...Justin Mahoney February 7, 2012 Marcella Gamallo Essay #1 Monster Corporation Forbes Magazine, the leading source of reliable business news and financial information develops an annual list of the world’s billionaires and lo and behold who has four members of its’ family in the top twenty of the richest people on the planet? The wealthiest family on earth, the Walton’s, whom control the world’s largest revenue public corporation, Wal-Mart (The World’s Billionaires). The American multinational retail corporation manages chains of large discount department stores. The corporation is also the world’s largest private employer with approximately 2.2 million employees; the company’s employee roll exceeds the population of over 50 countries in the world including Qatar, Trinidad and Tobago, Iceland and Suriname. Walmart is essentially the largest retailer in the entire world. The company, which is controlled by the Walton family who own a 48% stake, have been bashed in the media time and time again for “failing America.” Applause must be given to the Mega Corporation, they came from being just one department store to a multi-billion dollar corporation however, the treatment of Wal-Mart’s employees and the greediness of Wal-Mart’s owners combine to make it a monster corporation with negative effects on both individuals and competing companies. To be reasonable, we must touch on the benevolence of Wal-Mart because to be...
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...Bernie Madoff began his brokerage firm in 1960 and grew it into one of the largest on Wall Street. While doing so, he began investing money as a favor to family and friends, though he was not licensed to do so. Over a period of fifty years, these side investments became an investment fund that mushroomed into a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Bernie1 pled guilty without a trial on March 12, 2009, and was sentenced to 150 years in prison. Thousands of wealthy clients, philanthropic organizations, and middle-class people whose pension funds found their way into Bernie’s investment fund lost their life savings. What to Do? Bernie Madoff, at age 69, owned three very successful financial companies—a brokerage firm, a proprietary trading firm, and an investment advisory firm. On December 10, 2008, the brokerage and proprietary trading firms, managed by his brother and two sons, were performing as well as could be expected in the middle of a deep recession. His investment advisory firm, however, was on the verge of collapse. Investors in Bernie’s investment fund had requested $7 billion in withdrawals, and he did not have the cash to pay them. Known only to Bernie and a close circle of loyal employees, the investment fund was a $50 billion Ponzi scheme in operation for at least twenty years. Bernie met with his sons—Mark, age 44, and Andrew, age 42—in his...
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...ways to find Fairfax Articles. For back editions of newspapers older than the previous two weeks, please contact Paper World on 1800 811 755 or visit www.paperworld.com.au or your state library. In Sydney, back editions of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review can be purchased at Shop 15, Pavilion Plaza, 580 George Street, Sydney, 2000, phone: (02) 9261 8310. If you have a technical or account inquiry about News Store, please click here The modern tendency to deny the existence of luck leads logically to blaming the victim. Since Samuel Smiles invented an industry with his 1859 book Self-Help, it has been a project of the capitalist age to abolish the idea of luck. Smiles, who outsold Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill that year, opened with a line that said it all: "Heaven helps those who help themselves." The dogmas of self-help have remained religiously rigid. Since 2006, more than 21 million readers have bought Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, learning that success will come if you want it enough, and in the right way. Luck is not something for which you wait, passively, in hope; instead, it is a product you can make, a force you can attract. The assault on luck underpinned the rise of European democracy after the French Revolution; merit and hard work could earn a place in...
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...ts enemy Economics has met the enemy, and it is economics Ira basen From Saturday's Globe and Mail Published Saturday, Oct. 15, 2011 6:00AM EDT Last updated Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2011 8:41AM EDT After Thomas Sargent learned on Monday morning that he and colleague Christopher Sims had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for 2011, the 68-year-old New York University professor struck an aw-shucks tone with an interviewer from the official Nobel website: “We're just bookish types that look at numbers and try to figure out what's going on.” But no one who'd followed Prof. Sargent's long, distinguished career would have been fooled by his attempt at modesty. He'd won for his part in developing one of economists' main models of cause and effect: How can we expect people to respond to changes in prices, for example, or interest rates? According to the laureates' theories, they'll do whatever's most beneficial to them, and they'll do it every time. They don't need governments to instruct them; they figure it out for themselves. Economists call this the “rational expectations” model. And it's not just an abstraction: Bankers and policy-makers apply these formulae in the real world, so bad models lead to bad policy. Which is perhaps why, by the end of that interview on Monday, Prof. Sargent was adopting a more realistic tone: “We experiment with our models,” he explained, “before we wreck the world.” Rational-expectations theory and its corollary, the efficient-market hypothesis...
