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As if being named finance chief of General Motors Corp. before the age of 40 was not enough of a singular accomplishment, former GM CFO Ray Young earlier this year completed that rarest of all senior management career acts - he accepted a demotion.

As the vice president of GM international operations, Young found himself based in Shanghai, China – half a world away from Chris Liddell, the former Microsoft CFO who replaced him as GM’s finance chief. more

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Back in early 2009, Harry Wilson, an expert in corporate restructurings, realized his goal of performing public service when he was selected to be a member of the Obama Administration’s auto industry restructuring team. In the coming months, Wilson would become an arch inquisitor of GM’s finance team.

In fact, at Wilson’s very first meeting at GM, he allegedly turned to the company’s then-CFO Ray Young and asked how much cash the company needed to operate day-to-day. According to an account of the encounter found in the pages of Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), the CFO replied, “Eleven billion.”

To which Wilson responded, “That seems astronomically high. How did you get to that number?” more

The movement of tens of millions of people from rural areas into cities is today a global phenomenon, one that pundits widely agree will have a significant impact on the world’s workers and consumers in the years ahead.

Just what it means for American consumers – the world’s economic wild card – remains anyone’s guess. By now, it would seem we are all pseudo economists – thanks to a financial crisis that besides economic ruin has left a plethora of maxims in its wake. Here’s one: Spending returns only after jobs return.

For Americans these are sobering times, and the rise of new consumer populations in other parts of the world should give us pause. more

In my last post, I described how the “banking lobby” was noisily opposing a fair-value accounting proposal by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) that advances the idea that banks use market prices to value loans to both corporations and consumers. I also suggested that the groundswell of opposition to the proposal likely contributed to the recent departure of FASB Chairman Robert Herz.

While I was reading through the comment letters on the controversial proposal, I couldn’t help but notice that a considerable number of the letters were sent by small regional banks, a.k.a. Main Street banks – lending institutions that count small businesses and consumers among their best customers.

One comment letter I came across begins:

To Whom It May Concern:

I am Mark Williamson, CEO of a $125,000,000 community bank in Snyder, TX. Snyder is a very rural city and our customer base is composed of farmers, oil field workers, and other blue-collar workers. In addition to my duties as CEO, I also function as the bank’s chief credit officer. Read Williamson letter. more