Pondering

Standard Chartered Bank admits laundering $250B, will pay $340M fine. By the way, looks like a repeat violation.

Standard Chartered signed a consent decree with the New York Department of Financial Services on September 21.  The signed agreement, which you can read here, acknowledges about $250 billion of wires in approximately 59,000 transactions were “repaired” with the intent of hiding whose money was involved. By way, there is a previous enforcement action that didn’t detect any problem, which tells me this is a repeat violation.

Current settlement

The Wall Street Journal report StanChart Formalizes Settlement in Iran Case describes the settlement. The line that caught my interest is:

Standard Chartered, which contested the allegations when they were filed last month, acknowledged misconduct tied to 59,000 transactions totaling about $250 billion.

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Jim Ulvog

We need a new way to evaluate charities – Part 1

That is a major issue for Mr. Dan Pallotta. He suggests the excessive focus we as a society have on rating the effectiveness of NPOs by “overhead” ratios and our intolerance for NPOs paying market salaries are restricting organizations from getting the money to have the full impact they could have.

I read two articles by Mr. Pallotta on the same day. Please check them out.

Why Can’t We Sell Charity Like We Sell Perfume, from the Wall Street Journal.

Charities Must Battle Public Misconceptions About Overhead Costs, from the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

In the WSJ article he says:

We have two separate rule books: one for charity and one for the rest of the economic world. The result is discrimination against charities in five critical areas.

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Jim Ulvog

How many stern warnings does a bank get before it winds up in real trouble?

Barclays settled with US regulators over its role in the fiasco about manipulating Libor. I’ve mentioned that mess in my other blog. As a part of that settlement, they signed a deferred prosecution agreement.

They were already on probation for an earlier deferred prosecution agreement for money laundering.

A Wall Street Journal article, Corporate Probation: Punishing or Punting? by Michael Rothfeld, gives the details (article behind paywall).

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Jim Ulvog

2nd Blogiversary

August 29th marked the 2 year blogiversary of this little site (Nonprofit Update) to talk about nonprofit issues. I split off posts of interest to CPAs to another blog (Attestation Update) on October 14, 2010 and started Outrun Change on October 3, 2011. That site ponders the radical change around us and how we can stay ahead of it.

Thanks so much to those who have stopped by. I hope it has been a blessing to you.  In case you can’t tell, I’ve been having a blast.

Most visitors and page views are coming in from internet search engines. That is really cool.

One of the best things in the last year is a growing number of people interested enough is my musings to follow by e-mail or Google RSS feed.  Thanks very much for stopping by.

For the second year, I will report some stats for my sites.  Here’s some stuff for those interested in such things. I will adjust this time around to an August 31 cutoff instead of the 29th.  I’ll list stats for this year with the prior year in parentheses.

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Jim Ulvog

2 more unintended consequences

One of the big ironies in life is called unintended consequences – You try to do something good or helpful to fix a problem and there is some completely unexpected problem caused by the good & helpful thing.

Two examples from today’s reading. First, making forest fires worse. Second, getting sick from reusable grocery bags. My previous examples were from the international aid world.

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Jim Ulvog

Money laundering settlements. Are fines from the U.S. just a cost of doing business?

My previous post described the settlement by Standard Chartered bank with the New York state Department of Financial Services for $340 million over allegations of money-laundering.

I also listed six other settlements I found in two Wall Street Journal articles here and here.

  • $567M – 12-09 – Lloyds TSB Bank
  • $536M – 12-09 – Credit Suise
  • $500M – 5-10 – Royal Bank of Scotland
  • $298M – 8-10 – Barclays
  • $619M – 6-12 – ING Bank
  • $340M – 8-12 – Standard Chartered – settlement with New York regulators
  • $700M announced reserve for settlement – HSBC Holdings PLC
  • $???M – Standard Chartered will have a separate settlement with US authorities

What is going on?

The cases leave me scratching my head wondering what’s going on in the big banks.

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Jim Ulvog

Standard Chartered settles money laundering case. The latest in a string of settlements.

The British bank has agreed to a $340 million penalty to settle allegations from New York state regulators that the bank was laundering money for their Iranian customers. The Wall Street Journal describes a settlement in their article Bank Settles Iran Money Case. This is one in a long string of settlements for money-laundering.

