faulker031

Regular readers will know that we have a soft spot for corporate responsibility infographics . The one below, which recently crossed our desk courtesy of Accounting-degree.org , provides a nice overview of some of the big corporate accounting scandals of the last 15 years or so. The title may be misleading - it hardly seeks to capture the biggest scandals of "all time" - but it does give a good summary of those that have happened in recent memory. And the sources of the details they provide are cited - most of which (but not all) are pretty reliable. So if you want a five minute summary of all that's wrong in the world of accounting fraud, and you don't mind a strong US bias, this is a good place to start. One thing we particularly like are the "fun facts" accompanying each scandal. OK, so most of these are not really much fun at all - is anyone laughing about the introduction of Sarbanes-Oxley after the Worldcom and Enron scandals? - but they do point to so...

In the latest edition of ‘Business Ethics’ we referred to the events of 2008 (Lehman, AIG, RBS etc.) as the ‘financial crisis of the late 2000s’. Well, at the time we did not expect this to be useful for the reasons it now makes total (non-)sense: we are quite likely to having witnessed the beginning of the next instalment these days. Following the budget compromise in the US and the downgrading of US government bonds by Standard & Poors (S&P), we have seen markets plummeting and shareholder’s wealth wiped out in the billions. Again. Rather than being a distinct event from 3 years ago, the ‘financial crisis’ – as it is still commonly referred to – seems more of an ongoing concern than a one-off. This also seems to be the message from Europe: Greece is hardly on the safe side, and new bad news is coming out of Italy, Spain, and even France, of all places! So let’s put it frankly: there is no such thing as ‘the financial crisis’ or ‘a new financial crisis’. What we see these days...