Want to hire new people and save money at the same time? Just participate in the Treasury Department's employee subsidy program.

From February to August 2010, businesses have hired an estimated 8.1 million new workers who had been unemployed for 60 days or longer, making those businesses eligible to receive billions in the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act tax exemptions and credits for hiring long-term unemployed workers.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke asked lenders to ease credit to small businesses earlier this week, but the situation isn't likely to change anytime soon.

With stricter lending standards, small community banks have stopped lending to small companies. Part of the problem is a lack of demand from solid businesses. Most want to save their cash and preserve their credit while there's still uncertainty surrounding the economic recovery.

With Treasuries at all-time lows and bank lending still declining, companies are reorganizing their treasury operations in record numbers as they strive to increase efficiency, reduce costs and make best use of their internal cash. According to a recent survey by JP Morgan Treasury Services, 61 percent of companies polled had either just completed a treasury restructuring, were in the process of restructuring, or were building the business case for a restructuring.

The poll of 182 treasury executives—primarily from large corporations--found that 35 percent were implementing systems that would allow the company to get a global cash balance, 25 percent were reorganizing their bank account structures to reduce their number of banking partners, and 19 percent were restructuring their cash concentration programs to make use of extra cash for self-funding or debt repayment.

 Boutique investment firm Lazard is making headway in the mergers and acquisitions league tables so far this year. With its recent contract to advise the Treasury Department on the initial public offering of the government's stake in General Motors, it is also boosting its equity business.

The IPO of the 61 percent stake in GM could take place before the end of the year and could top $50 billion, according to a recent Barron's report. Lazard was hired to value the government's GM holdings and advise on the timing of the IPO. Lazard will be paid at least $7.5 billion for the assignment.

Republished from the Benche, a financial community for corporate treasurers.

The International Chamber of Commerce has released the findings of their survey titled "Rethinking Trade Finance 2010" that sheds some light on this issue.

Private equity firms are making progress in their plans to purchase financial institutions, which could help the industry get back on its feet while reducing taxpayer losses.

At the end of April, two regional banks, Pacific Capital Bancorp and Sterling Financial, entered into agreements with private equity firms to receive capital. Such deals will have a positive impact on the two banks, boosting capital levels that have been depleted due to asset quality deterioration.

Submitted by Francine McKenna, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

The US Treasury recently decided to vote its proportionate ownership interest in Citigroup to affirm reappointment of KPMG as Citi's auditor for the 41st consecutive year.

Maybe Treasury married KPMG all over again because they're cheap compared to what Goldman and AIG are paying PwC.

Maybe KPMG knows this client best - a dubious honor. KPMG has been on the scene of Citi's crimes and misdemeanors all over the world for 41 years.

Maybe Treasury feels like a mother who puts up with a gold digging daughter-in-law because daughter-in-law saw mom kissing the tennis pro and mom knows her son has slept with the baby-sitter...


From Citigroup's most recent proxy:

Submitted by Niclas Osmund, republished from the Benche, a financial community for corporate treasurers. 

 A majority of treasury managers and professionals wish for more centralisation of a number of activities. For example payments, collections, liquidity structures and organisation set-ups. But, it doesn't seem to happen.

This is one of the conclusions we can draw from a survey that SEB together with GTNews has conducted every year since 2006. In the areas mentioned they state having a de-centralised set-up but have a strong wish to centralise. This is consistent and doesn't seem to change over the years.

Banks' repayments of TARP preferred stock and warrants are turning a profit for the US Treasury, but taxpayers are still supporting financial institutions in many other ways.

As of March 30, the government earned an 8.5 percent annualized return on the funds that it supplied to 49 companies that have exited the Capital Purchase Program and the Target Investment Program, according to an analysis by SNL Financial.

The Treasury Department is planning to sell its Citigroup common stock in small tranches throughout 2010 to avoid too much dilution to shareholders, according to analysts. But some wouldn't be surprised to see the Treasury get out quicker if the economy shows improvement.

The department accounted today that it intends to sell 7.7 billion shares, or roughly a 27 percent stake, using a pre-arranged written trading plan, it said in a press release Monday.