NEWSPAPER ACCOUNTING ARTICLE

Newspaper Accounting Article

Newspaper Accounting Article

Winter Garden duo writes book on financial crisis, The West Orange Times, Thursday, October 7, 2010

Focusing on the state of the economy and its fate, Will Gates and Mike Gearhardt have co-authored the book The Financial Tsunami: Will It Drown Us in a Wave of Debt?

Both men live in south Winter Garden and are partners with Arete Group, Inc. They each have more than 30 years of experience in accounting and finance. Gates and Gearhardt said they sifted through more than 50,000 pages of information for their book, which they said was written to help the public.

Explaining why they wrote the book, the co-authors said, “Many find that issues involving the federal budget, deficits and national debt to be intimidating, complex and confusing. We wrote The Financial Tsumani to help those who wanted to understand these difficult subjects but did not necessarily have the time or background to do so.”

Gearhardt said he and Gates concluded that, “Decades of fiscal irresponsibility due to excessive spending, inconsistent and irrational tax policies, growth in entitlement programs, government intervention into free markets and inadequate accounting practices threaten to drown our nation's economy under a wave of debt.”

That debt, the authors stated, has increased significantly for the last 40 years during both Republican and Democratic leadership.

Financial Tsunami

The increasing importance of social and environmental reporting means that accountants need to develop new ways of collecting, classifying and measuring non-financial data. This information may include the levels of pollutants emitted by a factory, or whether the factory meets health and safety standards. Some businesses are choosing to report this kind of information in order to avoid negative publicity or to gain business from 'green' consumers (or finance from 'ethical' investors). There is also an increasing demand for government and public sector bodies to be held accountable to tax-payers and citizens for their actions. For example, schools publish their examination results and hospitals their waiting lists. Although social and environmental reporting are outside the scope of this unit, thinking about these issues helps us to understand the changing nature of accounting throughout time.

To become a financial center, Shanghai has its natural advantages. It has a vast hinterland, large market, many issuers and investors including corporations and individuals (it is worth noting that China currently has more than 820,000 wealthy individuals with personal assets over 1.5 million US Dollars ...