A stock was priced at $150 per share at the end of 1999. The following table shows dividends per share paid during each year and the price of the stock at the end of the year for the following four years:

year divedends paid during year stock price at end of year

2000 $3.00 $125

2001 $3.00 $150

2002 $3.50 $155

2003 $4.00$200

For each year from 2000 to 2003, calculate the dividend yield, the capital-gains yield, and the total return to the stock. Express your calculations in percentage terms

The Bureau of Meteorology of the Australian Government provided the mean annual rainfall (in millimeters) in Australia 1983–2002 as follows (http://www.bom.gov.au/ climate/change/rain03.txt) 499.2, 555.2, 398.8, 391.9, 453.4, 459.8, 483.7, 417.6, 469.2, 452.4, 499.3, 340.6, 522.8, 469.9, 527.2, 565.5, 584.1, 727.3, 558.6, 338.6 Construct a 99% two-sided confidence interval for the mean annual rainfall. Assume population is approximately normally distributed. Round your answers to 2 decimal places. less-than-or-equal-to mu less-than-or-equal-to

Part of international trade involves countries using their money to purchase other countries currencies, invest in their stock markets, and purchase financial products such as US treasuries (bonds, debt). In August 2002, a private lawsuit was filed in U.S. courts which sought to seize over $1 trillion worth of Saudi Arabian and other Middle Eastern assets in the United States as compensation for terrorist attacks. If the lawsuit would have been successful, how would that have affected future foreign investment in the United States? How would it affect interest rates?

The advent of Corporate Governance & Compliance and business ethics represented a major change in the way that senior leadership manages corporate operations. Since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, and other legislation have been enacted there is a concerted effort to bring transparency, accountability, and ethical behavior back into the market place. Discuss the effects these laws and regulations involving Corporate Governance, Corporate Compliance and business ethics activities on: corporate leadership, stockholders and stakeholders in the corporation and our economy. (Please type answer)

Shauna Coleman is single. She is employed as an architectural designer for Streamline Design (SD). Shauna wanted to determine her taxable income for this year. She correctly calculated her AGI. However, she wasn’t sure how to compute the rest of her taxable income. She provided the following information with hopes that you could use it to determine her taxable income.

Shauna paid $4,680 for medical expenses for care from a broken ankle. Also, Shauna’s boyfriend, Blake, drove Shauna (in her car) a total of 115 miles to the doctor’s office so she could receive care for her broken ankle.

Shauna paid a total of $3,400 in health insurance premiums during the year (not through an exchange). SD did not reimburse any of this expense. Besides the health insurance premiums and the medical expenses for her broken ankle, Shauna had Lasik eye surgery last year and she paid $3,000 for the surgery (she received no insurance reimbursement). She also incurred $450 of other medical expenses for the year.

SD withheld $1,800 of state income tax, $7,495 of Social Security tax, and $14,500 of federal income tax from Shauna’s paychecks throughout the year.

In 2016, Shauna was due a refund of $250 for overpaying her 2015 state taxes. On her 2015 state tax return that she filed in April of 2016, she applied the overpayment towards her 2016 state tax liability. She estimated that her state tax liability for 2016 will be $2,300.

Shauna paid $3,200 of property taxes on her personal residence. She also paid $500 to the developer of her subdivision, because he had to replace the sidewalk in certain areas of the subdivision.

Shauna paid a $200 property tax based on the state’s estimate of the value of her car.

Shauna has a home mortgage loan in the amount of $220,000 that she secured when she purchased the home. The home is worth about $400,000. Shauna paid interest of $12,300 in interest on the loan this year.

Shauna made several charitable contributions throughout the year. She contributed stock in ZYX Corp. to the Red Cross. On the date of the contribution, the FMV of the donated shares was $1,000 and her basis in the shares was $400. Shauna originally bought the ZYX Corp. stock in 2008. Shauna also contributed $300 cash to State University and religious artifacts she has held for several years to her church. The artifacts were valued at $500 and Shauna’s basis in the items was $300. Shauna had every reason to believe the church would keep them on display indefinitely. Shauna also drove 200 miles doing church-related errands for her minister. Finally, Shauna contributed $1,200 of services to her church last year.

Shauna’s car was totaled in a wreck in January. The car was worth $14,000 and her cost basis in the car was $16,000. The car was a complete loss. Shauna received $2,000 in insurance reimbursements for the loss.

Shauna paid $300 for architectural design publications, $100 for continuing education courses to keep her up to date on the latest design technology, and $200 for professional dues to maintain her status in a professional designer’s organization.

Shauna paid $250 in investment advisory fees and another $150 to have her tax return prepared (that is, she paid $150 in 2016 to have her 2015 tax return prepared).

Shauna is involved in horse racing as a hobby. During the year, she won $2,500 in prize money and incurred $10,000 in expenses. She has never had a profitable year with her horse racing activities, so she acknowledges that this is a hobby for federal income tax purposes.

Shauna sustained $2,000 in gambling losses over the year (mostly horse-racing bets) and only had $200 in winnings.

