Charity Not Usury was the theme last month when Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus announced the launch of MicroFinance Transparency, a organization that will publicize the interest rates charged by microfinance lenders, which are known to charge the world's poorest of poor interest rates of 90 percent. Yunus argues that anything above 15 percent is usury. "We are trying to get this loan sharking out and bring in a financial system to help get poor people out of poverty," says Yunus, whose work at Grameen Bank to help the poor start businesses earned him the Peace Prize.
Keeping your mouth shut is clearly the best policy to keep your job. Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblower laws supposedly protect the jobs of employees who bring misdeeds to the attention of authorities. But tell that to David Welch, who was dismissed as CFO of Cardinal Bankshares Corp. in 2002 after reporting what he said were earnings overstatements. In 2004 a judge ruled he should be reinstated, but that decision was reversed by the Department of Labor's Administrative Review Board, and this summer a court of appeals upheld that decision, saying Welch failed to explain how the supposed overstatement was against the law.
What's in a name? Or title? It took a couple re-reads to parse Marty Lippert's new densely tangled title at Citi: Chief Information Officer and Corporate Operations and Technology Chief Operations Officer. Lippert's main charge is to streamline operations at the global behemoth. He might start with his own business card.(c) 2008 U.S. Banker and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved.http://www.americanbanker.com/usb.html/ http://www.sourcemedia.com/