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...J.C. Penney’s Real Problem: The Shrinking Middle Class * Rita McGrath April 12, 2013 Ron Johnson’s office seat has barely cooled off following his departure as business observers everywhere dissect what went so dreadfully wrong at J.C. Penney. The former Apple executive was too Silicon Valley for the Plano, Texas, retailer. He was arrogant. He didn’t test his ideas, maintaining the Apple mantra that customers don’t know what they want until you show it to them. He approved marketing campaigns that told loyal Penney’s shoppers that “you deserve to look better,” basically telling them that they looked less than glamorous wearing the brand they had trusted and been comfortable with for years. He hoarded information so that individual store merchandisers didn’t know how various lines were performing. He mocked J.C. Penney’s ways of doing things. He abandoned the discounting customers had come to expect from retailers. And he, and most of the team he recruited, were commuter leaders, jetting back to California after cramming in marathon work sessions at headquarters. These factors certainly couldn’t have helped. I think, however, there’s one major reason behind J.C. Penney’s sudden swoon that not enough commentators are picking up on. There’s one big reason JCP would never be “Bloomingdale’s for the mass market,” as Johnson wanted it to be, and that’s because the mass market is gone. Because the middle class is gone, or at least rapidly going. This reflects a troubling development...
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...Introduction The book authored by Giles Bolton, is an eye-opener and a critique of the western approach to lift Africa from poverty. The author addresses - why Africa being resourceful could not lift itself from the poverty? Why is it that it needs the help of the developed countries? How the aid of billions of dollars is misused by the African Government? How the west with its unorganized aid program crippled the nation? Dividing the book into five sections—poverty, aid, trade, globalization, and change—he analyses the issues, with stories about real people in Africa and experiences from his own years in the aid industry. On his first visit to Kenya, to meet a friend, Giles Bolton ends up in deciding that he would start his aid industry career there. He through the incidents and experiences during the visit describes the scenic beauty, backwardness and poverty of the continent. He identifies that the continent needs internal reorganization more than the benevolence of the west. He says Corruption, conflict, and lack of democracy are the three major problems of Africa and poverty is the cause for these. Africa is stuck in the viscous cycle in which poverty induces corruption and vice-verse. He says “This book is written for people who are concerned about Africa but don't understand why it's still so poor. While there is quite a bit of good academic material out there, most of it isn't very accessible and it doesn't answer the direct questions most of us want answered...
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...Research Centre 2008 The Social Issues Research Centre 28 St Clements Street Oxford OX4 1AB UK +44 1865 262255 group@sirc.org The ecology of family life Contents 1 Introduction..................................................................................................................................................................................4 1.1 Family and childhood: a paradigmatic review ....................................................................................................................................4 1.2 Space and time in family life...................................................................................................................................................................4 1.3 Pennies and pounds: the socioeconomic relations of families and children in the present.......................................................4 1.4 Theoretical framework.............................................................................................................................................................................5 1.5 Defining consumption ..............................................................................................................................................................................5 1.6 Methodology and sources of data ...........................................................................................................................................................5 2 Family and childhood:...
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...to human capital investment and social inclusion. Institutions have come into the equation, as has a prominent role for markets and for the state as drivers of development. Underlying these views were practicalities that shaped the way countries dealt with their need for foreign capital, the management of the macroeconomy, and their responses to economic and financial crises. There was a prominent role for the so-called Bretton Woods institutions, namely, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, in shaping prevailing views of development and putting them into practice. This Danny Leipziger The Role and Influence of IFIs has been important, both directly and indirectly, in affecting policy choices made by developing country governments over past decades. Keywords: Bretton Woods Institutions; World Bank ideology toward development; IMF ideology and development; changing development paradigms; international financial institutions; Bank-Fund Collaboration; Bank-Fund Concordat. Chapter 49 Page 2 Danny Leipziger The Role and Influence of IFIs Introduction International financial institutions (IFIs) have strongly influenced development thinking and practice in recent decades. IFIs have exerted direct influence thorough the volume of their financial transfers, and indirectly, for example, through their impact on the resource transfers of others, including donors and the private sector. Even more important, IFI analysis and ideas have dominated aspects of...