Assuming her AGI is $107,000

a. Determine Shauna’s taxable income and complete Form 1040 and Schedule A assuming her AGI is $107,000

Your assignment is to read the Epidemiology research paper, “Mobile phone use and the risk of acoustic neuroma” (Lönn et al., 2004), for the next class. Te next time class meets, there will be a class discussion led by the instructor. Te questions below will help you prepare for this discussion. Questions 1. Compare the scientifc data given in the press articles with those in the scientif c paper. 2. Do you think cell phone use is hazardous to human health? 3. Based on this information, are you going to avoid using cell phones in the future?

THE PROBLEM

From 1996 through 2002, KPMG received $124 million in tax consulting fees from promoting tax shelters that allowed individuals and corporations to improperly avoid more than $1.4 billion in federal taxes.⁷ E-mail messages obtained and released by the Internal Revenue Service indicated that KPMG officials were aware that the tax shelters were questionable.

As one example, a shelter referred to as bond-linked issue premium structures (BLIPS) created $5 billion in tax losses for investors. Under this shelter, clients would purchase foreign currency from offshore banks with funds borrowed from those same banks only to sell the currency back to the same bank a few months later. These investments were presented to the Internal Revenue Service as seven-year investments.⁸ Other shelters in question carried similar names such as FLIP, OPIS, and SOS.

THE OUTCOME

On August 26, 2005, KPMG admitted to criminal tax fraud and agreed to a payment of $456 million in penalties (an average of $300,000 per KPMG partner); the government agreed to deferred adjudication and, in January 2007, dismissed all criminal charges against the firm. Subsequently, Judge Lewis Kaplan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed indictments against 13 of 16 former KPMG partners and, on December 18, 2008, two of the remaining three partners were convicted on multiple counts of tax evasion. (The remaining partner was acquitted.)⁹

In the midst of this activity, federal prosecutors indicted four current and former partners of Ernst & Young on similar charges. The shelters designed and sold by these partners brought Ernst & Young $120 million in fees. Those familiar with the matter do not expect that the firm itself will face criminal charges in this matter¹⁰; however, on May 8, 2009, four current and former E&Y executives were convicted.

THE ISSUE

KPMG has avoided the fate of Arthur Andersen: dissolution. However, the KPMG case has raised numerous questions about the future of the accounting profession if the small number of international accounting firms should become even smaller. For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission discussed various actions to assist companies in changing auditors if KPMG was indicted, including allowing companies to seek waivers to the stricter independence rules on a case-by-case basis and allowing KPMG to continue to perform audits if it were indicted. An unidentified SEC official indicated that “we have scenarios in place for any eventuality that could come out of this.”¹¹ In addition, prior to the settlement, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, and PricewaterhouseCoopers reportedly requested that their partners not solicit current KPMG clients.¹²

^question:

Provide us a very high-level summary of the Issues in the Case Study (Think who, what, where, and when.)

ACCT 110 ASSIGNMENT FOUR Mercado Company’s inventory transactions in the fiscal year ended December 31, 2002, follow: Jan 1 Beginning inventory…………………. 700 units @ $55/unit Feb 10 Purchase……………………………… 550 units @ $56/unit Mar. 13 Purchase………………………………. 220 units @ $57/unit Aug 21 Purchase……………………………… 270 units @ $58/unit Sept. 5 Purchase…………………………….. 445 units @ $59/unit Mercado company uses a perpetual inventory system. Its inventory had a selling price of $100 per unit, and it entered into the following sales transactions: Feb. 15 Sales………………………………………… 530 units @$100/unit Aug. 10 Sales………………………………………… 235 units @100/unit Required 1. Compute both cost of goods available for sale and the number of units available for sale. 2. Compute the number of units remaining in ending inventory. 3. Compute the cost assigned to ending inventory using (a) FIFO, (b) LIFO, (c) specific identification (note: 700 units from beginning inventory and 65 units from February 13 purchase are sold), and (d) weighted average.

Using Barney, J. (2002). Gaining and Sustaining Competitive Advantage. New Jersey: Prentice Hall as textbook.

What is your opinion concerning this article bases on Mergers and acquisitions, International Strategies.

Facebook, Instagram and the Disciplines of Mergers and Acquisitions

By Robert Teitelman

For years, it’s been a popular pastime to decry the use of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as a colossal, ego-inflating, comp-expanding, waste-of-shareholder-money exercise. Most of these charges are either wildly exaggerated or absurdly simplistic. M&A is a necessary means for companies to grow, particularly in a world so driven by change. Failures are unavoidable — it’s not easy — although measuring what’s exactly a failure or a success given the complexities of large corporations is pretty difficult. But it’s very true that in overheating markets, when currency in the form of shares is highly inflated, lots of lousy, value-destroying deals can get hatched. This is particularly the case in intensely competitive technology industries, where the value creation of a given deal may lie not in the current organization but in a technique, a process, a piece of intellectual property still undergoing gestation: that is, in an opaque future. Thus the truism beloved of Warren Buffett: In M&A, there’s nothing riskier than tech deals.

