While I take your point, I often see people who don't really understand accounting avoid the topic entirely by fully outsourcing the preparation of their financial statements. This often leads to disaster because I've noticed that if you're not really on top of your outsourced service provider, they get sloppy/lazy and make lots of mistakes.
I’ve noticed some weird anomalies as well like if there is a small, medium, and large size package the large sized package isn’t always the cheapest per unit - as they assume customer will just assume the largest packages has the lowest per unit price
not saying that he didn't defraud his investors - just pointing out that I was under the impression that his fraud did not economically harm his investors (which is rarely the case in these prosecutions) and puts his sentence in a different light to a certain extent...
I was told that a while back Bulgari (and probably some other high-end jewelers) operated one of the largest illicit money transfer networks - primarily for bribery.
Want to bribe a public official? Give his wife a $100k bracelet, and mention that it can be returned anywhere in the world for CASH (less a 10% “restocking fee” of course). Then you might mention how nice it would be to spend a weekend in Geneva - and coincidentally there is a branch of that jeweler just down the street from some very discreet Swiss bankers (back when they were discreet)...
I’d start with asking the questions: who was responsible for the contract and it’s implemntation, and what were their motives, incentives, qualifications and abilities. Then I would ask the same question, but what would the IDEAL motives, abilities, incentives and qualifications of that person be? Then try bridging those gaps....
That’s exactly what I meant by cross selling - many bank accounts are actually priced at a loss with the hopes of also getting you to sign up for a credit card or car insurance
I don’t know the breakdown, but it’s: banking software, mailed account statements, debit cards, phone support centers, websites, bank branches, compliance, ATM networks, check processing etc.
Obviously some of these costs scale very cheaply, but there is quite a bit that goes into a modern bank account+ some customers are costlier than others (lost of call center calls/lost debit cards for example)
On the banking side, some of it is fairly straight forward - the estimates I’ve seen say it cost ~$100-$500 for a bank to administer a checking account annually. The current net interest margin banks earn on your money in the US is 3.15%.
Which means if a bank charges no fees - and it costs them $315 to administer your account - you need to maintain a $10,000 balance for them to break even.
Once you understand that dynamic - you understand that banks that want to offer low balance free checking - need to either make it up on fees or on cross selling opportunities...
1) is who is actually causing the congestion in NYC - its my understanding that the bulk of the congestion is caused by non-NYC residents
2) a large unaddressed component is parking - the large amount of free parking available, especially to non-residents, creates a distorting subsidy in favor of commuting in many areas.
Singapore Airlines is a premium carrier that that is known for conisitently maintaing a young fleet, the take away is not that Singapore was getting rid of 10yo planes but that they did not buy more as replacements.
except you can't account for debt without accounting for assets.
Japan, Greece, and Italy have the highest portion of debt to GDP (235%, 182%, 133%) except that Japan and Italy are very rich countries, Greece less so...