What’s on International Treasurer’s radar screen.
With The NeuGroup peer group fall meeting season over, there was a host topics that came out of the week’s editorial meeting. These included:
World Class projects update
The survey of The NeuGroup’s Global Cash and Banking Group (GCBG) identifying best practices in corporate cash management is wrapping up. A few of the takeaways (see related story here) include organization, i.e., who owns what core function and maintaining influence over those that can impact financial results; centralization and striking a balance between HQ centralization vs. regional and local coordination and execution as well as advancing more technology use.
Also on tap for further exploration will be World-Class FX self assessments. Earlier in the year, the NeuGroup’s FX Managers’ Peer Group members asked each other to assess how well they thought they stacked up to the principles identified in their world-class project. In other words, if a world-class Exposure Identification and Monitoring Process will provide a strong and effective incentive for the forecast owners to be accurate, how did members rate themselves on a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1 being very far from world class and 5 being world class).
Impact of QE2
The US Federal Reserve’s plan to auction $600bn in Treasury securities over the next eight months has upset the rest of the world, but what are some of the impacts – short-term and long – on corporate treasury (see related story here)? So far it’s deemed both good and bad for treasury. But other aspects of the plan will have an impact.
HIA 2.0
With a Republican sweep of the House along with the gain in several Senate seats, the subject of lowering the tax rate to encourage US corporations to bring home some cash is starting to heat up again. There has been talk that Silicon Valley tech companies – many of whom have billions offshore – have been approached to see what compromises they’d be willing to accept in return for some form of repatriation tax holiday. Meanwhile, several companies have been talking to Washington about proposals of their own.
AFP survey results
The Association of Financial Professionals has released its 2010 benchmarking survey. International Treasurer will review both the AFP results as well as those of the GCBG World Class principles survey to see how the two compare.
“Environmental commodities” and green investments
A subject of interest at the AFP conference that just wrapped up in San Antonio this week was on environmental commodities. This is yet another twist on treating as tradable commodities carbon offsets, renewable energy certificates as well as energy efficiency. Such efforts to promote green market forces are being complemented by interest on the part of cash-rich power end-users to consider investing in alternative energy, or green investments to pick up a bit of yield while hedging somewhat their electricity price risk with long-term supply contracts that are often made possible by their investment positions. International Treasurer will explore both initiatives to see how they might impact on corporate treasurers.