Your company is about to report spectacularly good news. You get a big grant of options just before the announcement. Is that a crime? It depends, I learned Monday at a conference put on in Washington by Stanford Law School’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance. If you’re the CEO, you know about the pending announcement, [...]

In a comment to my piece last week on supply-side economics, Dan G. of Milwaukee cast doubt on the forecasts of the Congressional Budget Office: “The CBO can’t make predictions, assumptions, or analysis any better than some far left economics professor shielded from business realities on a college campus,” he wrote. Then he declared: History [...]

As you’ve probably heard, the U.S. economy grew at a 1.6% annual, inflation-adjusted crawl in the quarter that ended Sept. 30. Except that, well, it probably didn’t. It was the “advance” estimate of gross domestic product that the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis released today. On Nov. 29 we’ll get the “preliminary” estimate and [...]

I got an e-mail a couple of weeks ago from Ben Etheridge, a high school senior in Marietta, Georgia, who had come across a 2003 article I wrote on the Bush tax cuts. Ben said the article was “more helpful in trying understand supply side economics than many other sources on the Internet” but that, [...]

In my interview with Michael Zielenziger about his new book on Japan, Shutting out the Sun, we discussed the role of such business mavericks as management consultant Kenichi Ohmae, tech mogul Masayoshi Son, and blogger/investor/Gnome Mage Joi Ito. Michael’s take was that they remain marginalized. Joi e-mailed me this morning to say he didn’t entirely [...]

My first visit to Japan came in the sticky late summer of 1998. Fortune had sent me across the Pacific to figure out whether there was any end in sight for the island nation’s long economic nightmare. That’s not really the kind of question you can answer in a week of interviews in a country [...]

Do CEOs really matter? Back in 1972, an article by Stanley Lieberson and James O’Connor in the American Sociological Review contended that the identity of the chief executive mattered far less to corporate performance than which company he ran and which industry it happened to be in. Ever since then, management scholars have been arguing [...]

Corey Rosen of the National Center for Employee Ownership sent me a comment on my options backdating posts that I figure deserves a post of its own. Take it away, Corey: Justin Fox’s suspicion about backdated options being more common for top executives is backed up by broader data. In a July study of 53 [...]

Let me tell you about the nefarious scheme in place at some major American corporations until this year. Employees were allowed pick the lesser of the current stock price and the price a year before, then buy stock at a 15% discount from that lower price. The companies failed to report this clear transfer of [...]