We study managerial accounting to learn about better decision making.  Here Jerry Flint contrasts good and bad decisions. Making a new whatever in  a new plant with new people = problems. Which is what has happened to Nissan in MS and Toyota in San Antonio. 

Trying to sell different makes of cars under the same roof is also a problem, it results in less not more sales. I have noticed this lately in my study of DSLR cameras. Nikon and Canon dominate the field.  Walk in  a camera store where the sales folk are supposed to know about cameras, and all they know is Nikon and Canon, pity Olympus Sony Pentax Panasonic et al. These guys need to figure out another marketing channel cause they are not going to move anything in stores with no kowledge of their product.  Just yesterday I was i a store where the sales person said oh yeah he had heard some good things about Olympus, now there is a non  sales closer if I ever heard one.

Products are generally sold not bought, at least expensive products.  This is part of the overall package of making folks want your product.

Well here we go again. As gasoline is now $3, Jerry Flint actually drove a Smart Car.  And he actually got 47 mpg.  Finally a report I can believe.

For most of what I do here in the Best SW City area, a SMART would make sense.  I drive to school, and sometimes to the shopping area on Hwy 67. One can head down Pleasant Run and avoid I 20 which is probably not a bad idea anyway, it keeps one away from the huge semis. 

Jerry makes a really creative suggestion in his article. Why don’t the Big Three (smaller and smaller Three? ) open one of their shuttered factories, hire folks from the GM job bank that have experience building cars, and build a joint design that really gets 40 mpg.  Good idea and I suspect that the state of Michigan would bend over backwards to help make that happen. And they could certainly ask for some Govt Help, say a tax credit for purchasers of the cars, Dems always like tax credits for some reason.

Here is another idea that would help.  I can only drive one car at a time, and there are only two drivers in my family.  Why do I have to pay another full insurance premium if I buy another car?  Seems to me that I should only be paying for the chance that an act of nature would destroy the other car sitting in the driveway while I would be driving the SMART.  That would be an incentive to buy a second more economical car.

So, Jerry estimates 25,000 national sales, is that all, will you be on board?  I would say it makes sense in Lancaster but not on I 35 to Denton and back.

At left, Jimmie Smith, President of the Dallas Managerial Accounting Society presnets yours truly Dennis Elam, Asst Prof Accounting UNT Dallas Campus, a $250 check from .  The group voluntarily made the donation regarding the effort to lend CPE authority for the IMA meetings.

UNT Dallas Campus will be emphasizing careers in Managerial Accounting. The hallmark of this profession is attaining the Certified Managerial Accountant designation.  Dallas IMA hosts a monthly meeting with two speakers about both qualitative and quantitative topics.  Learn more at their website.

Mariane Markowitz certainly kept the meeting on time and moving along. I have attended many professional meetings but I cannot recall one better organized and on time as this one. Mariane hosted Lin O’Neill, President of Futures Consulting, who delivered a fine talk on leadership.  We will be listing the books she referenced in our next post.  Read about details on her book Managing High Maintenance Employees.

The  format for the meeting is a Professional Development Session which begins at 4:30 PM.  This is typically about qualitative issues such as leadership.   President Jimmie Smith is pictured at left bringing the group to speed on future meetings and plans for the group.  A buffet dinner  affords time to network between the two presentations.

John Wilmoth hosted the technical session  on Cost Segregation.  His niche is re clasifying 39 year property to shorter lives resulting in greater depreciation write offs.

The meeting was sponsored by People Flex Accounting Professionals.

People Flex awarded two nice door prizes, a travel cas and two tickets to a Dallas Mavericks game.

We look forward to a productive relationship with the Dallas IMA. Students will be interested in the

Gleim CMA preparation course that Dallas IMA is sponsoring.

All in all, Dallas IMA is moving ahead on multiple fronts by providing monthly meetings with CPE, expanding offerings to luncheon meetings with naitonally prominent speakers, beginning an important CMA review class, and partnering with UNT Dallas Campus. Expect to hear more aout the group and its activities on our blog.

