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Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Encourage men to move toward what we love, not just what's expected of us
Twenty-five years ago, I was running on the proverbial hamster wheel. My dad was an accountant, so I became an accountant. Then I did what everyone expected and landed a job at one of the big five accounting firms. Suits, skyscrapers, long commutes and a dog-eat-dog work environment... It was the quintessential life of a hungry, 20-something New Jersey businessman. A 'finance bro,' as the kids call them these days. Every morning, I was up at 4 a.m. Not because I loved spreadsheets, but because fitness kept me sane. My workout routine gave me clarity in a world where 'movement' otherwise meant ruthlessly climbing the corporate ladder, and competition for promotions was a full-contact sport. After the Enron scandal rocked my company and the smoke from the 9/11 attacks loomed over my long commute home, the cracks in my professional life became hard to ignore. Eventually, I realized I was moving in a direction at odds with the person I wanted to be. Opinion: American men are in crisis and they look up to toxic role models to cope So, I quit. I took a hard pivot, went back to my alma mater, and accepted an internship in campus recreation. Some would say I started over, but I'd say I found my way home. I found passion in working with health-minded students, creating fitness programs and earning advanced degrees in exercise science. I found a way to make a living by helping others live healthier, more active lives. Not from a cubicle, but from a place of purpose. June is Men's Health Month, and you'll hear a lot about cholesterol, PSA tests, and colonoscopies (all important, get them). But, men: There's more to health than lab results, and there's more to life than doing what's expected. Want to preserve your health? Move toward what you love. If you hate the treadmill, don't run on it. Go hike, join a pickup basketball game, try martial arts, chase your kid around the yard. Your body craves movement, but your soul craves purpose. Find something that gives you both. We don't have to burn out in a job that doesn't serve us, or stay stuck in a routine that makes us miserable. Life's too short. Trust me, there's more out there than spreadsheets. Opinion: Why funding for more mental health resources is in Tennessee's best interests I still work out almost every day. My joints complain a little louder now, but I listen to them just like I listened to my gut all those years ago. So this June, sure, get your screenings. But also take inventory with an honest question: Am I heading towards something that fulfills me? Because movement is good, but movement with purpose is even better. Take it from me: You'll know the difference because the latter won't feel like you're on a hamster wheel. Dr. Tim Leszczak is the Chair of the Department of Health and Human Performance at Austin Peay State University, where he oversees the healthcare administration, kinesiology, physical education, public health, and speech-language pathology programs. This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Men's health more is than tests. We should move with purpose. | Opinion
Mint
12-06-2025
- Business
- Mint
The six best films about financial turmoil
Finance is not an obvious subject for dramatists. Interest rates, term sheets, mark-to-market accounting: these are phrases to make the average viewer's eyes glaze over. But when markets plunge—dragging down Main Street along with Wall Street—screenwriters' interest surges. Perhaps viewers can expect some terrific films about the tariff-induced chaos in years to come. Until then, here are the best films made about financial turmoil. The financial crisis of 2007-09 was decidedly serious, but this film—about a group of outsiders and hustlers who bet on the housing bubble bursting, and hence foresaw the crisis—is very funny. (It is adapted from a book of the same name by Michael Lewis.) Various celebrities make cameos to explain financial concepts directly to viewers, while Steve Carell, Christian Bale (pictured below) and a frighteningly tanned and venal Ryan Gosling play three of the men who profit from the crisis. This film is morally complex and gripping; it informs and outrages. This documentary is about financiers who ended up in prison because they thought they were cleverer than everyone else. Greedy and hubristic, Enron's executives used dodgy accounting and aggressive PR tactics to make their energy-trading firm seem more profitable than it was. Investors lost billions and the top executives were convicted of fraud, though the boss, Kenneth Lay, died shortly before his sentencing. Based on an equally enjoyable book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. The Joad family, kicked off their land in Oklahoma during the Great Depression, head west to California to make a better life. The story could easily have been leaden, but Henry Fonda's spiky lead performance as Tom Joad, and the extraordinary cinematography of Gregg Toland (who also filmed 'Citizen Kane'), make it a work of art. John Steinbeck's novel is an American masterpiece; this film is better. A young analyst at an investment bank finds out that the firm is overexposed to risky mortgage-backed securities. This film (pictured below), set in 2008, focuses on the next 24 hours, as the firm sells everything and panic spreads across Wall Street. The ensemble cast is terrific, in particular Paul Bettany as a shark with a well-hidden heart of gold. But watch it for its portrayal of the rituals and culture of high finance: how people dress and defer to superiors, what they talk about outside the office and how they cut each other's throats. Another film about the crisis of 2007-09, this time about the headliners. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Hank Paulson, America's treasury secretary (William Hurt), Ben Bernanke, the chair of the Federal Reserve (Paul Giamatti), and the leaders of the biggest banks gather. They negotiate the Troubled Asset Relief Programme, the government's purchase of bad assets from banks to unfreeze credit. The script is instructive—characters explain things to each other for the viewer's benefit—so you'll finish the film having learned something as well as having been entertained. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort, a smooth-talking huckster who, in real life, made millions in penny-stock scams before going to prison. Martin Scorsese may have intended to make a morality tale about the dangers of filthy lucre, but Belfort and his buddies are clearly having more fun than the honest lawmen who eventually do them in. Jonah Hill offers a grotesque supporting performance aided by a gargantuan set of false teeth.
