Peter Thiel Is A Trump Supporter, Convention Speaker But Why?
By Francine • Jul 25th, 2016Peter Thiel gave a closing night speech, and endorsement of Donald Trump, at the Republican convention last week.
Archive for the ‘Food for Thought’ Category
Update: Writing About Equity Market Structure at MarketWatch
By Francine • Feb 16th, 2016One area I am covering now at MarketWatch is market structure, specifically the equity markets. Reforming equity markets is a big ongoing issue, especially after the May 2010 flash crash. Here’s a summary of the articles, updated for a new one on February 3, I’ve written since May on the subject and some background on some of the many controversies.
Failure to Earn: What Scattershot Enforcement of Sarbanes-Oxley Clawbacks Tells Us About Paybacks Under Dodd-Frank
By Francine • Oct 20th, 2015I wrote at MarketWatch about the SEC’s proposed Dodd-Frank clawback rule.
New Orleans January 2008: "He leadeth me beside still waters…"
By Francine • Aug 29th, 2015I went to New Orleans in January 2008 for a few weeks to work with Habitat for Humanity building new houses. Here’s a slide show of what I saw three years after Katrina in the 9th Ward New Orleans LA. Just went down on my own and joined a random group. There was still a […]
SEC News at MarketWatch
By Francine • Jul 19th, 2015On July 21 Dodd-Frank will be five years old. If I hadn’t been through the same thing with Sarbanes-Oxley now twice, I’d be more excited. But the partisan rancor on this law, especially at the SEC, is even worse.
Looking Into SEC’s Equity Markets Structure Committee at MarketWatch
By Francine • Jul 5th, 2015My piece on the SEC’s new Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee, spanning several online pages, is now out at MarketWatch.
Deloitte US First Female CEO; There’s More We Don’t Know
By Francine • Mar 2nd, 2015Wouldn’t it be nice if investors and other interested parties could look up new Deloitte US CEO Cathy Engelbert in a public and easily accessible registry and find out about all the audit clients where she has been a lead partner or a Quality Control partner? Has she ever been named in a lawsuit or been sanctioned? Let’s hope not.
Journalists’ Obligations In The Shareholder Value Maximization Debate
By Francine • Jan 14th, 2015I wrote about two journalists who penned sympathetic stories about shareholders and other stakeholders who can’t get their voices heard but who, in service to shorter and simpler narratives, paid short shrift to the active and contentious debate about shareholder primacy and shareholder value maximization.
Auditors Can Be Whistleblowers: A Guest Post On Recent Developments In Whistleblower Case Law
By Francine • Jan 5th, 2015Several recent developments regarding auditor whistleblowers should be of interest to internal and external auditors and compliance professionals, whether they work for a public company or a professional services provider.
You’ll Never Eat Lunch… A Review of “This Town” By Mark Leibovich
By Francine • Aug 24th, 2014Mark Leibovich’s “This Town” is billed in the flap copy of the dust jacket as “a blistering, stunning —and often hysterically funny— examination of our ruling class’s incestuous ‘media industrial complex.’” Does anyone still eat lunch with him? In the new 24-7 news cycle, the half-life of any criticism of DC culture is about three days.
Francine McKenna (@retheauditors) is the Transparency Reporter at MarketWatch.com, a Dow Jones publication, where her work is also featured frequently in the Wall Street Journal. McKenna had more than twenty-five years of experience in consulting and professional services including tenure at two Big 4 firms, both in the US and abroad before becoming a journalist. Look for her prior columns, 