New York’s Transit Innovation Led to Disaster and Fears

New York’s Transit Innovation Led to Disaster and Fears

A transit disaster hits New York City like a heart attack. On Dec. 1, four people died when a Metro-North Railroad train derailed. Explosions, collisions and derailments have shadowed travel in New York since the inception of the transit system two centuries ago and the search for explanations has often tapped into larger fears. Read more of this post

SEC Official Sounds Alarm on Decline in ‘Material Weaknesses’

December 5, 2013, 4:15 PM ET

SEC Official Sounds Alarm on Decline in ‘Material Weaknesses’

EMILY CHASAN

Senior Editor

Public companies are disclosing fewer missteps in their internal controls over financial reporting. But it could be that they just aren’t looking hard enough, a securities regulator said on Thursday. The number of companies and their auditors reporting so-called “material weaknesses” over their internal control systems that work to prevent fraud and misstatements at public companies has declined precipitously over the past few years. Read more of this post

SEC Officially Above The Law: Prosecutors Decline To Charge SEC Employee For Violating Internal Rules

SEC Officially Above The Law: Prosecutors Decline To Charge SEC Employee For Violating Internal Rules

Tyler Durden on 12/06/2013 14:03 -0500

Two weeks ago we wrote of SEC compliance examiner (yes, compliance examiner) Steven Glichrist who was arrested for being non-compliant with the SEC’s ethics requirement to disclose his financial holdings. “New York-based SEC employee Steven Gilchrist was charged with three counts of making false statements regarding the nature of his personal financial holdings. As WSJ reports, the 48-year-old compliance examiner at the agency, allegedly certified that his stock holdings were in compliance with the agency’s ethics rules, when in reality he had held shares of six companies that agency staffers are barred from holding. The SEC is “very disappointed that an employee allegedly made false statements to conceal prohibited holdings after being told by our ethics office to divest.” Fast forward to today when we learn that not only was the SEC not disappointed when another SEC employee was found to have flouted virtually the same rules, but that, inexplicably, federal prosecutorsdecided not to prosecute. Read more of this post

Stagnant thinking: An old explanation for economic drift gains a new following

Stagnant thinking: An old explanation for economic drift gains a new following

Dec 7th 2013 | From the print edition

EVEN before the financial crisis, there was a lurking suspicion that bubbles were the only way listless rich economies could keep growth up and unemployment down. “Recession-plagued nation demands new bubble to invest in,” joked the Onion, a satirical newspaper, in 2008. In a speech last month Larry Summers, an economist at Harvard University, gave the idea new credibility when he suggested that the rich world might be suffering from “secular stagnation”. He joins a growing rank of economists worrying that advanced economies will keep inflating bubbles in a doomed attempt to resurrect growth. Read more of this post

U.S. government’s audit watchdog PCAOB agreed to circulate a proposal that would require auditors to name the partner who signs off on a company’s books

December 4, 2013, 3:06 PM ET

PCAOB Moves Ahead With Auditor Naming Proposal, Despite Reservations

EMILY CHASAN

Senior Editor

Following a heated debate Wednesday, the U.S. government’s audit watchdog agreed to circulate a proposal that would require auditors to name the partner who signs off on a company’s books. The U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board voted unanimously but several board members raised pointed concerns about the plan to make auditors name their lead engagement partners on annual reports. The proposal will be open for public comment for 60 days and a final rule could be issued in the spring. Read more of this post

New Zealand Pension Fund Pares Equities Bet After Markets Surge

New Zealand Pension Fund Pares Equities Bet After Markets Surge

New Zealand’s sovereign wealth fund is cutting equity holdings after this year’s surge in global stock markets left shares at the most expensive in four years. “Sometimes we are going to have huge opportunities and that’s when we use our risk,” Neil Williams, chief investment adviser at the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, said in an interview in Auckland Dec. 2. “Other times, like now, equities have rallied and are close to fair value. Fixed income sold off and bond yields are getting closer to fair value. Then we leave it and we don’t have positions on.” Read more of this post

Volcker Rule to Require CEOs Guarantee Compliance

Volcker Rule to Require CEOs Guarantee Compliance

Decision Marks Latest Setback for Wall Street Firms

SCOTT PATTERSON

Updated Dec. 5, 2013 7:36 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON—The Volcker rule will require bank executives to guarantee their firms are in compliance with the regulation, said people familiar with the rule, another setback for Wall Street firms that lobbied against such a requirement. The inclusion of so-called CEO attestation is intended to help increase accountability at firms by ensuring that top executives know what types of trades are occurring at their firms, these people said. Read more of this post

