Corporate Finance

The world of corporate finance is a maze that most people get stuck in and can never find their way out of. It has a language and terms all of its making and few except the expert insiders can interpret the runes and signs that make up corporate finance. For example when they talk about capital structure most of us would think about banks or even vaults or safety deposit boxes. When they say capital structure they could mean anything from leasing, bond covenants, raising equity capital, short-term financing, stock offerings to equity carve-outs, whatever any of those things are. When we think about investments we think about our mutual funds, our 401 (k) s, or our pension retirement funds. They talk about foreign markets, financial statement analysis, company valuation, project risk analysis, and R&D investment. Okay. One of their big themes these days is corporate governance. For the layperson this is one of those things that we simply duck or walk away from. For those involved in corporate finance, this is absolutely crucial. They spend days and days discussing corporate governance including executive compensation, the role of boards of directors, and the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The reason that they talk about these last set of items so much is because they have not be doing so well in keeping up with the requirement of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or many of the other laws in the country in recent years. It is so bad in corporate finance now that Forbes Magazine publishes a Corporate Scandal Sheet. The Corporate Scandal Sheet follows only the corporate accounting imbroglios, it avoids the smaller infractions like insider-trading allegations like those plaguing ImClone, because they say that chronicling every corporate transgression would be impractical and probably impossible. They start with the Enron disaster and lead you through everyone from Adelphia to Xerox, offering only the basics including the company, the allegation, an update, and what the company has said publicly about the charges. Surprisingly, for people who like to talk about corporate governance so much, their company's response is often "no comment."

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