It's all about the jobs.

Add chief financial officers of retail firms to the long list of experts who believe the economy will continue to muddle along until the unemployment rate comes down.

Salaries of financial executives and their staff continued to outpace national averages in 2009, and raises were also larger than other white-collar professionals. But the pay of lower level finance professionals outpaced those of CFOs and other senior-level types.

Average annual salaries for financial professionals increased by 2.5 percent in 2009 and were 13 percent above the national average, according to the Association for Financial Professionals' 2010 compensation survey.
But like other workers, CFOs, treasurers and their staff also enjoyed smaller salary growth than what they had been used to. The average salary increase for financial professionals in 2009 was a full percentage point below the average increase reported in 2008. Salaries went up 3.4 percent in 2008 and 4.5 percent in 2007.

The Federal Reserve recently reported that nonfinancial companies had $1.84 trillion in cash and other liquid assets as of the end of March, up 26 percent from the prior year and the largest sum since 1952, when these kinds of records began to be kept.

So, various interest groups have been urging companies to spend this money-on dividends, buybacks, acquisitions, additional employees.

Submitted by Caleb Newquist, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

Late on Friday, it was reported that Sue Sachdeva will plead guilty to six felony counts in the Koss embezzlement case that was discovered at the end of last year.

Submitted by Caleb Newquist, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

Anyone that is in St. Paul/Minneapolis (ideally Baker Tilly Virchow Krause employees) should get in touch with us because this reeks of bad behavior that we absolutely must know about:

There are countless famous examples of successful business mentoring relationships and the benefits that can be gleaned from such a partnership. 

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was mentored by former Citi CEO Sandy Weill. Dimon went on to act as a mentor to Heidi Miller--CEO of JP Morgan’s Treasury & Securities business, Charlie Scharf--CEO of Retail Financial Services at JP Morgan Chase and a director on Visa’s board, and Michael Cavanagh—JP Morgan’s CFO.

Submitted by Jonah Bloom, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

Jonathan Ramsden has been Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Abercrombie & Fitch since December 2008 and is a key part of a team trying to guide the retailer's global expansion while managing something of a remake of its domestic operations. Going Concern caught up with him recently to find out how he sees A&F's business and what else is on his mind.

From a macro standpoint, I have never been as concerned about the high unemployment rate as other people since many other economic metrics have been showing encouraging improvement for months...until now.

Thursday's surprising surge in new unemployment claims and the New York Times front page article confirming what we all thought we knew-that this is the worst job market for teachers since the Great Depression-is starting to change my thinking. Anecdotally, it also doesn't help to know that all--ALL--of my daughter's friends who graduated from college one year ago are enrolled in graduate school for the upcoming fall semester after spending a year of mostly under-employment or attending school.

Submitted by Caleb Newquist, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

 It has been well established in these pages and elsewhere that the SEC has had its share of problems. Take your pick: 1) missing the biggest financial fraud in the history of the world 2) hiring an army of porn-addicted accountants and lawyers to protect our markets 3) waffling on IFRS 4) did we mention missing huge frauds?

Today is my last day at CFOZone. I'm heading to Inc.com to cover the world of small businesses and entrepreneurs.

I've always joked that throughout my career I've left a trail of destruction. Right out of undergrad, I worked on Wall Street briefly. The year was 1999 and I worked for the online brokerage firm TD Waterhouse. Remember those days? Everybody was a trader. Retail money was flowing into companies like TD and E*Trade. I left in early 2000. We all know what happened shortly after that.