And then there’s Facebook and Instagram. Facebook is famously paying a cool billion dollars for the two-year-old app-based photo service. Instagram has 13 employees, 30 million users and no revenues. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg decided the social media giant absolutely had to have the startup, and took a year’s worth of cash flow and offered it up, about twice Instagram’s recently closed Series B venture round valuing the company at $500 million. There was no indication of other bidders, though everyone seems convinced that a Google or an Apple was lurking out there ready to make its own pre-emptive bid. In the developing meme about the Instagram deal, Zuckerberg didn’t have a choice: He had to strike. It was eat or be eaten. The sheer uncertainty of the social media landscape can’t tolerate hesitation; it demanded action. In California, venture capitalists, investment bankers and analysts can’t praise the deal highly enough (of course, they all profit from the resulting euphoria). Zuckerberg showed brilliance, they said, by recognizing Instagram’s potential and making the bid — despite the fact that this will further complicate Facebook’s enormous and much-hyped IPO in a month or so.

That alone should cause one to pause along with the profound faith in a young CEO who hasn’t done much dealmaking. The issue here is not that Zuckerberg made a good decision or not. We’ll find out in time whether Instagram is a PayPal or a Skype (both eBay acquisitions: the former, as The New York Times lays out today, a big success, the latter, a big loser) or a Flickr (a Yahoo! bomb) or a Flip (which Cisco, a regular and expert user of M&A, shut down last year). Instagram most closely resembles some of the giant telecom deals from before the bubble burst in 2001, particularly in the size of the deal and the tiny number of employees. Billions of dollars in those deals were written off when the market collapsed. And let us not wallow in AOL-Time Warner again.

No, the issue with these sorts of deals is how any investor can make a rational judgment about a) whether this deal makes strategic sense, or b) whether the price makes any sense at all. The two are related, of course. The view from Silicon Valley seems to be that Facebook had the money so why not spend it. Cutting-edge tech companies need to bet big and make “strategic deals,” that is, deals that can’t be be valued — the feeling is that Zuckerberg is a genius and if he doesn’t know what Facebook needs, then nobody does. Facebook isn’t even public so Zuckerberg can spend his money any way he wants and the reaction of users and the tech community seems to be so positive it can’t go wrong. Well, of course, it can go wrong. Crowds change their minds, and Instagram’s users in the Twittersphere don’t seem to want to be enveloped into Facebook world, though this is about as scientific as a finger in the breeze. Apps (and social media sites) come and go. Instagram has very few employees, all of whom are now loaded with dough. They may stay and develop the product — though no one seems to know how it’ll make money — or they may drift off to start new companies or go into politics or try venture capital. There seems to be few barriers to entry in the app world, and it’s hard to imagine that Instagram, as nifty as it is, is unassailable. Moreover, it’s unclear whether Instagram boasts the kind of network effects that makes PayPal, YouTube, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook so formidable. Remarkably, few seem to be asking.

Again, this could turn out to be a fabulous deal. But this is the kind of deal that gives M&A a bad name. The notion that Zuckerberg can spend “his” money any way he wants is not only wrong — it’s not really his — but about to become a real problem when public investors buy shares. (Substitute, say, Bank of America for Facebook and see how that works.) A billion dollars remains a big number, no matter the market cap. Moreover, it’s pretty clear, as the Financial Times‘ Lex column pointed out Tuesday, that despite Zuckerberg’s statement that this is a one-off deal, what it really suggests — and that the tech crowd confirms in its comments — is that there could well be other Instagrams to be scooped up. Facebook is implicitly admitting that in a burgeoning and remarkably fluid app world, it can’t really go it alone: It needs to buy and buy and buy. Again, that’s not a shock (Google has been a busy buyer) — though Zuckerberg, prepping for public company status, should be more careful with statements about one-offs he may have to take back, and that will hurt him with investors once he goes public.

Will this deal hurt Facebook if it never works out? Not really. It’s just a write-off, which Facebook can shrug off. By then there will be new hot apps, racking up millions of grazing users. But what this deal tells us most clearly is just how risky the Facebook enterprise is. For Zuckerberg to make a pre-emptive bid that’s twice the venture valuation from two weeks ago — and one a month before a public offering — suggests two things: either he’s undisciplined with all that money (were there negotiations or due diligence? what’s the breakdown of cash and shares?) or that the powerful network effects that keep users coming back to Facebook may not be as strong as a relatively obscure two-year-old startup’s app.

Is this a sign of a bubble? I don’t believe that, unless you define bubble in a very narrow sense. Social media is clearly heating up, but for rational reasons: new devices, new services, new apps, an exploding audience. Instagram might look like an old dot-com — lots of users that may come or go, no viable revenue model — but Facebook does not: Like Google, it has found a way to make a lot of money. But you don’t have to have a full-blown bubble to lose your discipline as a buyer. You just need the sudden appearance of a lot of cash. Which is how M&A gets a bad name.