While Ben Bernanke may have declared the recession technically over, as this article in MarketWatch points out, most finance execs aren’t buying it. Just 11 percent of the nearly 1,000 CFOs, treasurers and the like responding to a survey conducted by the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) said that the U.S. is out of the woods.

That’s not all. Only one in five foresees an end to the doldrums by the New Year, while more than two-thirds predict that the recession will drag on into 2010.

Not surprisingly, only 14 percent say that their firms will add employees over the next six months; 22 percent foresee further cuts in head count. The news isn’t much better when it comes to capital spending: only one-fifth anticipate increases here. more

A little work up front can save time and money down the road.

While the value of goods and services imported to the U.S. fell from $217 billion in April 2008 to $150.3 billion in April 2009 according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, corporate finance managers can’t assume that their firms are sitting pretty when it comes to complying with the myriad regulations that govern import transactions. After all, many companies are running on barebones staff, which can mean that pesky details, like import regs, get pushed to the back burner. “Companies are focused on what they absolutely have to do to get goods into the country, versus looking at overall compliance,” says Susan Pomerantz, vice president of global trade management consulting with JPMorgan.

That could prove troublesome down the road, Pomerantz adds. If U.S. Customs and Border Protection later determines that a company hasn’t fulfilled its obligation to document and manage the transaction, the agency could take any of several unwanted actions, she says. These include yanking the firm’s trade privileges, boosting the frequency of audits and inspections, or zapping the firm with penalties. None are any fun. more

. . . it’s not clear that the positive trend is sustainable.

For the quarter ended in June 2009, free cash flow at approximately 3,500 publicly held North American companies stood at 4.76 percent of revenue, up from 4.60 percent in March. That’s according to an analysis by Charles Mulford, professor of accounting and director of the Georgia Tech Financial Analysis Lab, Atlanta. Mulford has been measuring free cash flow, or the percent of revenue that’s available to shareholders, for several quarters. His analysis covers companies with market caps of at least $50 million, other than those in the financial sector.

Free cash flow for this group has risen steadily since December 2008, when it had sunk to 4.12 percent of revenue. “We’ve seen continuous improvement in companies’ ability to generate free cash flow,” Mulford says. more

In its efforts to prevent a recurrence of the upheaval that occurred in the money market fund sector last September, the Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a number of changes to the regulations governing these funds, as noted in this SEC paper released in June.

An earlier blog post covered several of the proposals outlined by the SEC, such as a cap on the weighted average life maturity of the securities in the fund, along with the idea of allowing a fund to suspend redemptions if the fund’s value was likely to fall below $1 per share.

One proposal, however, is likely to impact corporate treasurers more than I initially thought. That’s the proposal to limit money market funds to holding just the highest-rated, or A1/P1, securities. Under current law, most money market funds can hold up to 5 percent of fund assets in A2/P2 securities. more

With a new commissioner, Gary Gensler, now at the helm of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the agency likely will head in a different direction than it has in the past. “Gensler clearly is in the Obama camp and very activist from the point-of-view of wanting to re-regulate,” says Michael Gorham, a professor and director of the Stuart Center for Financial Markets at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Gorham also was the CFTC’s director of market oversight for several years starting in mid-2002. more