It’s a sign of the times but two of the UK’s highest profile high street shopping chains are in financial trouble. La Senza, the luxury women’s underwear shop, has reportedly called in KPMG to help restructure the business. Whilst some of the less professional male readers amongst you may well suggest that the first thing [...]
Published on: 16 Dec 2011I’m willing to bet that nearly all of you have used a Microsoft product. Probably an equally high proportion have used Google and a reasonably significant number of you will own an Apple product. What about LinkedIn? Most of you have no doubt heard of it and a number of you will be registered with [...]
Published on: 18 Nov 2011Forget about the Eurozone crisis that is currently dominating the news and instead, here’s a nice bedtime story to tell your children… So children, are you feeling tired and ready for your story? Once upon a time, in a land far far away there was a man called Gordon Reece (or Mr G.Reece). Now Mr [...]
Published on: 02 Nov 20113 years ago in the middle of the financial crisis when some of the best known banks in the world were on the verge of collapsing, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) was rescued by the British tax payers to the tune of £45 billion. Since then the bank has been under a lot of [...]
Published on: 14 Oct 2011One of the real challenges facing a lot of companies at the moment is access to funds. The economic turmoil over recent years has led to the loan markets largely drying up and without access to suitable cash reserves a number of firms have hit cashflow problems and have gone out of business. Similarly, a [...]
Published on: 05 Oct 2011When I was in my teenage years, pubs in England were a very distinctive place; dark, smoky, slightly smelly, overwhelmingly male and mostly shut. A legacy of previous societal norms meant that women rarely went into pubs unless they were with men. A legacy of World War One legislation meant that drinks could not be [...]
Published on: 10 Nov 2010According to reports this week, Ernst & Young will be the first of the Big 4 to appoint non-executive directors to its global advisory council. This is a major move for the accountancy profession. The profession has been under increasing regulatory pressure for a while now and the decision to appoint non-execs is reportedly in [...]
Published on: 09 Jul 2010The major stock markets around the world have been bear markets for the last couple of years but with the end of the recession looking like it’s fast approaching we should soon see a switch to a bull market. Analysts around the world will be arguing one way or another on the timing of the [...]
Published on: 11 Jun 2010On 12 November 2009, the IASB issued IFRS 9 “Financial Instruments”. This is the first stage of a three stage project that will probably make or break the international reputation of the IASB and its deeply impressive chairman, Sir David Tweedie. The IASB inherited IAS 32 and IAS 39 from its predecessor, the IASC. IAS [...]
Published on: 29 Nov 2009A few accounting standards arguably have an unfortunate tendency to exaggerate the economic cycle. During a time of economic downturn, the chances of a company having impaired assets is increased. This has the unfortunate effect of taking poor trading results and augmenting them with impairment losses. In other words, accounting conventions take a bad situation [...]
Published on: 14 Oct 2009