The accusation by the New York Department of Financial Services is that over the course of a decade the bank hid Iranian involvement for 60,000 wires totaling $250 billion.  The basic concept is the wires were withdrawn after initial submission and the identifying information removed from the transaction, then the instructions were resubmitted.

I touched on this in an earlier post.

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Jim Ulvog

Is cheating rampant in our culture?

Rich Karlgaard from Forbes thinks so. In his article, Recovery Drag: The Age of Cheats, he surveys the moral rot in sports, quickly touches on the rot in business and our political system and concludes we are in an Age of Cheats.

Is there something wrong in the sports world? Consider this:

Sosa was a former 165-pound rookie who weighed 220 pounds the year he banged out 66 homers, chasing McGwire’s 70.

A 55 pound bulk up?

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Jim Ulvog

Try a new thing three times before you decide whether you like it

Try a thing you haven’t done three times.

Once, to get over the fear of doing it.

Twice, to learn how to do it.

And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not. 

Multiple internet sites attribute this to Virgil Thomson, American composer.

I’ve been pondering that quote over the last week or so. Lots of wisdom there. Doesn’t apply to everything, but it has lots of value for many situations, especially when dealing with radical change.

(cross-post from my other blog, Outrun Change.)

Jim Ulvog

Tweets I wish I’d sent from the 2012 Chick-FIl-A LeaderCast

  • #JohnMaxwell   People without passion in life are already dead – – they just haven’t made it official
  • #AndyStanley    Questions to clarify your thinking – #1 what would my replacement do?
  • #AndyStanley    Questions to clarify your thinking – #2 What would a *great* leader do?
  • #AndyStanley    Questions to clarify your thinking – #3 What story do I want to tell? (legacy)
  • #JohnMaxwell   Bet on yourself – Your best investment is you
  • #AndyStanley I’m not the smartest person around here. I’m just the leader.
  • #TimTebow   don’t worry about what you can’t control – critics and what they say
  • #TimTebow   focus on what you can control – your attitude and performance

I had a great time watching the LeaderCast.  After going through my notes a couple of times, wish I’d sent the above tweets.  I have a few more thoughts here and here.

Jim Ulvog

Nothing like recovering from a computer failure to show how much change is going on

(cross-posted from my other blog, Outrun Change.)

One of the main computers I use in my business failed Sunday night. For various reasons, I’ve held off on making several major upgrades, like jumping to Windows 7 and Office 2010.

So I shopped for new computer, have it in place, and as of yesterday have almost all the software running. Still have a couple of things to bring online, but they can wait for the moment.

Making the jump to a host of new technology tools all at once highlights the volume of change surrounding us.

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Jim Ulvog

Waste

I don’t do rants on my blog.  Not my style.  Besides, who wants to hear that?

I’ve made a rare exception at my other blog, Outrun Change.  My post Waste shares the irritation I feel when I see waste, whether caused by unintended consequences in foreign aid, substance abuse, or lives wasted by failed education.

My feeble conclusion?  It is time to move beyond failed solutions that have failed for decades.  How about we find something that ends the waste of lives?

I mention my rant because I think many readers of this blog are motivated by wanting to end wasted lives.  At a deep level, I think that is the drive many of us feel when we want to change the world.

 

Jim Ulvog

A short explanation of why feel good aid might make things worse

In The Broken “Buy-One, Give-One” Model: 3 Ways to Save Toms Shoes author Cheryl Davenport provides a concise description of the underlying problem with the TOMS model.

There’s a huge number of articles out there describing the conceptual issues.  Ms. Davenport has a great recap:

First, the Toms buy-one-give-one model does not actually solve a social problem. Rather, the charitable act of donating a free pair of shoes serves as little more than a short-term fix in a system in need of long-term, multi-faceted economic development, health, sanitation, and education solutions.

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Jim Ulvog

Moving up the value chain – data, information, knowledge, wisdom

What’s the difference between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom?

John Bredehoft pointed me to an academic definition from Sujatha Das, in her post Difference between Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom.

Value increases dramatically with each step up. Knowledge is far more valuable that just information. Wisdom far surpasses knowledge in value.

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Jim Ulvog