Forbes
11-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The GOP Wants To Stop A Major Accounting Regulatory Body
Audit Envelope Are You Prepared on white paper an yellow envelope holding by human hands The Trump administration and congressional Republicans seem intent on peeling back some basic regulatory framework introduced by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002. They argue that the burden on companies is too heavy and, by removing the regulations, corporations would be free to invest, expand, and grow the economy. The arguments are understandable but ultimately unconvincing. For large corporations, the amounts they devote to compliance are proportionately trifling, and some of the biggest coherent additions to the regulatory framework happened at the start of what would become share increases in corporate profits. You may have never heard of the PCAOB, or Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. It was part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a whiplash response to the dot-com implosion and the massive financial fraud by such companies as Enron, Adelphia, and WorldCom, that part of it. To give a sense of how bad it was, in 2003, I wrote about the challenges replacement CEOs at such companies faced in trying to stabilize the businesses. One example was Bill Schleyer, an experienced executive and venture capitalist with an MBA from Harvard, who became chair and CEO of Adelphia Communications. He told me about his experience listening to the head of accounting talk about the previous management bookkeeping. 'I thought he was joking,' Schleyer remembered. 'I didn't think that anyone could be that Machiavellian to dream up those accounting practices.' Sarbanes-Oxley was unusual among many regulatory packages as it focused on financial reporting accuracy and executive accountability, according to That includes chief executive officers and chief financial officers signing off on the accuracy of financial statements. (There were many complaints from corporations at the time about the sign-off requirements. It's impossible to read people's minds, but perhaps an aversion of top executives to personal guarantees of produced information might have had something to do with it.) It's not the first time people have tried to eliminate the PCAOB. The first Trump administration had undertaken a 'virtual gutting,' as Forbes contributor Robert G. Eccles wrote in 2021. AccountingInsights notes that the PCAOB has had a positive impact by creating a 'shift towards a more rigorous and structured approach to auditing.' The body has emphasized corporate internal controls and risk factors, 'requiring auditors to adopt a more analytical and skeptical mindset.' The quality of audits is of particular import for the public markets. They help ensure better information and transparency that investors, large and small, use to better their portfolios and strategies. The PCAOB announced in March 2025 the results of inspections in 2024. The aggregate deficiency rate of corporations audited by the six U.S. Global Network Firms dropped eight percentage points, from 34% in 2023 to 26% in 2024. The aggregate rate for the firms audited by the four largest firms dropped six percentage points from 26% in 2023 to 20%. Those Big Four firms audit about 80% of the market capitalization of public companies listed on exchanges. Companies may complain about regulation, but contrary to their criticisms, regulations seem to help improve profits. Below is a graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It shows pre-tax profitability of U.S. corporations at different times. U.S. corporate pre-tax profits The gray bars are periods of recession. Notice how post-recession growth more or less continued a longer pre-recession trend until after the 2001 recession. As the country exited that period, growth in corporate profits shot upward at a quick pace. That started around when the U.S. passed Sarbanes-Oxley into law. Another example is how the country came out of the Global Financial Crisis. The Dodd-Frank Act, which was the regulatory reaction to the excesses and risky behavior that had just passed, was signed into law in 2010. At the same time, there was another sharp boost in corporate profits. There is no way to show that Sarbanes-Oxley or Dodd-Frank was the cause of the profit growth spike after each, but it is clear that, at least, neither seemed to inhibit business. Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the famous physician and humanitarian, was also a musical scholar and organist. In his two-volume biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, he discussed the difference between what he called objective art and subjective art. In music, he said that musicians who redefined forms and rules were subjective artists. By that, he meant they changed things around them to create. Bach, however, was, in Schweitzer's eyes, an objective artist. He followed strict rules that pushed him into himself where he worked around the restrictions to create things that had never been heard before. Perhaps financial regulation is similar. Corporate executives and boards want flexibility to do what they wish, but that doesn't focus innovation and strategy the way needed regulations did. Wiping away what has been successful is a mistake, no matter how many businesspeople want to eradicate constraints on themselves.
