Chapter 4: Q5B (page 474)
A company’s current ratio is 2. If the company uses cash to retire notes payable due within one year, would this transaction increase or decrease the current ratio? What about the asset turnover ratio?
Increase; increase.
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Use the following case in answering Problems 26 – 28:
Institutional Advisors for All Inc., or IAAI, is a consulting firm that primarily advises all types of institutions such as foundations, endowments, pension plans, and insurance companies. IAAI also provides advice to a select group of individual investors with large portfolios. One of the claims the firm makes in its advertising is that IAAI devotes considerable resources to forecasting and determining long-term trends; then it uses commonly accepted investment models to determine how these trends should affect the performance of various investments. The members of the research department
of IAAI recently reached some conclusions concerning some important macroeconomic trends. For instance, they have seen an upward trend in job creation and consumer confidence and predict that this should continue for the next few years. Other domestic leading indicators that the research department at IAAI wishes to consider are industrial production, average weekly hours in manufacturing, S&P 500 stock prices, M2 money supply, and the index of consumer expectations.
In light of the predictions for job creation and consumer confidence, the investment advisers at IAAI want to make recommendations for their clients. They use established theories that relate job creation and consumer confidence to inflation and interest rates and then incorporate the forecast movements in inflation and interest rates into established models for explaining asset prices. Their primary concern is to forecast how the trends in job creation and consumer confidence should affect bond prices and how those trends should affect stock prices.
The members of the research department at IAAI also note that stocks have been trending up in the past year, and this information is factored into the forecasts of the overall economy than they deliver. The researchers consider an upward-trending stock market a positive economic indicator in itself; however, they disagree as to the reason this should be the case.
Which of the domestic series that the IAAI research department listed for use as leading indicators is least appropriate?
a. Industrial production
b. Manufacturing average weekly hours
c. M2 money supply
The SEC due-diligence team is searching for the reason behind Hatfield’s inventory build-up relative to its sales growth. One way to identify a deliberate manipulation of financial results by Hatfield is to search for:
a. A decline in inventory turnover.
b. Receivables that are growing faster than sales.
c. A delay in the recognition of expenses.
For each pair of firms, choose the one that you think would be more
sensitive to the business cycle.
a. General Autos or General Pharmaceuticals
b. Friendly Airlines or Happy Cinemas
What is typically true of corporate dividend payout rates in the early stages of an industry life cycle? Why does this make sense?
Recently, Galaxy Corporation lowered its allowance for doubtful accounts by reducing bad debt expense from 2% of sales to 1% of sales. Ignoring taxes, what are the immediate effects on (a) , operating income and (b) operating cash flow?
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