International Finance and Responsible Financial Management

Late on Wednesday 23 rd October 1929, share prices on the New York Stock Exchange began to plummet. Investors were shocked. Panic ensued as 2.5 million shares were sold within one hour (Bartholomew, 2009). This was the start of what would later be know as The Great Crash. The BBC  documentary, which aired in 2009 and was directed by Joanna Bartholomew, investigates the years leading up to The Great Crash from 1919 up until a few years after The Great Crash in 1929 (Bartholomew, 2009). The documentary tells personal stories, looks at the facts and explains what happened. In this week’s blog, I am going discuss some of the ideas, theories and facts from this documentary whilst also comparing these ideas to some academic articles and looking at the wider impact of The Great Crash. When the New York Stock Exchange crashed, it is estimated that $25 billion worth of personal wealth disappeared due to the fall of the stock market prices (Bartholomew, 2009). Confidence in the econom...

IPOs listing on the Australian Securities Exchange have been struggling recently and subsequently, this has deterred many companies. These companies have cancelled plans to go public on the Australian Securities Exchange and instead opted to remain private for the foreseeable future (The Financial Times, 2019a). Today, I am going to look at the reasons why companies go public, look at the recent case of PropertyGuru (a company which cancelled their plans to go public) and look at possible reasons why companies would choose to cancel their plans to go public and why IPOs might not perform well with particular reference to PropertyGuru and Australia (The Financial Times, 2019a). In order to establish why IPOs are struggling in Australia and why companies are cancelling their plans, we need to first to look at why companies go public in order to determine what they are trying to achieve. According to Brau (2012), there are many reasons why a company may choose to go public. The mai...

Wirecard is a global internet technology provider which helps to process online payments. Established in 1999, Wirecard has benefited from rapid growth over the last 10 years and has been extremely popular with investors since its listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. A lot of this growth can be attributed to their acquisitions of many smaller companies. However, throughout its growth Wirecard has frequently found itself under scrutiny because of allegations of accounting malpractice. There have been reports and allegations of Wirecard conjuring up sales and profits in order to increase shareholder value and increase their share price to attract further investment from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. When accused in the past, Markus Braun, the Chief Executive of Wirecard, played down these reports and allegations and claimed they were merely local difficulties in accounting which did not have any financial impact whatsoever. Yesterday, The Financial Times published documents appar...