Business Reform

President Bush signed far-reaching accounting reform legislation into law Tuesday as corporate executives, auditors, lawyers and Wall Street analysts braced for a significant change in the way they do business. At the White House's carefully orchestrated signing ceremony, Bush stressed the punitive aspects of the most far-reaching business reforms since the Depression--measures that appeared all but dead just a few months ago.

Business schools are under the microscope again, their relevance and value questioned in many quarters. The financial crisis has triggered a self-examination of their raison d'etre. However, before we can decide whether and how business schools need to change, it is worth pausing to consider how and why business schools have evolved as they have. FOR THE RECORD: Business book review: A review in the Oct. 2 Business section of the book "The Roots, Rituals and Rhetorics of Change: North American Business Schools After the Second World War" misspelled the last name of reviewer Morgen Witzel as Wenzel.

WASHINGTON -- Moving to bolster its response to corporate scandals, the White House said Friday that President Bush will deliver a major address on corporate responsibility to Wall Street next month and signaled a willingness to work with congressional Democrats on business reform legislation many Republicans have resisted. For a third straight day, Bush had strong words for corporate wrongdoers, declaring: "When we catch people doing wrong, there will be consequences."

So what does it take to get your foot in the door at California's giant public pension fund with its $203 billion in stocks, bonds, real estate and commodities? It has become a somewhat embarrassing question lately in Sacramento, where the California Public Employees' Retirement System is struggling to be more open about how it does business at a time when investment performance is subpar. For years, the nation's largest public pension fund basked in the luster of impressive financial returns, a reputation for investor activism and leadership in corporate governance reform, all in the name of 1.6 million state and local government workers, retirees and their families.

The administration's latest misstep in handling America's corporate crisis has convinced many people on both sides of the political divide that President Bush does not take the business scandals of the last year all that seriously. Revelations that Bush's Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, Harvey L.

The brewing face-off with Iraq may have claimed its first casualty: more corporate reform legislation. Prospects for a bevy of measures designed to strengthen protections for workers' pensions and impose new rules of corporate behavior appear to be dimming, in part because of Washington's preoccupation with President Bush's aggressive new stance toward Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Corporate corruption remains a potent political issue.

House and Senate negotiators reached agreement Wednesday on legislation to tighten oversight of the accounting industry and increase criminal penalties for corporate fraud. President Bush will receive the bill today, after final votes in the House and Senate, and is expected to sign it. The measure authorizes the most far-reaching new business regulation since the 1930s.

The Obama administration this week will propose the most significant new regulation of the financial industry since the Great Depression, including a new watchdog agency to look out for consumers' interests. Under the plan, expected to be released Wednesday, the government would have new powers to seize key companies -- such as insurance giant American International Group Inc. -- whose failure jeopardizes the financial system.

Since the first Earth Day almost 37 years ago, U.S. companies have been eager to trumpet their environmental good deeds, even when they were more about public relations than clean air or water. But increasingly, corporate America is going green in new, serious and costly ways. After years of being prodded -- and in some cases punished -- by protesters, lawmakers, regulators and, now, even Wall Street, businesses are looking beyond the bottom line.

Late last year, just as 2002 was about to be anointed the "Year of the Whistleblower" by Time magazine, a state judge in Los Angeles booted Christine Casey's lawsuit out of his courtroom. Casey's claim was that she had been forced from her financial analysis job at Mattel Inc.'s El Segundo headquarters for trying to advise top management about how they might acquire accurate information about consumer demand for Barbies and other toys.

More than a year after the financial crisis devastated the economy and triggered massive taxpayer bailouts, the House narrowly approved the most sweeping overhaul of financial regulations since the Great Depression in hopes of preventing a similar catastrophe. The sprawling measure would grant the government broad new authority to break up large financial firms if their size poses a major risk to the economy, as well as to seize and dismantle such firms if they teeter near bankruptcy.

The road to reforming financial regulations winds through the cornfields, hog farms and cattle ranches of America's heartland, and that complicates the Obama administration's already arduous effort to revamp oversight of Wall Street. Lawmakers from Iowa, Minnesota, Oklahoma and other farm-belt states who sit on the congressional agriculture committees have a surprisingly influential role in the administration's proposed overhaul, which Congress resumes debating Tuesday after its summer recess.

The financial regulation plan that President Obama will roll out today will impose stricter and broader government oversight of the nation's banking system -- including tough new requirements on companies whose failure would threaten the economy, and creating new agencies to regulate banks and to protect consumers.

The Obama administration this week will propose the most significant new regulation of the financial industry since the Great Depression, including a new watchdog agency to look out for consumers' interests. Under the plan, expected to be released Wednesday, the government would have new powers to seize key companies -- such as insurance giant American International Group Inc. -- whose failure jeopardizes the financial system.

President Obama's plan to crack down on what he called abuse of overseas tax loopholes was met Monday with quick and unusually sharp opposition from big business, threatening to produce the administration's first major confrontation with a broad segment of corporate America.

Henry Ford II was famous for saying "Big cars, big profits. Small cars, small profits." Now a better mantra for the country's second-largest carmaker might be "Big cars, no profits." Faced with crashing sales of big sport utility vehicles and pickups and an increasingly dim financial outlook as a result, Ford Motor Co.

President Bush and the White House on Wednesday again fended off questions about whether his record as a director of an oil company undermined his administration's push for corporate reform. The latest controversy concerned companies locating overseas to escape U.S. taxes, which Bush says he opposes. "We ought to look at people who are trying to avoid U.S. taxes....

One in 10 publicly traded companies made financial restatements because of accounting irregularities in the last five years, the U.S. General Accounting Office said Wednesday. Annual restatements from accounting irregularities will increase 170% to a projected 250 by the end of 2002 from 92 in 1997, the report says.

President Felipe Calderon on Tuesday called for a sweeping modernization of Mexico's state-owned oil company, outlining a series of reforms that would allow private firms to assume a greater role in the petroleum industry. "We must act now," Calderon said in a televised address timed to coincide with the formal presentation of his initiative to the Senate. "Time and our oil are running out." The reserves of Pemex, as the oil company is known, could disappear in a decade, officials say.

Starbucks Corp. is testing letting its customers pour their own coffee at some stores as part of an effort to halt two quarters of customer declines. Customers can pay before or after getting their own drip coffee, the coffee chain said.