Archive for December 3rd, 2008
links for 2008-12-03
-
Today, AFT releases a new report, Reversing Course: The Troubled State of Academic Staffing and a Path Forward, which provides further data on higher education's continuing reliance on underpaid contingent faculty and the parallel decline in the number of full-time tenure-track faculty.
“…we may be on the cusp of much more dramatic adjustments in this sector than anything seen so far”
“This sector” is the US auto industry and the warning comes from James Hamilton.
What are the chances of Volvo PV and SAAB Automobile surviving 2010? And what about the long-term effects on Swedish manufacturing? Västra Götaland is likely to be in for a very bumpy ride in the coming years.
Fraudsters
In case any of you don’t follow the news from Denmark, the really big story right now is the revelation of Stein Bagger, the CEO of a company called IT Factory, as a big scale fraudster. As I’m not a lawyer or an economist, commenting the finer details of the case is a little beyond me but Bagger has managed to put Ernest&Young and KPMG in an embarrassing light (there’s nothing like accountancy firms getting whacked, is there?) and Danske Bank looks set to end a bad year with being involved in the case. Add Hells Angels thugs acting as bodyguards, and things begin to look really funny.
Anyway, tech journalist and blogger Dorthe Toft is covering the case.
But what is a little interesting is that these fraud cases seem to appear at regular intervals – the names of Klaus Riskjær and Kurt Thorsen will be familiar to Danish readers. And then there is the political world – as I spend much of my time immersed in the 1900s right now, it is difficult not to think of the biggest scandal in Danish politics (perhaps with the exception of the Tamil refugee case which brought down Poul Schlüter’s government, but that is a different story because there was no money involved here): The revelation that P.A. Alberti, former Justice Minister (!) and leader of a savings-and-loans bank on Sjælland, was a common fraudster. Somehow, the economic details of the Alberti case have something in common with the Bagger case. Alberti, described as a compulsive gambler by commentators, spent his money on bad investments – where did Bagger’s money go?