Hi All,

Happy Friday!

I wanted to send a sincere thank you and recommendation to Mitch Langstein. Mitch is the President of Cellular Accessories For Less in Redondo Beach, CA and is a true expert and leader in his field. His firm has outfitted all three of our offices and each one of my recruiter’s phone headset and cell phone accessory needs.

Please contact Cellular Accessories For Less for all your phone accessory needs.

Thnx,

Matt

 1. John Grisham. While this red-hot novelist is well known for being a lawyer prior to his writing career, what is less well known is the fact that his first degree was in Accounting from Mississippi State University. It wasn’t until later that he went to law school and watched a 12-year-old rape victim testify and inspire his first novel.

2. Kenny G. The famous soprano saxophone player graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Washington with a degree in accounting. Although he’d already been playing semi-professionally since high school, he wasn’t sure he’d make in the music world so accounting seemed like a much safer bet.

3. Bob Newhart. This funny man got his first job out of the army working as an accountant in downtown Chicago. He claims to have invented his own system for balancing the petty cash—when the drawer was short, he replaced any missing money from his own pocket. When his boss accused him of not using sound accounting practices, he decided to try something else. Ironically, it was while he was working as an accountant that he began doing his famous telephone routines.

4. Gibby Haynes. It might be hard to believe, but this outrageous lead singer of the hot punk band The Butthole Surfers went to Trinity University and earned his degree in accounting. In fact, he was captain of the basketball team, president of his fraternity, and was voted Accounting Student of the Year. After graduating, he worked for over a year at an accounting firm before starting the band.

5. Tim DuBois. You might not know this name right off the bat, but he’s known as The Singing Accountant. He’s written many a hit country song, including “Love In The First Degree”, “She Got the Goldmine, I Got The Shaft” and the Vince Gill hit “When I Call Your Name.” While currently the head of Arista Records, he taught accounting at Owen University for many years.

6. Walter Diemer. Another name you might not recognize, he worked as an accountant for the Fleer Corporation in the 1920’s. But in his spare time he tinkered with recipes until he invented a little something we know today as Bubble Gum.

7. J. P. Morgan. This famous financier and banker began his early career as an accountant on Wall Street. But after his father died and left him the family business, J.P. Morgan went on to become a banking and corporate pioneer. He began buying distressed businesses, in particular railroads, and merging them—a common business practice still today.

8. Walter L. Morgan. A name well known in the business world, Walter L. Morgan was a CPA—and is considered the father of the mutual fund industry. His fund—The Wellington Fund—became the flagship fund of the Vanguard Group, the second largest mutual fund company in the world. When he died in 2000 at the age of 102, he was the oldest living accountant and CPA.

9. Arthur Blank. Today best known for owning the Atlanta Falcons football team, he started his early career as an accountant. But he worked part-time in a hardware store and along with another employee went on to found Home Depot, the famous chain of hardware stores. This little company made him a billionaire—and his accounting know-how taught him how to spend it.

10. Josiah Wedgewood. Yes, that Wedgewood, the famous potter—he invented what we now call Cost Accounting. Thanks to a lucky combination of an embezzling clerk and a depression, Josiah was forced to come up with a system of tracking bottom line costs and profit. He used this system to determine the costs of his product, and was only one of hundreds of potters to survive the depression.

I wanted to share this moving video.  Please take some time to read the short story and watch the video afterwards.

Thnx - Matt Henry

“A son asked his father, ‘Dad, will you take part in a marathon with me?’ The father who, despite having a heart condition, says  ‘Yes’. They went on to complete the marathon together. Father and son went on to join
other marathons, the father always saying ‘Yes’ to his son’s request of going through the  race together.

One day, the son asked his father, ‘Dad, let’s join the Ironman together.’ To which, his father said ‘Yes’.
For those who don’t know, Ironman is the toughest triathlon ever. The race encompasses three endurance events of a 2.4 mile (3.86 kilometer) ocean swim, followed by a 112 mile (180 .2 kilometer) bike ride, and
ending with a 26.2 mile (42.195 kilometer) marathon along the coast of the Big Island.

Father and son went on to complete the race together.  (The son works at B.U. in the technology department.) ”

By VICKI SALEMI (Click here for original article)

If the enrollment numbers are any indication of its widespread appeal, crunching numbers is cool. According to the American Institute of CPA’s, more than 64,000 students graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting in the 2006-2007 school year, the largest number of accounting graduates in at least 36 years.