Forbes
10-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The GOP Wants To Stop Major A Major Accounting Regulatory Body
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans seem intent on peeling back some basic regulatory framework introduced by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002. They argue that the burden on companies is too heavy and, by removing the regulations, corporations would be free to invest, expand, and grow the economy. The arguments are understandable but ultimately unconvincing. For large corporations, the amounts they devote to compliance are proportionately trifling, and some of the biggest coherent additions to the regulatory framework happened at the start of what would become share increases in corporate profits. You may have never heard of the PCAOB, or Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. It was part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a whiplash response to the dot-com implosion and the massive financial fraud by such companies as Enron, Adelphia, and WorldCom, that was a part. To give a sense of how bad it was, in 2003, I wrote about the challenges replacement CEOs at such companies faced in trying to stabilize the businesses. One example was Bill Schleyer, an experienced executive and venture capitalist with an MBA from Harvard, who became chair and CEO of Adelphia Communications. He told me about his experience listening to the head of accounting talk about the previous management bookkeeping. 'I thought he was joking,' Schleyer remembered. 'I didn't think that anyone could be that Machiavellian to dream up those accounting practices.' Sarbanes-Oxley was unusual among many regulatory packages as it focused on financial reporting accuracy and executive accountability, according to That includes chief executive officers and chief financial officers signing off on the accuracy of financial statements. (There were many complaints from corporations at the time about the sign-off requirements. It's impossible to read people's minds, but perhaps an aversion of top executives to personal guarantees of produced information might have had something to do with it.) It's not the first time people have tried to eliminate the PCAOB. The first Trump administration had undertaken a 'virtual gutting,' as Forbes contributor Robert G. Eccles wrote in 2021. AccountingInsights notes that the PCAOB has had a positive impact by creating a 'shift towards a more rigorous and structured approach to auditing.' The body has emphasized corporate internal controls and risk factors, 'requiring auditors to adopt a more analytical and skeptical mindset.' The quality of audits is of particular import for the public markets. They help ensure better information and transparency that investors, large and small, use to better their portfolios and strategies. The PCAOB announced in March 2025 the results of inspections in 2024. The aggregate deficiency rate of corporations audited by the six U.S. Global Network Firms dropped eight percentage points, from 34% in 2023 to 26% in 2024. The aggregate rate for the firms audited by the four largest firms dropped six percentage points from 26% in 2023 to 20%. Those Big Four firms audit about 80% of the market capitalization of public companies listed on exchanges. Companies may complain about regulation, but contrary to their criticisms, regulations seem to help improve profits. Below is a graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It shows pre-tax profitability of U.S. corporations at different times. U.S. corporate pre-tax profits Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis The gray bars are periods of recession. Notice how post-recession growth more or less continued a longer pre-recession trend until after the 2001 recession. As the country exited that period, growth in corporate profits hot upward at a quick pace. That started around when the U.S. passed Sarbanes-Oxley into law. Another example is how the country came out of the Global Financial Crisis. The Dodd-Frank Act, which was the regulatory reaction to the excesses and risky behavior that had just passed, was signed into law in 2010. At the same time, there was another sharp boost in corporate profits. There is no way to show that Sarbanes-Oxley or Dodd-Frank was the cause of the profit growth spike after each, but it is clear that, at least, neither seemed to inhibit business. Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the famous physician and humanitarian, was also a musical scholar and organist. In his two-volume biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, he discussed the difference between what he called object art and subjective art. In music, he said that musicians who redefined forms and rules were subjective artists. By that, he meant they changed things around them to create. Bach, however, was, in Schweitzer's eyes, an objective artist. He followed strict rules that pushed him into himself where he worked around the restrictions to create things that had never been heard before. Perhaps financial regulation is similar. Corporate executives and boards want flexibility to do what they wish, but that doesn't focus innovation and strategy the way needed regulations did. Wiping away what has been successful is a mistake, no matter how many businesspeople want to eradicate constraints on themselves.
