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I am now on Twitter… and you can add me to your follow list if you would like. Twitter will allow me to write little blurbs that don’t necessarily warrant a full post.

My twitter updates are listed along the right sidebar of the blog.

As always, thanks for reading.

-Jeff

I am a guest poster over on the accounting/audit industry blog re: The Auditors, which is authored by Francine McKenna.

Ms. McKenna covers the ongoings of the Big 4 and has twenty-plus years of experience in the professional services environment, including tenure both in the US and abroad at PwC, KPMG/BearingPoint, JP Morgan and Jefferson Wells/Manpower. She leads McKenna Partners LLC, a specialized consultancy, advising other professional services firms, especially those with interests in Latin America.

Someone left this link in a comment to another post and I found it highly relevant today (and perhaps even more so given the current state of the job market) even though it was written mid-2008.

Accounting graduates are flooding the streets according to CFO magazine (a subscription to the mag is free, by the way and is an easy way to pique the curiosity of your brown-nosing co-worker who will throw anyone under the bus if they feel it will make them look good to management…

“what? he’s reading CFO magazine? why don’t I get CFO magazine? does he think he’s going to be CFO or what??? grrrrrr…did the company pay for the subscription? I bet they did. why didn’t I get one? that’s it – I’m done with this place…no one appreciates ME!!!” )

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but being a CPA will set you apart from your peers who are not CPAs. I passed the exam back in November and it’s already opened a door internally that wouldn’t have been open for me if I was still trying to get through this exam.

Study study study – get this Exam over with. Being a CPA won’t make you completely bullet-proof in this job market, but at least you’re wearing a vest.

Hear that sound? Newly graduated, lower-paid reinforcements are on the way.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user idg under this Creative Commons license.

If you’re sitting for a section(s) of the CPA Exam in the January/February 2009 window and have questions or want to share your Prometric testing experience for others doing the same, feel free to do so here.

Obviously, please don’t post any disparaging comments about review companies or entities (“Review Company X sucks”), other people (“hey anonymous at 1:15pm – you suck”) or anything that would violate the confidentiality terms that you agree to when you sit for the Exam.

I keep this blog focused on the CPA Exam and purposely don’t delve into topical tangents like politics or other non-Exam related subjects. The CPA Exam however, tests on economics and business in general, as well as the obvious accounting topics that you would expect.

I also can’t think of a more pressing and relevant topic for accountants to be informed on than the proposed “bailout” as it’s called. As accountants and CPA Exam candidates we need to be informed and equipped to discuss the current financial mess with our peers and with those who expect us to have an opinion on the subject – i.e. your relatives and people who catch you in the hall at church.

“Hey, you’re almost a CPA right? How are we going to fix this mess?”

If you listen to the media, there is only one solution – and it should have been put in place yesterday, and that is to go a trillion dollars into debt and force the taxpayers to clean up the mess of greedy people.

Here is another plan – and it involves (gulp) letting greedy people – not taxpayers suffer the consequences of their own actions.

“What? They’ll be no credit! We’ll all lose our jobs! The stock market will be worth zero!”

Not true.

Harvard Economist Jeffrey Miron writes:

“In contrast, a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This “moral hazard” generates enormous distortions in an economy’s allocation of its financial resources.

Thoughtful advocates of the bailout might concede this perspective, but they argue that a bailout is necessary to prevent economic collapse. According to this view, lenders are not making loans, even for worthy projects, because they cannot get capital. This view has a grain of truth; if the bailout does not occur, more bankruptcies are possible and credit conditions may worsen for a time.

Talk of Armageddon, however, is ridiculous scare-mongering. If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.”

There are pros and cons to every alternative. We need to be prepared to discuss them. CPA candidates must be somewhat competent on the subject.

Get the article here

Dave is a smart guy and someone who I greatly admire and it’s no surprise that he is voicing a debt-free plan to get us out of this mess. It’s relevant to this blog because well, we all live in this economy and also because it involves mark to market accounting and the unintended consequences of Sarbanes-Oxley.

Dave wrote an article this week called “How We Can Clean Up A Lot of the Economic Problems“.

The funny thing about going into debt is, well…someday you will have to pay it back. Our great-grandchildren are going to wake up to an America one day that is completely owned by China and the Middle East.