Shareholder Activism on the Rise

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jul 6, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments   Because most companies are on a calendar year for financial reporting, their annual shareholder meetings and proxy statements are considered by their owners in the late spring to early summer.  This annual meeting season has seen a rise in shareholder activism.  Executive pay, in particular, has been a flash point for shareholders. Is it that shareholders have all of a sudden gotten...
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What’s Going on in the Financial Markets Right Now?

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jul 5, 2011 in Blog | 2 comments   Via e-mail a loyal reader of the blog asks a great series of questions that are an opportunity to address what’s going on in the financial markets right now.  Hopefully he will forgive me for bringing his question into the public forum of the blog.  Here’s what he writes: “I’m wondering why the market is zooming up lately.  I’m too confused to reduce my...
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Greek Debt Risk Still Present

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jul 4, 2011 in Blog | 2 comments   Last week the Standard & Poors 500 Index surged 5.6% having almost everything to do with the possibility of a resolution to the Greek debt crisis.  Most market participants felt that the situation was resolved.  You might have noticed that I did not blog about the possible solutions being bandied about.  Why? Because frankly European solutions to eurozone or European Union issues tend...
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2011 Predictions Half Year Update

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jul 1, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments Today marks the end of the first half of 2011, so it is time to return to my 2011 Predictions to see how I have done so far this year.  For ease in evaluation I will re-post each prediction in its entirety, followed by evaluation and commentary. OVERALL THEMES Cohesion – The economies of the world will finally start to move more in lock step than they have since the Great Recession...
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Egyptian ‘Revolution’ Update

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jul 1, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments On 15 February, 2011 I wrote a post entitled, “Archetypes Are Obscuring the Understanding of Egypt” that was about the unrest in Egypt that was then unfolding.  My specific focus was about how people’s, including the press’s, obsession with archetypes was obscuring an understanding of the reality on the ground in Egypt. I stressed that to understand what was really...
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Chinese Auditors Find Lies

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jun 30, 2011 in Blog | 2 comments Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal ran a story that only confirmed my worst fears about the quality of Chinese financial data.  In short, the piece, entitled “Auditors Sharpen Queries in China,” catalogs a series of lies found by auditors of Chinese businesses. For example, one of the very easiest things for an auditor to confirm anywhere else in the world besides China is the...
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New Measure of Economic Efficiency

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jun 29, 2011 in Blog | 3 comments Yesterday morning I played around with some statistics in pursuit of an economic efficiency rating that could be used to compare two economies to one another.  What I have come up with is simple and, hopefully, compelling. You could evaluate the continents of the planet just by sheer economic output, or total 2010 gross domestic product (GDP): Europe: $19,920 billion; 32.9% of total North...
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