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.

Companies in Europe have been largely spared being forced to clear all their derivative contracts on centralized exchanges. New regulations announced last week by the European Commission on OTC derivatives, central counterparties and trade repositories largely focused on financial firms. But there was a significant space devoted to corporate users of derivatives.

The new regulations will create three categories of non-financial derivatives user: those who do not need to inform the authorities about their derivatives exposure; those that will have to inform the authorities but can still clear their trades OTC; and those who are such heavy users of derivatives that they will have to behave like banks and trade them on exchanges and have the contracts centrally cleared.

Record low interest rates are impacting corporate borrowers in a number of ways.

For one thing, they no longer are relying heavily on the commercial paper market, traditionally the main source for short-term funding.

Latin American direct investment—both greenfield and M&A—continues to rise as companies from around the world take a look at the opportunities that the region holds.

The region is not only doing very well from a macro-economic perspective, but it is also experiencing strong domestic growth, strong trade growth, and boasts an experienced corporate executive class who have led the region’s businesses through the crisis with relative ease.

For multinationals keen to take advantage of the strong growth potential in Asia, changes to China’s foreign investment regulations might just make that a little bit easier.

According to a Reuters UK report, the country is in the process of reviewing its foreign investment catalogue—which lists those sectors and industries in which foreign companies or investors may invest.

The world’s largest companies are cutting costs and headcounts with a vengeance as new, much-reduced federal defense budgets take hold.

CFOs in the defense sector are putting on their HR hats as they try to manage cost cuts and still retain necessary staff.

US corporate pension plans fell to their lowest funding level since BNY Mellon Asset Management began tracking this data in 2006.

The funded status of the typical defined benefit plan dropped 5.6 percentage points to 71.3 percent at the end of August.

Bloomberg reports Wednesday that the number of job openings in the US rose in July by 178,000 to 3.04 million.

This follows last week's report that companies added 67,000 jobs in August, above consensus forecasts, following a 107,000 increase in July.

Sometimes bad short-term news could turn into good long-term news.

Case in point is the report that employees paid 14 percent more for family health care coverage this year than they did last year.

Can the economy continue to grow without a meaningful improvement in the job market? The stock market seems to think so.

This morning we got bad news on the jobs front from a number of sources.