“Accounting is a very stable and well-anchored career path,” says Denny Reigle, director of academic and career development of the AICPA, a national professional association of CPAs with more than 350,000 CPA members.

Jody Queen-Hubert, executive director of co-op and career services at Pace University, adds, “Businesses always need accountants; the demand is there. Understanding how an organization manages its finances is critical to understanding how the business operates, and students need to cut their teeth in the trenches of an organization.”

Supply and Demand
“The issue is really this: accounting firms need more accountants than ever directly related to regulation,” says Karen A. Berger, Ph.D. associate dean and director of undergraduate programs at the Lubin School of Business at Pace University.

In fact, the already stable profession increased in demand thanks to the passage of the Sarbanes Oxley Act, also known as Sox. This legislation was passed in 2002 in order to reduce and eliminate abuses in financial reports, accounting and transactions and other activities that have damaged credibility in the field. For instance, CEOs and CFOs must sign statements confirming their review and judgments that the financial statements are accurate.

Recession-Proofing
Although strict regulatory requirements in effect for several years created an increased need for more accountants, the sizzle appeal right now may be attributed to the capricious financial industry.

Marjorie Platt, professor and head of the accounting department at the Northeastern University College of Business Administration, explains, “As Wall Street faces serious layoffs, quantitatively oriented students may decide to focus on accounting rather than finance. We’ve seen our number of majors continue to grow over that past year while the number of finance majors is flat or trending down a bit. Since the two subjects are highly related, it may not take a lot of extra effort or coursework to refocus one’s major.”

Rah-rah Recruitment
Another factor contributing to the appeal of accounting, says Queen-Hubert, is a focus on recruiting students on campus. “Accounting firms recruit heavily from college campuses and have been trying to jazz up their image. They have worked hard at trying to attract younger students with sophomore summer leadership programs, internships for juniors, and job offers before students hit their senior year. The image of a boring bean-counter is no longer what firms are projecting.”

As students meet recruiters on campus and learn more about opportunities they may also learn about the variety of paths to pursue. Reigle notes that once you earn your accounting degree, the sky’s the limit. “Within the accounting discipline, there are an increasing number of specialties such as personal financial planning and risk assessment.” Accounting for an adrenalin rush

Tracy Coenen, forensic accountant and author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud (Wiley, 2008), knows about one such specialty, “Fraud investigation sounds sexy, especially to the younger generation. It’s a bit of a twist on traditional accounting roles, which are often seen as boring. The idea of chasing down the bad guys sounds much more interesting than adding up a column of numbers.”

Forensic accountants typically put together a puzzle by piecing together a situation, reconstructing financial records, and following a trail of evidence. “Who knew I’d get an adrenaline rush from doing accounting work?”

Coenen steps into a client’s business to get a quick education as to how things work there and the suspicions of fraud. Next, she gathers data to help prove or disprove fraud, which is contrasted to the role of a traditional accountant who closes the books each month and reconciles accounts.

Many curriculums like Pace University include a forensic accounting class. Their forensic accounting course is a core requirement as part of the internal audit minor.

Full Speed Ahead
As enrollment reached at an all-time high over the past three decades, it seems the popularity of the accounting profession has no intentions of slowing down among students. Queen-Hubert attributes this to the financial crisis. “In today’s world and with the high price tag of a college degree, parents and students are looking for careers that offer long-term prospects and skills that can be portable amongst industries.” And right now, accounting seems to add up.

Ask Americans how the economy is doing, and their answer is stark: It is not just bad, it is run-for-the-hills terrible. Consumer confidence is at its lowest level in almost 30 years. Only 12 percent of Americans think the economy is in good shape. On the Internet, comparisons to the Great Depression are widespread.

But the reality is different. According to most broad measures of how the economy is doing, it’s not all that grim.

Soft? You betcha. In recession? Quite possibly. And a crisis in the financial markets has rattled nerves for months now. But so far, the economy is holding up better than it did during the last two recessions in 1990 and 2001. Employers haven’t shed as many jobs, the unemployment rate is still relatively low, and gross domestic product has kept rising. Things are nowhere near as bad as they were in the Great Depression, or even during the severe recession of 1982-83. The last time consumers were this miserable, in May 1980, the jobless rate was 7.5 percent and inflation was 14.4 percent. Now those numbers are 5.5 percent and 4.2 percent respectively.

