COA Solutions – Business Accounting Software

On 20th May 2009 over 80 Finance Directors came together at the London Chamber of Commerce to meet and discuss practical actions that could help their organisations prosper in a downturn. Interestingly of those surveyed, 41% felt the upturn would come as soon as 2010.

6.30am – Awake after yet another lousy night. I keep waking up shaky and sweaty, remembering standing in the House of Commons in March last year and saying “I am able to report that the British economy will continue to grow through this year and beyond”. It’s really hard – I doze off, hear myself again and take ages to get back to sleep, and again, and again…….

You’ll mostly be cheered to know that it is bleak mid-winter in the private equity world.

Jon Moulton talks about the current state of private equity funding and how it needs to invest for the long term.

COA Solutions ran a successful event last September with Jon Moulton (Managing Partner of Alchemy Partners) advising Financial Directors on how to prosper in a downturn.  We intend to run another event with Jon in May this year, providing more advice and guidance on how to ensure survival in current times and plan for the upturn when it eventually comes.

In this 5 minute clip from YouTube, Jon Moulton gives his latest views (speaking at SuperInvestor 2008) to Josh Learner, Professor of Investment Banking at the Harvard Business School about private equity and the economy.

In a HARDtalk interview broadcast on 2 September, Allan Little talks to private equity financier John Moulton.

I attended a very useful session yesterday run by the Cranfield University School of Management on ‘Marketing and Sales in a recession’. I was doubly interested as COA Solutions is running a similar event in September, only this time aimed at financial executives with a slightly more upbeat title, ‘How to prosper in a downturn’.

Today Base Rate is 5%. So what? LIBOR (the rate Banks are supposed to lend to each other) is 6.0% for one year and a one year Gilt earns 4.6% p.a. Drawings by the Banks under the emergency funding scheme are at 4.6% – so who gets or pays Base Rate?

Recession – it’s now pretty official – the Bank of England has finally started using the dreadful phrase in their Inflation Report.