Happy holidays from Armando Nuricumbo!

Dear friends,

I hope you are doing well and not too overloaded with year-end work, closing deadlines, and crazy Christmas shopping lists… yet.

Just want to take a minute to wish you health, happiness and joy during this holiday season.

I invite you to look forward to the New Year with lots of optimism and confidence. I am sure next year will be better than this one (it can hardly be any worse, at least for the financial markets and our personal retirement accounts).

We look back to 2008 and we find a lot of things to be thankful for, among others, that we did not stay at a luxury hotel in Mumbai in recent weeks, that we did not work at Lehman Brothers or Bear Sterns, that we did not fly with Mexico’s Interior Minister too often, and that we did not invest our life’s savings in Ford or General Motors.

As we witnessed the credit markets collapse, many of us came face-to-face with the prospect of probably having to work until we are 75 or 80 years old to be able to retire. However, we should not lose sight of the small details that make work at the office such a pleasure: the noisy telephones, the cheap coffee, the boring staff meetings, the occassionally-insane coworker and, of course, the lovely commute to work. Thanks to the economic crisis, we will enjoy all this for a few more years.

We will also remember 2008 as the year of the bail-out. So I am ready to send a letter to Mr. Barack Obama asking for a bail-out of the Accounting industry. I will propose a 700 billion US Dollar rescue package (also called TARP, for Troubled-Accountant Relief Program), aimed at bolstering the personal balance sheet of every accountant in the world. This will translate into a capital injection of, roughly, one million US dollars per accountant. I think it is not a bad idea. :-)

Well, on the other hand, I am not sure if my bail-out proposal would obtain enough votes in the US Congress. Other professions might become jealous and may try to push their very own bail-outs. You see, there is competition everywhere.

In any case, and in all seriousness, I just want to wish you all a very happy holiday season and a terrific 2009!

Take good care and receive best wishes from Mexico City.

Armando Nuricumbo

Ranking of Ethics by Profession

The Gallup Poll's annual ranking of public perceptions of the honesty and ethics of various professions found that accountants rank below funeral directors, but above journalists.

At the top of the list were nurses, whose honesty and ethics are rated as high or very high by 84 percent of Americans. In contrast, the ethics and honesty of accountants are ranked as high or very high by only 38 percent of those polled.

Still, both accountants and funeral directors topped the journalism profession, whose ethics and honesty was rated high or very high by only 25 percent of the survey respondents. But journalists ranked favorably compared to some other professions. Building contractors, bankers, journalists and real estate agents received relatively neutral ratings. The lowest ranked professions were lobbyists, telemarketers and car salesmen.

The top-rated professions, in order, were nurses, followed by pharmacists, high school teachers and medical doctors, with close to two-thirds of respondents rating all those professions highly. Just over half of the survey respondents consider the honesty and ethics of clergy members and police to be either high or very high.