This paradox has created a unique challenge for those guiding the economy, who worry that Americans’ pessimistic views will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Two-thirds of the economy is consumer spending. So if people’s negative outlook leads them to cut their spending, a steeper downturn could happen.

This has left economists trying to figure out why Americans’ perceptions are so much more negative than the data analysts use to measure how things are going.

“We’re saying that we feel a lot worse than we did at the depths of the last recession, when we had had 2 or 3 million job losses, that we feel worse than we did after

9/11,” said William Cheney, chief economist of John Hancock Financial Services. “At some level, that just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

But through the prism of daily experience, it may.

The run-up in gasoline and food prices, for example, appears to affect people’s perception of how they’re doing more than a similar price rise in other goods.

Eric J. Johnson, who studies behavioral economics at Columbia Business School, offers this example: Someone who has to pay an extra $25 to fill up his car is reminded of that cost once a week — or more often if you count the times he is driving down the road and sees the $4 per gallon price in giant numbers on a sign. Technically, he is no worse off than if his rent had increased by $100 a month. But it feels a lot worse.

“Things that you buy more frequently and that have large percentage increases will weigh more in people’s perception of inflation,” Johnson said.

Not only that, but increases in the price of gasoline and food affect almost everyone.

“If the unemployment rate goes from 5 to 7 percent, that affects 2 percent of the population,” said Michael Feroli, an economist at J.P. Morgan Chase. “If gas prices go up, almost 100 percent of the population feels terrible.”

Another possibility: Americans have been unnerved by the financial crisis that was a major cause of this broader economic slowdown. The credit crisis has spilled from one part of the financial markets to another. At times, the wheels of global capitalism have appeared to be at risk of coming off.

Although trouble in the financial sector is not the same as a generalized disorder of the economy, ordinary Americans may not make that distinction.

Another factor is that homes are losing value — and this reduces the wealth of more people than a plummeting stock market like that of 2001. Currently, 68 percent of Americans own their home. In 2001, only 21 percent owned stocks directly.

Moreover, housing values literally hit closer to home. A person’s stock holdings can seem like a paper abstraction. But the value of the four walls that a person calls home is more tangible and can seem more secure even though it may be every bit as volatile.

Wellesley College economist Karl E. Case and two co-authors researched how changes in the value of homes affect what people spend and got a curious result: When home prices are rising, people spend more money. When they are dropping, they don’t spend less money. With stocks and other assets, by contrast, spending both rises and falls with prices.

“People spend more when house prices go up and worry more when prices go down, but don’t actually spend much less,” Case said. “That could explain why consumer spending numbers have been much more robust than you would expect if you look at consumer sentiment.”

Some analysts attribute Americans’ negative views on the economy to media coverage, which tends to play bad news more prominently than good news. There is ample research proving that, say, a drop in the stock market or rise in the unemployment rate gets more extensive news coverage than a move in the reverse direction. (In other news, newspapers tend to cover plane crashes more extensively than a safe landings).

But that has been true during past downturns. There is no obvious reason that it would be more pronounced now than in 2001 or 1990, when consumer confidence did not drop as much as it has recently.

The biggest reason for people’s gloom might be because of what they’re used to. In the 1980s and ’90s, memories of the double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation from the 1970s were still fresh.

“People expected very little out of the economy,” said Richard Curtin, who has administered the University of Michigan’s survey of consumer sentiment for 35 years. “Compared to what their frame of reference was, the performance of the economy was absolutely tremendous.”

But now, coming off two decades of prosperity and low inflation, Americans have come to treat low unemployment and inflation as givens. We have gotten so used to things being good, in other words, that even when conditions become somewhat bad, it feels terrible.

Full Article - Click Here

Matt Henry Group’s new website release has grown leaps and bounds in the past few months.   We look forward to reaching more of the country’s top Accounting and Financial professionals!  We want to thank all of you for visiting the site and look forward to assisting your career search!

Many Thanks,

Matt Henry

I found this article this morning on CNNMoney.com. Good article comparing our current employment market with that of the Great Depression.

Enjoy,
Matt

CNNMoney.com

By Paul R. La Monica, CNNMoney.com editor at large

We can’t win. By we, I mean Big Media.

There were two distinct camps of responses to my column yesterday about the economy. Some people think that the economy isn’t in recession and that journalists are just spreading doom and gloom for various self-serving reasons.

