What’s on International Treasurers’ radar.
Discussion this week started with a recap of the NeuGroup’s Latin American Treasury Managers’ post-mortem discussion on the Venezuelan bond offering. We will be reporting on some of the takeaways in our upcoming issue, but for MNCs the allocations were almost totally weighted towards those importing vital necessities into the country and those that sought too much of the offering still lost out, as is typical, even if the definition of too much seemed to have gone up a bit.
From there the big question driving treasury, and much more, is the state of the economic recovery. Regardless of all the chatter about which direction the economy moves, most companies are still doing the proper planning. Specifically, what impact will volatalie signs of economic improvement have on financial markets, and those for commodities and currencies in particular? This question along with how best to reshape and restaff the treasury function in response is top of mind for treasurers in the NeuGroup’s T30, who are finalizing their agenda for their fall meeting
While waiting for that demand to perk up many treasurers are wondering more staff will be needed in the coming months? Or will process change and technology improvements continue to allow treasurers to DMWL – the dread “do more with less” with which practitioners are too familiar.
The state of play in deleveraging vs. deleveraging is also on their minds, as the economic recovery continues to teeter, including the right thing to do with cash that has been allowed to pile up on their balance sheet: buy, buy-back or keep cash on the sidelines? Treasurers are seeing their peers do a bit of it all.
The end of an era
Robert Herz last recently announced he would step down as the head of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) at the end of September. What impact will this have on accounting rules going forward as well as the much ballyhooed but slow moving convergence with its international cousin, IASB?