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...GCE History |Contents |Page | | | | |Unit A2 1: Option 1, Anglo–Spanish Relations 1509–1609 |5 | |Unit A2 1: Option 2, Crown and Parliament in England 1600–1702 The Changing Role and |17 | |Status of Parliament | | | |37 | |Unit A2 1: Option 3, Liberalism and Nationalism 1815–1914 | | |Unit A2 1: Option 4, Nationalism and Unionism in Ireland 1800–1900 |51 | |Unit A2 1: Option 5, The Clash of Ideologies in Europe 1900–2000 |67 | Introduction CCEA has developed new GCE specifications for first teaching from September 2008. This scheme of work has been designed to support...
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...ACCOUNTING FRAUDS CONTENTS WHAT ARE FRAUDS? | WHAT ARE ACCOUNTING FRAUDS? | NOTABLE FRAUDS | NOTABLE OUTCOMES | MANIPULATION & FALSIFICATION OF RECORDS | MISAPPROPRIATION OF CASH BALANCES | MISAPPROPRIATION OF GOODS | TEEMING & LADING | WINDOW DRESSING | SECRET RESERVES | ENRON FRAUD | WORLDCOM FRAUD | WHAT ARE FRAUDS ??? FRAUDS AND THEIR CHARACTERISTICS Misstatements in the financial statements can arise from fraud. In criminal law, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual, Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation. Defrauding people or entities of money or valuables is a common purpose of fraud Industries most commonly effected by fraud are banking, manufacturing, and government. Fraud can be committed through many media, including mail, wire, phone, and the Internet (computer crime and Internet fraud). * The term “fraud” refers to an intentional act by one or more individuals among management, those charged with governance, employees or third parties, involving the use of deception to obtain an unjust or illegal advantage. Although fraud is a broad legal concept, the auditor is concerned with fraudulent acts that cause a material misstatement in the financial statements. Misstatement of the financial statements may not be the objective of some frauds. Auditors do not make legal determinations of whether fraud has actually occurred. Fraud involving one or more members of...
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...org/español ACAMSToday.org MoneyLaundering.com Study Guide for the Certification Examination Fifth Edition a publication of the association of certified anti-money laundering specialists Study Guide for the Certification Examination Fifth Edition Executive Vice President John J. Byrne, CAMS Editor Robert S. Pasley, CAMS Co-Editor Kevin M. Anderson, CAMS Contributors Joyce Broome, CAMS Heather Brown, CAMS Aub Chapman, CAMS Vasilios Chrisos, CAMS David Clark, CAMS Jurgen Egberink, CAMS Michael D. Kelsey, CAMS Saskia Rietbroek, CAMS Nancy J. Saur, CAMS Mansoor Siddiqi, CAMS Daniel Soto, CAMS Timothy White CAMS Production Assistant Catalina Martinez We would like acknowledge the following individuals for their contributions to the CAMS Exam, and the Online and Live Preparation Seminars: Kevin M. Anderson, CAMS Joyce Broome, CAMS Aub Chapman, CAMS David Clark, CAMS Josue Garcia, CAMS Hoi Luk, CAMS Ira Morales Mickunas, CAMS Robert S. Pasley, CAMS Karim Rajwani, CAMS Mansoor Siddiqi, CAMS Saskia Rietbroek, CAMS Ed Rodriguez, CAMS Nancy J. Saur, CAMS Wendy Steichen, CAMS Brian J. Stoeckert, CAMS Charles Taylor, CAMS Will Voorhees, CAMS Natalie Ware, CAMS Peter Warrack, CAMS Amy Wotapka, CAMS Crispin Yuen, CAMS Copyright © 2012 by the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS). Miami, USA. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed, and may not be made available...
