BV Girl

As 2009 comes to a close the Dow Jones industrial average stands at 10,428. That is down from 11,497 on December 31, 1999 – yep, ten years and no gain.

In a recent poll of 921 small business owners in the U.S. by management consulting firm George S. May International, 43 percent said they planned to sell their businesses within the next 10 years, 22 percent said they plan to sell later than 10 years, and 35 percent said they don’t plan on ever selling their businesses.

BusinessWeek has declared that the sacred texts of investing need to be rewritten. The so-called equity risk premium, the once-sacrosanct belief that stocks perform better than bonds over time, has been vastly overrated.

$1 billion. Yep, that is the value placed on Twitter today by an investor group providing $100 million in financing. According to the Wall Street Journal this Twitter valuation is quite a lift from the company’s last round of investing earlier this year, in which investors valued the company at around $255 million.

I would venture to say that FAS 157 has been the most controversial statement ever to come out of FASB. This fair value standard has been blamed for the current recession and there is increasing pressure on FASB to change it. So change is coming. The first change is the name – FAS 157 is now Topic 820.