Time of India
06-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
GAIL operates Dabhol LNG terminal in monsoon for the first time, receives LNG ship
India's biggest gas utility GAIL has started operating its 5 million tonnes a year liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal at Dabhol in Maharashtra at full capacity as it received its first ever cargo at the facility during monsoon. The company had to shut the Ratnagiri terminal, popularly known as the Dabhol LNG plant, for four months from May 25 each year to avoid high swell in the sea damaging ships or the jetty while berthing. The firm has now completed building a breakwater to guard the ships during the monsoon season. "GAIL (India) Limited has successfully berthed and discharged its first LNG vessel at the Dabhol LNG terminal following the completion of the landmark breakwater project," the company said in a statement. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like New Container Houses Indonesia (Prices May Surprise You) Container House | Search ads Search Now Undo The vessel, GAIL Bhuwan, was received on June 2, 2025, by GAIL Chairman and Managing Director Sandeep Kumar Gupta and GAIL Director (Marketing) Sanjay Kumar, marking the commencement of uninterrupted, round-the-year operations at the terminal. Gupta had last month stated that the breakwater was complete and the company had applied for an all-weather terminal status with the authorities. The approval has now come, allowing the import of LNG during the monsoon period as well. Live Events "With the commissioning of the breakwater after receipt of all statutory approvals, Dabhol LNG terminal has now been designated an all-weather port which is a critical transformation that ensures safe and reliable LNG operations even during the Southwest monsoon, traditionally a challenging period for marine logistics on India's west coast," the statement said. Natural gas extracted from below ground and the seabed, when cooled to a liquid state at around minus 162 degrees Celsius turns into liquid. Gas in this form, called LNG, can be easily stored and transported in ships. At the receipt terminal, LNG is warmed back into gas, which then is piped to power plants for generating electricity, to fertiliser units for making urea, or sold to city gas for turning into CNG or piped cooking gas. India is aiming to raise the share of natural gas in the country's energy basket to 15 per cent from the current 7 per cent by 2030. With its lower emissions, gas is considered a transition fuel as the country migrates to a net zero scenario by 2070. Dabhol Power Company (DPC) of now a bankrupt US energy giant Enron, was formed for setting up a power plant in Maharashtra. Construction started in 1992, and the first phase of 740 MW (Naphtha based) was commissioned in May 1999. The construction of Phase-II of the power plant and an LNG import terminal started and was due for completion in late 2001. But due to various controversies, the project was stalled. Enron's bankruptcy led to the company abandoning the project altogether. To rescue the asset, the government in 2005 formed a special purpose vehicle (SPV), called Ratnagiri Gas and Power Private Limited (RGPPL), with the participation of GAIL, power producer NTPC , MSEB Holding Company Limited and Indian financial institutions to take over the assets of the erstwhile Dabhol Power Company (DPC) and revive the abandoned project. The project consists of a power block of 1967 MW and LNG Terminal of 5 million tonnes per annum capacity. The RGPPL integrated plant (power block and LNG terminal) was not creating value. And subsequently, the power plant and LNG terminal were separate, with NTPC operating the power plant and GAIL operating the LNG facility. "Strategically located on the Maharashtra coastline, the Dabhol LNG terminal serves as a vital link in India's gas supply network via the Dabhol-Bangalore and Dabhol-Panvel cross-country pipelines," the GAIL statement said. Dabhol is an island breakwater (unlike conventional land-connected structures) showcasing a feat of advanced marine engineering. "This ambitious project, involving extensive collaboration among multiple stakeholders, posed complex technical challenges and required innovative, customised solutions," it said. "The successful commissioning of the breakwater is expected to significantly enhance vessel accessibility and improve capacity utilisation at the terminal, bolstering energy infrastructure and supply reliability." This achievement comes at a crucial time as GAIL looks to expand the terminal's capacity from 5.0 million tonnes per annum to 6.3 million tonnes in the first phase over the next three years. Once expanded, the terminal is expected to handle up to 100 LNG cargoes annually, thereby playing a pivotal role in reinforcing India's energy security, it added.
