university trustees to hire the president, advise senior staff, manage investments and financial decisions, and oversee major strategic initiatives. Unfortunately, they sometimes come into this powerful role with little or no understanding of what they are meant to do or how their institutions work. How University Boards Work, by Robert A. Scott, is designed to help trustees understand how to fulfill their responsibilities. Written by a widely respected leader in American higher education and former university president, How University Boards Work is the product of personal experience and considerable research. This concise, straightforward guide includes: • an explanation of the difference between governance and management • tips on how best to prepare for board decisions and discussions • examples of positive and negative board behavior • guidance about board professional development • advice on managing transitions between chief executives How University Boards Work will prove an invaluable resource for those responsible for governing colleges and universities, whether privately financed or state funded. It will also be an illuminating read for board secretaries, campus executives and administrators, faculty leaders, alumni volunteers, and public officials, as well as anybody seeking to understand institutional governance in the light of past and current trends in higher education.
Your loved one, or a professional may be your best option as your Successor (Trustee/Executor), but don't select anyone without reading this book first! Too many families are no longer on speaking terms because the chosen person did a poor job, or just did not fulfill the required fiduciary duties. "This little book saved our family from World War III, thank you!!" A. B., 86 years old. Ethics for Trustees 2.0 is for everyone who is getting their estate plan written, as every Trustor needs to select a Successor Trustee. This book is for everyone who serves as a Trustee of a Trust; experienced or inexperienced; Attorneys, Fiduciaries, CPA's, Family Members and Friends, etc., this book can help you better understand what is required to do the job well. Quotes and concepts have been drawn from personal experience based on serving as private professional trustees in California. This book is designed to stimulate discussion in our estate planning community, to emphasize the value of continuing education, and to encourage those who serve as a Fiduciary to do their best.
Written by two longtime Professional Fiduciaries, "Ethics for Trustees", A Guide for All Who Serve as Trustee, is intended as a guideline for everyone who serves as a Trustee of a Trust; Experienced or inexperienced; Attorneys, Fiduciaries, CPAs, Family Members and Friends, etc. Quotes and concepts have been drawn from personal experience, from the Professional Fiduciary Association of California (PFAC) Code of Ethics and from the most recent California Probate Code (2011). Review by an experienced Trusts and Estates Attorney: Ethics for Trustees is an excellent guidebook that draws together important resources and reference materials. It covers some topics few other writers have addressed, and the authors draw on wealth of personal experience. The writing is clear and concise. It is a valuable addition to my professional library. Meredith G. Alcock Trusts and estates attorney www.aalapc.com Review by an Independent Financial Advisor: Whether you are already serving as a professional trustee or considering taking on this role for the first time, we recommend this book. Serving as a trustee is a challenging responsibility. This book will help you understand what is expected of you and how to best meet the role of trustee. Troy B. Daum, CFP Principal Wealth Analytics www.WealthAnalytics.com The Authors: Jane B. Lorenz, CPA, CLPF has been practicing as a CPA since 1975 and started serving as a Professional Trustee around 1990. Marguerite C. Lorenz, CTFA, CLPF began working with Jane in 2003 and has been serving as a Professional Trustee ever since. This book is a labor of love. They know from experience the challenges facing todays Fiduciary, whether amateur or professional. Many professional Fiduciaries operate as sole proprietors, without partners or staff . Jane and Marguerite have benefitted so much from their partnership and business model, they feel good about sharing some of what they have learned. The Readers: Everyone who is in the Estate Planning Process can benefit from a better understanding of what their Successor can and should do. The documents alone do nothing. The selection of the appropriate Successor Trustee is vitally important, as this is the one trusted to fulfill the Estate Plan provisions. How can the right Successor be selected if the one choosing is not familiar with what the job entails? Reading this concise volume gives the reader just what is needed. Before one accepts the role of Trustee he/she should understand the liability, the ethical issues and the depth of responsibility. We believe that reading this book may prevent family upset and financial disaster.
