Many eager businessmen with a few extra dollars invested in the railroad and real estate businesses, and soon this gave way to massive over speculation. Over the next few years, 89 of the country’s 364 railroads went bankrupt, over 15,000 businesses failed, and unemployment skyrocketed to 14%. Eventually, the economy managed to get itself back on its feet, and by the 1880s the country was back to normal. The government passed a number of reformative protective tariffs which were meant to ensure that nothing like the panic would ever happen again. Unfortunately, it did.
RUNNING HEAD: AMERICAN AIRLINES American Airlines and US Airway’s Merger By Aveon Sims Strayer University BUS 508 Contemporary Business Professor Jean Fonkoua August 24, 2014 Abstract American Airlines has suffered tremendous profit losses over the last few years. The losses have been so great that the company filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The news for the Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection was a shock to many, considering the fact that they had enough money to operate and cover their losses through the following year. The merger indeed was a great decision on behalf of American Airlines. The merger itself was questionable.
Case 37: American International Group (AIG) and the Bonus Fiasco Synopsis: In September 2008 American International Group started to fall under the financial crisis in America. The United states enter in a recession in the beginning of 2008 but it didn’t hit until the end of that year. Then all big companies started falling and going bankrupt. They decide to help stop the collapse of the America economy by presenting a bailout package of companies in need. The government created a 750 billion bailout package for American companies that are going under.
These scandals cost investors billions of dollars when the share prices of affected companies collapsed, and shook the publics’ faith in the security markets. When examining the SOX act you can see that since 2002 many things have changed in the past eight years. Corporate governance is one of many things that have changed; Public companies must now have a totally separate audit committee composed of entirely independent directors and must contain one financial expert. Security fraud now has much more extreme punishments for those who commit or conspire to commit fraud. Since the introduction of SOX auditors of public companies must keep documentation of an audit for seven years, destruction of any documentation or evidence that someone has committed fraud is now punishable by jail time and fine.
Lehman Brothers file bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was bought out by Bank of America, and AIG, an insurance company that sold insurance to investment banks to cover the downturn of investments, was on the brink of financial distress along with so many other failing financial institutions. Paulson, knowing that something had to be done to stop the fall of the economy, along with Bernanke & Geithner basically went to Congress and asked for 700 billion to bail out banks. This was the creation of TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Project). Paulson was asking Congress to approve a program the size of the entire federal budget (which took around 15 months to prepare) in just a couple of week’s time. All of the big banks participated in TARP.
Fly-By-Night International Group Fly-By-Night International Group’s major problems began in Year 13 (technically the end of Year 12). By observing the Cash Flow Statement, we see that even though there’s a huge increase in cash from all of the company’s operations, the largest increase from previous years is Accounts Payable. Notice how AP goes from a mere $54,000 to $5,286,000 in just one year. This should have been a red flag to accountants/managers that signaled trouble. FBN has made significant investments (property, plant and equipment) on account, thereby getting into financial trouble by owing their creditors quite a bit of money.
This act was signed by President Bush after the financial scandals revolving around Enron, Worldcom, amongst others. People want to know, why was there not one single arrest of a high ranked executive following the biggest market crash in history. Sarbanes Oxley was supposed to help prevent this kind of disastrous situation. During the crash, executives from Countrywide mortgage amongst other bankers packaged toxic securities and sold them to their customers knowing that they were practically worthless. These subprime mortgage derivatives were the entire center of the meltdown that resulted in millions of jobs being lost, and millions of lives ruined.
Investigators have determined others were involved in the scheme.The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has also come under fire for not investigating Madoff more thoroughly; questions about his firm had been raised as early as 1999. Madoff's business, in the process of liquidation, was one of the top market makers on Wall Street and in 2008, the sixth-largest. Madoff's personal and business asset freeze created a chain reaction throughout the world's
The stock market crashed rapidly, and took a big hit to the U.S. economy. Many investors put almost all their money into the stock markets. This made the Great Depression. On January 7th, 1953 Herbert Hoover sent a message out to the world and said please take out all of your money before you go broke and start working again. And before you go broke and don’t know what to do with your life.
The Great Depression lasted in America for at least ten years, but it took twenty-seven years to get the economy back above depression levels. To this day, the reasons that lead to the Great Depression are still being debated; although there are a few reasons that historians and ecoomics have agreed on. Such as, the stock market crash that occurred on October 29th of 1929. This happened when a few investors began selling their stocks, because they thought the bull market was going to end soon. The bull market was when prices were rising due to automobiles; steel was selling at a record high but was going down very fast.