Take your pick among the following: We’re trying to get Obama in the White House. We’re helping our numerous short-seller friends. Scary headlines generate more reader interest and hence, advertising dollars. (That last conspiracy theory is amusing since it’s so untrue.)

But many more readers seemed to think that columnists like me are stooges for not telling the truth about the economy. The government’s statistics are all lies! This is the worst economy I’ve ever seen!

Some are even calling this a Depression, and that’s where I think people are going too far. It’s one thing to casually drop the R-word even though the economy has yet to report even one quarter of declining output. But busting out the D-word is dangerous and misguided.

Let’s look at the history books.

It was a lot worse in the 1930s

The unemployment rate skyrocketed during the Depression, peaking at nearly 25% in 1933. The current unemployment rate is just 5%. And that’s only up from 4.5% a year ago. Contrast that with the far more explosive spike at the beginning of the Great Depression - from about 3% in 1929 to nearly 8.7% in 1930, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Another hallmark of the Depression was deflation, which is obviously not happening today. Wages are rising - albeit by less than many would like.

The main fear is inflation in the cost of food and oil. And there’s reason to believe that inflation pressures may eventually ease since there is a bit of a speculative bubble going on in commodities. Plus, if the Federal Reserve can stabilize the dollar, that could cool off the recent runup in gas and food costs.

Finally, there’s the issue of the stock market. I’ve taken a lot of flack for mentioning the bounceback in stocks since many readers seem to think that what happens on Wall Street does not affect Main Street.

But that’s simply not true. Sooner or later, a healthy stock market will help the average consumer. If big businesses are doing better, they are more likely to hire and pay better wages. A rebounding stock market also means more wealth for investors…and many average Americans still have an important stake in the market thanks to 401(k) plans and other retirement accounts.

Keep in mind that the Depression was kicked into gear, if not necessarily caused, by the stock market crash of October 1929. The massive plunge in the value of an asset, in this case stocks, sent the economy spiraling into its most severe downturn in history.

Economy “dead in the water” but not “plunging”

Recessions result from a slow, gradual slip in the economy. The Depression was a product of a one-time shock that took years to recover from. We simply don’t have that environment today.

“I don’t see many similarities between now and the Great Depression. The economy may be dead in the water but it’s not fair to describe it as plunging. That’s what happened in the Depression. You had a massive contraction,” said Chris Probyn, chief economist with State Street Global Advisors.

And I don’t think that the decline in house prices we’ve seen over the past year is an analogous situation.

Woes in the housing market get a lot of attention. But only a small minority of homeowners are subprime borrowers at risk of foreclosure.

For many people, the decline in housing prices is frustrating, but it is something that can be ridden out. For a lot of people, a house is still a place to live, not a short-term investment to be treated like an ATM machine.

Again, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to paint a rosy picture of the economy or minimize in any way the financial hardship that many Americans are suffering through right now. We just need to put things in perspective.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in the housing market,” Probyn said. “And for an individual, there are other things going on that could be extremely painful. Adjustable rate mortgages getting reset, gas prices at $4 a gallon, a weakening labor market. These are certainly capable of creating difficulties.”

“But the Fed has cut interest rates. Congress has responded aggressively with a fiscal stimulus package,” Probyn added. “One of the problems in the Great Depression was that there was no fiscal policy employed preemptively to stop it.”

So to call the current state of the economy a recession may be a tad premature. But it’s probably close to accurate. To label this a depression, however, is downright irresponsible.

Issue #1 - America’s Money: All this week at noon ET, CNN explains how the weakening economy affects you. Full coverage.

Gas prices have climbed to record levels. Are you feeling the pinch? Tell us how gas prices are affecting you and what you’re doing to cope. Send us your photos and videos, or email us and tell us what you think.

Anne Fisher, a Fortune senior writer, ranks the job boards. I was a bit shocked not to find MattHenryGroup.com

Which of the more than 40,000 online job boards now operating in the U.S. are most likely to help you land the position you want? Check out these survey results.

Each year, Weddle’s (www.weddles.com), a major U.S. publisher of print guides to Internet job hunting, invites the public to visit its Web site and vote for their favorite job boards. The 30 sites with the most votes at the end of the year are declared the winners of the Users’ Choice Awards. It’s not a scientific survey, since those polled are a self-selected sampling and tend to feel strongly about certain sites, both pro and con.

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-Much, much, more…

Thanks again and please keep checking back,

Matt Henry, Founder & President