Private equity firms have long been at the center of public debates on the impact of the financial sector on Main Street companies. Are these firms financial innovators that save failing businesses or financial predators that bankrupt otherwise healthy companies and destroy jobs? The first comprehensive examination of this topic, Private Equity at Work provides a detailed yet accessible guide to this controversial business model. Economist Eileen Appelbaum and Professor Rosemary Batt carefully evaluate the evidence—including original case studies and interviews, legal documents, bankruptcy proceedings, media coverage, and existing academic scholarship—to demonstrate the effects of private equity on American businesses and workers. They document that while private equity firms have had positive effects on the operations and growth of small and mid-sized companies and in turning around failing companies, the interventions of private equity more often than not lead to significant negative consequences for many businesses and workers. Prior research on private equity has focused almost exclusively on the financial performance of private equity funds and the returns to their investors. Private Equity at Work provides a new roadmap to the largely hidden internal operations of these firms, showing how their business strategies disproportionately benefit the partners in private equity firms at the expense of other stakeholders and taxpayers. In the 1980s, leveraged buyouts by private equity firms saw high returns and were widely considered the solution to corporate wastefulness and mismanagement. And since 2000, nearly 11,500 companies—representing almost 8 million employees—have been purchased by private equity firms. As their role in the economy has increased, they have come under fire from labor unions and community advocates who argue that the proliferation of leveraged buyouts destroys jobs, causes wages to stagnate, saddles otherwise healthy companies with debt, and leads to subsidies from taxpayers. Appelbaum and Batt show that private equity firms’ financial strategies are designed to extract maximum value from the companies they buy and sell, often to the detriment of those companies and their employees and suppliers. Their risky decisions include buying companies and extracting dividends by loading them with high levels of debt and selling assets. These actions often lead to financial distress and a disproportionate focus on cost-cutting, outsourcing, and wage and benefit losses for workers, especially if they are unionized. Because the law views private equity firms as investors rather than employers, private equity owners are not held accountable for their actions in ways that public corporations are. And their actions are not transparent because private equity owned companies are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Thus, any debts or costs of bankruptcy incurred fall on businesses owned by private equity and their workers, not the private equity firms that govern them. For employees this often means loss of jobs, health and pension benefits, and retirement income. Appelbaum and Batt conclude with a set of policy recommendations intended to curb the negative effects of private equity while preserving its constructive role in the economy. These include policies to improve transparency and accountability, as well as changes that would reduce the excessive use of financial engineering strategies by firms. A groundbreaking analysis of a hotly contested business model, Private Equity at Work provides an unprecedented analysis of the little-understood inner workings of private equity and of the effects of leveraged buyouts on American companies and workers. This important new work will be a valuable resource for scholars, policymakers, and the informed public alike.
The legal meaning of bankruptcy and insolvency law has often remained elusive, even to practitioners and scholars in the field, despite having been enshrined in Canada’s Constitution since Confederation. Federal jurisdiction in this area must be measured against provincial powers over property and civil rights, among others. Debt and Federalism traces changing conceptions of the bankruptcy and insolvency power through four landmark cases that form the constitutional foundation of the Canadian bankruptcy system: the 1894 Voluntary Assignments Case, Royal Bank of Canada v Larue in 1928, the 1934 Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act Reference Case, and the 1937 Farmers' Creditors Arrangement Act Reference Case. Together, these decisions ultimately produced the bedrock for modern understandings of bankruptcy and insolvency law. Thomas G.W. Telfer and Virginia Torrie draw on archival and legal sources to analyze the decisions from a historical and doctrinal perspective. This astute book demonstrates that the legal changes introduced by these landmark cases underpin contemporary bankruptcy and insolvency law and scholarship.
"By far the best book on corporate and institutional governance." —Nicholas Katzenbach, former attorney general of the United States In his new foreword to The Board Book, former Mellon Foundation and Princeton University president William G. Bowen brings his immense experience to bear on the most pressing questions facing boards of directors and trustees today: seeking collaborative relationships and placing a renewed emphasis on sustainable initiatives. The strategies Bowen relates throughout the book foster the collegiality and sense of purpose—more important in today’s turbulent times than ever before—that are integral to any effective board.
