Chief financial officers of middle-market companies are generally upbeat about the economy and their hiring plans.

Nearly half (47 percent) of the CFOs who participated in GE Capital's quarterly survey said they expect the US economy to be stable while another 37 percent said it is "improving" over the near term. This suggests little chance for a double-dip recession in the months ahead, GE Capital asserts.

Companies across the US are signalling that they are not happy with proposed new accounting rules that would require them to disclose potential losses from pending class action lawsuits, and increase disclosure on potential liabilities from products and operations.

As many as 140 big name corporates—including Ford Motor, GE, McDonald’s, Google and HP—signed a response to the proposed accounting changes, saying that they oppose the scheme, according to a report in Monday’s FT.

General Electric agreed to pay more than $23.4 million to settle bribery charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission stemming from the UN Oil for Food Program in Iraq at the beginning of the millennium.

The SEC had filed Foreign Corrupt Practices Act books and records and internal controls charges against GE and two of its subsidiaries-Ionics, Inc. (currently GE Ionics) and Amersham plc (currently GE Healthcare).

By this point, press cheerleading for the economy is hardly newsworthy, and I'm not the first to notice the latest example.

But the down-is-up spin on Caterpillar's results cannot escape mention.  As the Business Insider notes, the Bloomberg story is tame by comparison with the ravings on CNBC yesterday.

This is seriously speculative stuff on my part. But I wonder if the other shoe that Carl Levin says is about to drop on Goldman has to do with its failure to disclose the fact that it received a Wells Notice from the SEC last July about the Abacus deal.

Yes, the bank claims it was immaterial, just as it claims was its lack of disclosure of hedgie John Paulson's role in helping to design the CDO to go south so he could profit by shorting the deal was immaterial.

Something is wrong with a financial system where investors don't want the SEC to pursue fraud.

Does Mr. Market really want to be fooled into thinking he is wealthy, at least on paper? Talk about cynical.

Hey, I got hold of some interesting data from Audit Analytics on the length of time that some US companies have had the same auditors.

The issue arises in connection with a CFO cover story on audit fees that I wrote about yesterday.

The results that General Electric reported on Friday for the fourth quarter of last year show that expectations continue to be everything on Wall Street. And so long as they're not as bad as expected, stocks will continue to rise.

Who knows, at this rate, maybe we'll never need a real recovery.

General Electric sure is taking this whole recession seriously.

We've had news that it is experimenting with a new management structure in India. And now GE has finally come out and said it's looking to cut its interests in NBC Universal after years of insisting it wouldn't.

It's unclear exactly how an NBCU deal would go down, but it sounds like something is going to happen. GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt told reporters on Friday that there are ongoing discussions about an IPO or another partnership, according to Reuters. GE currently owns 80 percent of NBCU and Vivendi owns the remaining 20 percent.