Corporate executives could be scrambling to raise billions of dollars in cash this year to pay personal tax bills on their stock options because of a recent United States Tax Court ruling.
The ruling, which involved the billionaire Philip F. Anschutz but applies to scores of executives,
says that a complex strategy routinely used to turn stock options into cash and defer the capital gains taxes is invalid for deferral.
26 July 2010.
THREE years ago, when Joseph Rohm, manager of the T. Rowe Price Africa and Middle East fund,
visited Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, he was chaperoned by guards carrying semiautomatic weapons.
These days, he strolls the streets alone.
“I feel safer in Lagos than I do in Johannesburg,” said Mr. Rohm, a native of South Africa.
That transition underscores the changing reality of so-called frontier stock markets,
those that are less developed than emerging markets like Brazil, China and India.
The German banking giant Deutche Bank went all out to convince clients – including many small investors – to invest in a giant Ferris wheel project.
Then it turned out they decided not to invest in it themselves.
Nothing has actually been built, and everyone involved has lost money – EXCEPT Deutsche Bank, which appears to have done quite well on the deal.
Big Pharma is supposed to be an advancing sector, where jobs are plentiful for people with the right skill set.
But don’t tell that to employees at multi-national giant Merck, where about 15,000 of them have been told they’ll be getting the axe – if they haven’t been cut already.
The company plans to lay off about 15 percent of its work force over the next two years as part of a global merger restructuring, according to an announcement it issued earlier this month.
21 July 2010. By David Caploe PhD, Chief Political Economist, EconomyWatch.com.
Consistent readers of Economy Watch are aware we have been more than hard on the shenanigans of US investment banks,
notably Goldman’s rampant tricks with Greece – which played a significant role in both that country’s somewhat deceptive entry into the Eurozone
19 July 2010. By David Caploe PhD, Chief Political Economist, EconomyWatch.com
Well, it’s not supposed to be nice to say “we told you so” –
but just about three months to the day, on the ever-auspicious 4/20,
A number of Afghan construction companies working on contracts for American and NATO military bases in Afghanistan
have accused American middlemen of reneging on payments for supplies and services,
and in one case of leaving the country owing Afghan companies hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars.
The failure of American companies to pay for contracted work has left hundreds of Afghan workers unpaid in southern Afghanistan,
Diageo, the maker of Johnnie Walker whiskey, has found an innovative way to plug a gaping deficit in its pension plan:
put aside 2 million barrels of maturing whiskey from its distilleries in Scotland.
Diageo announced it would transfer ownership of £430 million, or $645 million, worth of whiskey to a pension funding partnership.
Diageo employees would not receive their pensions in whiskey rather than cash,
Robert Prechter, the market forecaster and social theorist, is convinced that we have entered a market decline of staggering proportions — perhaps the biggest of the last 300 years.
He understands that no other forecaster was likely to accept his reasoning, which is based on his version of the Elliott Wave theory — a technical approach to market analysis that he embraces with evangelical fervor.
Last week, the French Competition Authority officially declared Google a monopoly.
That conclusion is hardly novel, but the decision appears to go beyond any previous official ruling in the United States or elsewhere.
“Google holds a dominant position on the advertising market related to online searches,” the French authority concluded.
