In a follow-on from my blog yesterday on small business confidence and economic recovery, today I will take a look at the impact on retirement planning of continued tough conditions and a lack of external funding for businesses.

Retirement planning has taken a back burner for many small business owners since the crisis started. With small business confidence dropping in December for the first time in three months and many still reporting a dearth of outside funding sources, many owners expect to see their savings dwindle further in the coming six months, rather than grow.

As spending soared above even optimistic predictions this holiday season, small business owners are still far from optimistic about economic recovery as a whole, according to a survey by Discover Small Business Watch.

Discover's monthly index of small business confidence fell for the first time in three months in December, even as consumer spending soared. The index fell to 81.6 from 87.2 in November, a drop of 5.6 points.

CFOs who cook the books are often bullied into it by overbearing CEOs that are looking out for their own equity stakes, according to a new piece of research by a group of global academics.

The research looked at why and when CFOs become involved in material accounting manipulations, and what factors increased the likelihood that CFOs would knowingly become involved in accounting fraud.

Here are more encouraging signs that the economic recovery continues to gain strength.

Credit quality continues to improve and some indicators stand at two-year highs.

According to Standard & Poor's, the US speculative-grade default rate fell to 3.35 percent in mid-December, down from a peak of 11.4 percent hit in November 2009. In the US, 53 issuers defaulted through November, compared with 185 at the same time in 2009.

Although corporate social responsibility and sustainability are big buzzwords right now, and have been for some time, actual efforts to implement sustainable practices within the supply chain have not been a priority for many companies over the past few years.

This is, of course, hardly surprising. Given the vast array of changing regulations, increased compliance requirements, and the need to simply focus on basics as markets floundered through some of the toughest economic conditions of the past century, any projects not deemed either necessary for compliance purposes or able to show a very quick return on investment were understandably put on hold.

Data breaches happen for all kinds of reasons, from employee sabotage to human error. But the past week or so has been a big one for security disasters caused by hackers, according to Risk Management.

Two of them involve hackers who infiltrated a third party a corporation had hired to do email marketing. At McDonald's, a company managing the franchisor's email campaigns used another firm to send out the promotions. Hackers stole data from that last firm, including names, phone numbers, and addresses.

When it comes to data security breaches, the bulk of the attention goes to problems with information storage and transmission. In fact, I recently wrote something about some particularly egregious, recent examples.

 But it turns out there's also a big threat posed by what's known as visual privacy issues-that is, data displayed on screens. With the rise of a mobile workforce, constantly working on laptops, tablets, and smart phones, sending and receiving emails and tapping proprietary corporate information while on the go, security breaches caused by visual information are also increasing.

Although chief financial officers, risk managers, and other corporate executives recognize the importance of strategic risk management, many are as yet unable to put it into full practice and linking it effectively with overall corporate strategy is a still-elusive goal.

One of the latest offshoots of socially responsible investing is called impact investing. It's aimed at creating investments with a social and/or environmental impact, as well as financial returns. To that end, it seeks to differentiate itself from traditional socially responsible investing, by focusing on enterprises that actively seek to do good, rather than those that merely avoid doing harm. That means businesses, for example, providing customers with access to water or housing or creating quality jobs. In a short time, it's attracted the interest of everyone from major financial institutions and pension funds to foundations, commercial banks, family offices, and wealth managers. The list includes such heavy-hitters as Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Prudential Financial.

 But as I wrote recently, one of the big questions about impact investing is just what kind of returns you can get. Now a new report from JP Morgan, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Global Impact Investing Network, provides at least some preliminary answers. The first large-scale data analysis of return expectations, it includes comparisons to established benchmarks for emerging and developed market debt and equity returns with data on over 1,100 investments. And it provides an estimate for potential returns and total investment opportunity over the next 10 years.

The European debt crisis is rocking the global stock markets, many debt markets as well as the Euro.

But one market that seems to be immune from the growing volatility is the market for riskier US corporate bonds.