What Bizarro Bogle’s world might look like

What Bizarro Bogle’s world might look like

Or, of whooping cranes and 2 and 20

By Jason Kephart

Dec 5, 2013 @ 4:25 pm (Updated 9:15 am) EST

In the Superman mythos, there’s a villain named Bizarro Superman that possess all of the same powers as Superman, but uses them for evil instead of good. At a luncheon in New York Thursday honoring John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group Inc. and investing Superman, James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, imagined what the world would look like if a Bizarro Bogle took the place of the real Mr. Bogle. Read more of this post

Taiwan and China: Best Friends Suddenly

Taiwan and China: Best Friends Suddenly

By Bruce Einhorn December 05, 2013

China’s tense relationships with its neighbors have recently grown even worse. Ties with Japan, already frosty over an island dispute, soured further after Beijing announced a new air defense zone in the East China Sea that overlaps with Japan’s. The expanded China zone also covers territory claimed by South Korea, but Korean air force planes are ignoring it. In the South China Sea, site of another island quarrel with the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the Chinese were late and stingy in sending relief to the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan: First they offered $100,000 in aid, then a still-puny $1.6 million. Out west, the Chinese foreign ministry cautioned India not to complicate the Sino-Indian relationship after President Pranab Mukherjee visited a Himalayan region that China considers part of Tibet. Read more of this post

In Vietnam, Weary Apparatchiks Launch Quiet Revolution

In Vietnam, Weary Apparatchiks Launch Quiet Revolution

By Martin Petty on 1:59 pm December 3, 2013.
Hanoi. The Vietnam of today wasn’t what Le Hieu Dang had hoped for when he joined the Communist Party 40 years ago to liberate and rebuild a country reeling from decades of war and French and US occupation. The socialist system of the late revolutionary Ho Chi Minh has been corrupted, he says, by a shift to a market economy tightly controlled by one political party that has given rise to a culture of graft and vested interests. Read more of this post

Vietnam Faces Growing Threat of Power Blackouts: Southeast Asia

Vietnam Faces Growing Threat of Power Blackouts: Southeast Asia

Vietnam’s success in attracting investment, generating growth and adding jobs is under threat from looming shortages of what keeps modern economies running: electricity. The risk of shortages took a turn for the worse last week when state-owned Vietnam Oil & Gas Group said talks with Chevron Corp. (CVX) to develop a natural gas field had failed due to price disputes, which will delay supply of the fuel to electricity generators. Consultant IHS Energy said last month that demand in the country may exceed gas supply by 2015. Read more of this post

Reverse the curse: Maximizing the potential of resource-driven economies

Reverse the curse: Maximizing the potential of resource-driven economies

December 2013 | byRichard Dobbs, Jeremy Oppenheim, Adam Kendall, Fraser Thompson, Martin Bratt, and Fransje van der Marel

Rising resource prices and expanded production have raised the number of countries where the resource sector represents a major share of the economy, from 58 in 1995 to 81 in 2011. That number will rise: to meet soaring demand for resources and replace rapidly depleting supply, the world should invest a total of up to $17 trillion in oil and gas and in minerals by 2030, double the historical rate. In 20 years, almost half of the world’s countries could depend on their resource endowments for growth. Read more of this post

China regulator mulls cutting traditional medicine prices: report

China regulator mulls cutting traditional medicine prices: report

6:17am EST

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Chinese regulators are considering cutting retail price limits on some traditional Chinese medicines (TCM) by as much as 10 percent early next year, a newspaper controlled by the official Xinhua news agency reported. This follows a regulatory crackdown on real or perceived corporate wrongdoing this year, with domestic and international manufacturers of infant formula and drugs coming under the spotlight. The Economic Information Daily, citing unidentified sources, reported on Thursday that the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) was looking to reduce prices of top-end, non-essential products, which had risen sharply due to supportive policies. Beijing Tongrentang and Shijiazhuang Yiling Pharmaceutical are among the firms that will be most affected, given the range of such medicines that they offer, the report said. The agency expects to see prices for a small number of such products drop by up to 25 percent in two years, according to the report. Traditional Chinese medicine products classified as “essential” by the NDRC and those identified as state secrets will be exempted from this ruling.