Gee lots of news on the ethics front today.  Upset and distraught about your or your significant other’s wayward ways.  Well,  Cheatneutral to the rescue!  This article describes and provides a link to the site.  Now you can purchase an offset to your own cheating.  See, just like a ‘carbon neutral footrpint rendered maenignless by carbon offsets’ you can offset your own lack of fidelity! Purchase your offset here.

This is  of course a protest and a satire over the entire idea of carbon offsets.  Living in 20,000 sf houses and flying private jets around the world (which is typical of the entire global warming bunch Al Gore, Brad Pitt, etc) and rationalizing it by purchasing carbon offsets is ridiculous. 

For those of your rusty on thelogy back in the 1400-1500s, the Catholic Church sold Indulgences.  Sinful, well no problem, just buy your way out with the purchase of an Indulgence.  And all if forgiven.  To his credit, Pope Pius V in 1567 put a stop to this. But too late the Protestant Idea led by Martin Luther was already out of the box.

But my point is that there is nothing new under the sun in this idea of ‘offsets.’  And they are as ridiculous now as then.

Virute is one of the cornerstones of UNT Dallas Values. It cannot be bought or sold, only practiced.

I  made several posts about Michael Vick and other athletes this past semester. Now we have the (alleged) actual letter Michael Vick wrote to his Judge regarding his sentence.  Rather than comment here myself, I hope that you will read his letter and  coment on the blog. By the way, do you have an opinion on those other letter writes chiming in for his character?

Here is a  rundown on the VIck case for those that have been studying for finals rather than watching E TV,it ain’t over yet apparently.

Several of you have reviewed or read the book How to Win Friends by Carnegie. Carnegie of course emphasizes that one must be sincere in one’s comments. Mike has had three kids by his girl friend, soon to be his fiance!  Do we have a new Mr. Manners here?

I report you decide. 

Logistics is all the buzz these days but there is nothing new about it.  Imagine you were Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants, where does one get Elephant Food in Boerne Switzerland? Here is a column about

the Great White Voyage.   Austin Bay makes it clear that this was no mere stunt. Indeed TR wanted the Japanese to know that all Western Powers were not what they experienced with the Russians. Did you know TR won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the Japan Russian War at that time? 

Logsitically TR was insistent on making this  a shakedown cruise to learn what would go wrong in peactime. Certainly supplying sixteen battleships going round the world was no simple task.  There is a link to the longer story on the Navy Historical Site, I suggest you read it, a fascinating glimpse back in time.  But were things so really different, in the Navy article note the gag outfits worn by the sailers crossing the equator, looks like a scene right out of South Pacific!

And the theme of mercenary suppliers was one explored then and now, aka Blackwater.  Back then the Navy concluded they needed their own ships. In time of war they were concerned whether private contractors would venture into Harms’ Way once fighting began.  This of course, is still an interesting question.  You will recall that the British relied on German mercenaries during the Revolutionary War. Indeed this was  a group that Washington defeated after his famous Delaware Crossing during the night.

Good stuff, logistically and in terms of managerial accounting.  Imagine the logsitics of supplying 12,000 sailors going round the world in 1907, or in 2007.

Alan Greenspan has written an itneresting piece in the Wall Street Journal. He confesses that after a half century of watching markets, well the FED cannot stop a bubble of speculation until it bursts of its own accord. This is another way of saying, no matter what I did at the FED after 9/11 it would not have worked. Of course he was glad to be on magazine covers after the 1987 Crash or the Hedge Fund debacle in 1999 and take credit. I however do believe that he is right. Thinking all financial problems can be solved by moving short term interest rates is folly.

He of course wants to absolve himself of blame for the current sub prime mess. His story  is that the FED thought long term rates would rise once they started raising short term rates. He says that never happened.