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...Chapter 1 Discrete Probability Distributions 1.1 Simulation of Discrete Probabilities Probability In this chapter, we shall first consider chance experiments with a finite number of possible outcomes ω1 , ω2 , . . . , ωn . For example, we roll a die and the possible outcomes are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 corresponding to the side that turns up. We toss a coin with possible outcomes H (heads) and T (tails). It is frequently useful to be able to refer to an outcome of an experiment. For example, we might want to write the mathematical expression which gives the sum of four rolls of a die. To do this, we could let Xi , i = 1, 2, 3, 4, represent the values of the outcomes of the four rolls, and then we could write the expression X 1 + X 2 + X 3 + X4 for the sum of the four rolls. The Xi ’s are called random variables. A random variable is simply an expression whose value is the outcome of a particular experiment. Just as in the case of other types of variables in mathematics, random variables can take on different values. Let X be the random variable which represents the roll of one die. We shall assign probabilities to the possible outcomes of this experiment. We do this by assigning to each outcome ωj a nonnegative number m(ωj ) in such a way that m(ω1 ) + m(ω2 ) + · · · + m(ω6 ) = 1 . The function m(ωj ) is called the distribution function of the random variable X. For the case of the roll of the die we would assign equal probabilities or probabilities 1/6 to each of the outcomes....
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...Andrey Artemenkov, The department of economic measurements, GYY artemenkov@rambler.ru Modern Portfolio theory (MPT) and Financial Economics: a theory of lesser turf?♣ “In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run the easiest.” Henry Miller “[These are colossal] disproportions that have accumulated over the last few years. This primarily concerns disproportions between the scale of financial operations and the fundamental value of assets, as well as those between the increased burden on international loans and the sources of their collateral. … In effect, our proposal implies that the audit, accounting and ratings system reform must be based on a reversion to the fundamental asset value concept. In other words, assessments of each individual business must be based on its ability to generate added value, rather than on subjective concepts. In our opinion, the economy of the future must become an economy of real values. How to achieve this is not so clear-cut. Let us think about it together.” From the Address of Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister of Russia, at the Davos Economic Forum (February, 2009) This Part analyzes the pre-analytical foundations and macro-economic impact of the Modern Portfolio Theory1 (MPT) tenets, on which much of the present Western investment theory and financial economics is erected. Our general inference is that while the former are tautological...
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...Confessions of an Economic Hit Man By John Perkins Preface Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development, and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM. I wrote that in 1982, as the beginning of a book with the working title Conscience of an Economic Hit Man. The book was dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been my clients, whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits—Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We EHMs failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in. I was persuaded to stop writing that book. I started it four more times during the next twenty years. On each occasion, my decision to...
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...Activists call for closure of No. 2 nuke power plant TAIPEI--Environmental groups staged a protest yesterday to urge the government to shut down the No. 2 nuclear power plant in northern Taiwan, citing concerns about the safety of the plant. The protesters gathered outside the Legislature, calling for the government to review the operations of the 30-year-old plant in Wanli, New Taipei City. They pointed out that in a routine safety check on March 16, the state-run Taiwan Power Co. (Taipower) found that one of 120 bolts that anchor the plant's No. 1 reactor to its concrete base had broken and six others had cracked. Taipower recently applied to resume operations of the No. 1 reactor after replacing some parts and carrying out other safety checks. But the environmental groups said the cracks in the bolts indicated deterioration of the nuclear power plant's structure, operating systems, parts and components. Allowing continued operation of the aging plant would jeopardize public safety. At a recent public hearing on the matter, Tsuei Su-hsin, secretary-general of Green Citizen Action's Alliance, said the decision to resume operations was not transparent. Forecasts for slow growth in China, worries over Greece bailout take toll on markets HONG KONG--World stock markets sank Tuesday over worries about slower economic growth in China and a possible snag in the deal for Greece to get its bailout money. In early European trading, Germany's DAX was down 0.4 percent at 6,835...
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