Not true Alan.  I pointed out that Fannie Mae is about to sell preferred stock for 8.25%, that sounds like a higher rate to me.  True govt bond rates are down, and he grouses that there is nothing he could do about it.  The truth is that holding short term rates so low so long allowed lots of builders and lenders to entice apartment dwellers to take on debt that should have been avoided. Now as he says, the only solution is to eliminate the backlog of unsold homes. Now he tells us.

Irecently remarked to Deputy Vice Provost Garry Ross that I did not mind what they made on Wall Street as much as I minded the lack of accountablity.  Ben Stein agrees in this article.   AS with 9/11 and the FBI, DEA, CIA, etc, no one gets fired,where is the justice?

Go to the bottom of the finance.yahoo.com page. You will see a section on Global Investing with a list of coutnries. Click on a few of them.  You will be able to see for example how the Austrailian All Ordinaries Index did versus the US Market. You can click on World Indices and see how the Hang Seng or the Straits Times or the KLSE did last night. Interestingly the stories, written in England and here, reflect how those exchanges acted after the NYSE New York Stock Exchange closed.  My point is that capitalism has literally spread like wildfire.  Investing is has sprung up where it never existed before.   Why, because everyone wants to get filthy stinking rich, don’t let the anyone tell you any different..

Think about it.  The earth turns on its axis, never stopping. Neither does trading. As the earth turns counterclockwise, the day begins in Oceania, Australia and points east.  Traders then come to their desk in Japan and Korea.  China and then India awake.  Petro dollars is making Dubai a new financial Center.  Even dead broke Egypt has a stock exchange.  Trading continues into Europe, click on that link, how many exchanges are there?  And these are just the major ones.  You have to work harder for example to find the

Prague Stock Exchange. As Asia shuts down it is midday at the FTSE in London and the CAC in Paris.  Note that trading in US Stocks continues in all these countries and in US indices.  But the US Excchanges are closed you say!  Yes but foeign exchanges trade US Securities while we sleep.  This is why financial accuracy and ethics in US reporting are so important.  Confidence in US companies drives the world marekts.  And that is what SARBOX is all about.

This is why I recommend you subscribe to Business Week.  It is cheap and portable and a faster easier read than the Wall Street Journal.  Because staying informed ina 24/7 trading world is important.

Let the games begin.

Okay our previous post was all about bonds, what companies owe.  What about stocks?  Glad you asked.

You should have a handle on commonc stock and preferred stock by now.  For more on this a great source is Chart School. Take the topics in order. Start with the Overview Tab.  This takes you to another page with several topics. Please start with Fundamental Analysis.  Or you can start with Why Analyze Securities?  That section differs tech analysis from fundamental analysis. Click on fundamental analysis and scroll down the page.  Notice how many terms we study in accounting that you see here, surprised?  This is a good review of what we did this semester. Now stop and think.  Look at how the ratios and terms in this section were also scattered thru various chapters of Itnermed ACCT 3110.  Remember Chapter 14 and 17 in Managerial on analysis, here it is again.  And you will see a lot of this in the finance courses.

Ater you re acquaint yourself with fundamental analysis, then start on technical.  Technical analysis seeks to derive future stock or any other pattern from past patterns on the chart. This is also a great way to acquaint yourself with charts.  As you read this you should start developing a feel for trends. This is what I meant in your presentations in Managerial that you do not just look at the numbers for one year. We are looking for trends and changes in trends.  In the blank at the top right on these pages you can insert the ticker symbol for any stock and then see its chart.  Try it for CFC or FNM. Do you see a change in trend?

Okay this page on stocks and the last on bonds should keep you busy before and after you unwrap Santa’s presents.  Believe me I wish this sort of information had been this easily available when I was in school.  Seriously I spent over twenty years around the brokerage business as a broker, securities office manager, bond trader, cpa, representing folks before the IRS, you name it.  The world of corporate accounting and finance is fascinating to me because it involves just about everything, well see the next post, that is enough for now with this one.

DLE