Stories I’d like to see

1. Printing drachmas?

What actually will happen if Greece leaves the euro zone and goes back to its own currency? How would that work? Is there a printing press somewhere busily churning out drachmas just in case? Or did they keep the old ones in storage? How will Greeks get new drachmas? Will they exchange their euros for them? How will the exchange rates be determined? How will all the software for cash registers and credit card and e-commerce transactions be reprogrammed?

2. Searching for Jimmy Hoffa’s assassins:

We’re approaching, in two months, the 37th anniversary of the disappearance of Teamsters Union leader Jimmy Hoffa. I wrote a book about the union three years after his disappearance that pinpointed how he was murdered and who did it. Although the FBI spelled out in an internal memo and in various affidavits seeking search warrants pretty much the same scenario and suspects that I reported, the feds were never able to make a case because no one would talk and Hoffa’s body was never found. (It was probably incinerated in a mob-connected sanitation plant near Detroit.)

However, the case is still officially open. In fact, I’m told there is at least one FBI agent still assigned to it. With almost all of the people involved in taking out Hoffa now dead, what does that agent do all day? A great story commemorating the anniversary would not only spend a few days with that agent but also check in on Hoffa’s son, James, who is now the Teamsters president. Portrayed in my book as a completely clean lawyer who did some union-related legal work, James took over his father’s old job in 1999. When I spent time with him in the years just after his father’s murder he was seethingly bitter about how the mob element that controlled the union in partnership with his father had turned on the elder Hoffa. But he was also understandably afraid to say much about it publicly. What’s he got to say all these years later?

3. Are gift cards the new currency?

Last month’s mammoth takedown in the New York Times of Wal-Mart’s alleged cover-up of allegations of corporate bribery in Mexico reported that one alleged method of spreading payments to local Mexican officials was by giving them Wal-Mart gift cards. That got me wondering how that kind of accounting was handled.

It’s one thing to disguise a bribe by recording it as a fee paid to a lawyer or other middleman, who passes it on to the corrupt official. But how would depleting the gift card inventory that way be explained? Or are controls on gift cards so lax that this can be done routinely? What about gift cards at other large retailers? Do they hand them out to “friends” this way? Again, this seems like an easier way to dispense illicit corporate funds than cutting a check or creating a cash stash.

And while we’re on the subject of gift cards and accounting, with the cards now proliferating so widely I’d love to see a story on how companies account for them when it comes to reporting profit and loss. If I give a corporation $50, the company counts that revenue against the cost of what I just bought for that $50 But if I buy a gift card, it has no costs to count it against, which should mean that until someone redeems my gift card by taking $50 worth of merchandise, under basic accounting theory the company should not record the revenue because it hasn’t earned it by supplying any merchandise. Is that the way it works uniformly? And if so, what happens if my giftee never redeems the card or never redeems it fully? When can the money paid for unredeemed cards be counted as revenue?

How much of a profit center have such unredeemed gift cards become? And what are the regulations governing how long someone has to redeem the cards?

4. If JPMorgan lost, who won?

Aside from this article in Reuters, which pieced together part of the mystery, as far as I can tell, with all that’s been reported about JPMorgan’s trading loss of more than $2 billion, there’s one part of the story that’s not been fully covered: If one party loses billions in a trade, another party – or, as seems to be the case here, many parties have to have made those billions.

So far, the most public reference to that side of the story I’ve seen is an offhand comment made by a politician who’s always looking at things from a business angle. According to the Wall Street Journal, when he was asked last week about the JPMorgan fiasco, Mitt Romney told a radio interviewer: “That’s the way … America works. Some people experienced a loss in this case because of a bad decision. By the way, there was someone who made a gain…” To be sure, if the Reuters piece is correct, this seems to be the way the world, not America, works: Those on the other side of the trade so far seem to include London-based hedge funds.

So who are the lucky winners? Does JPMorgan even know? What about the fact that the Reuters piece notes that at least two of the winners used to be traders at JPMorgan? And what more can we find out about the drama unfolding right now as these traders decide whether to push for more winnings against JPMorgan or take their money off the table? How does this poker game work?

PHOTO: A man makes his way past a replica of a one drachma coin outside the Athens Town Hall May 21, 2012.  REUTERS/Yorgos Karahalis

1. The Dodd-Frank effect: Good, bad or both?

Although the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the mega-agency created by the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory bill, has only been in existence for about six months, all of the Republican presidential candidates and GOP congressional leaders have slammed the agency and called for its abolition. Their central charge is that the regulations it has already promulgated are strangling the financial system and disabling banks from making the kinds of loans to small businesses and potential homeowners that would reignite the economy.

For example, in the Jan. 23 Republican presidential debate Mitt Romney said he had spoken to a banker in New York who said he had “hundreds of lawyers” tied up trying to navigate the new regulations.

Some sophisticated financial reporter, or team of reporters, needs to dig into that – with specifics. What exactly is the new agency requiring that is gumming up the works? What new rules are drawing the most persuasive complaints? How burdensome are they? How many lawyers and others are actually involved who were not working on the same types of regulations before? What abuses are the new rules intended to prevent? Which ones, if any, really do seem indefensible and which ones, if any, seem smartly crafted and worth the extra burden?

The best way to do a story like this is to go to one big bank and ask for full, on-the-record access to those working in the trenches on compliance. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, who has been a lead complainer, would be my first candidate; ask him to show us the trauma. Then enlist a community bank in the same show-and-tell. Dig in to every single detail, with no preconceptions. Either way, it’s a great story about how what happens in Washington affects Wall Street and Main Street.

2. Private equity and blue-collar workers:

The controversy over Bain Capital and Mitt Romney’s defense against charges that Bain is guilty of “vulture capitalism” call for a broader story about one of the most interesting ironies in American finance and business: As Romney has pointed out, private equity funds draw much of their investment dollars from – and make much of their money for – pension funds. And among the biggest of these pension funds are those whose beneficiaries are the most liberal-leaning, 99-percenter unions, particularly those representing teachers and other public employees. The same is true of venture capital funds, which, because they focus more on startups than private equity funds do, are perhaps more likely to fund businesses that threaten to disrupt an industrial status quo that unions might want to preserve.

I know of at least one venture fund that is so sensitive to its union pension fund investors that it requires the companies it invests in to pledge not to oppose efforts by unions to organize the companies’ workers. But most operate as conventional, profit-seeking businesses. So how about a story that focuses, with specifics, on private equity or venture funds whose investors are progressive unions but whose investments run counter to the values and positions of those unions? For example, suppose a fund has major teachers’ union pension funds but supports high-tech distance learning companies — which the teachers’ unions adamantly oppose because they fear technology or distance learning will lessen the need for teachers in the classroom. Or what about a fund backed by blue-collar union pension funds that has investments in outsourcing services or in FedEx, Wal-Mart or other, smaller companies that have opposed unionization?

3. Newt’s taxes, chapter two:

As the Associated Press recently reported, it’s not clear that all of the issues related to Newt Gingrich’s income taxes were resolved with his release of his and Callista Gingrich’s personal joint return on Jan. 20, which showed that they paid taxes of 31.5 percent on $3.1 million in income. That’s because the return reveals that most of their income came from his corporation, Gingrich Holdings Inc — which apparently took in the money from his various books, documentaries, and consulting, and most of his speeches. His company is a kind of personal holding corporation with “subchapter S” status (making it for tax purposes almost one and the same with the individuals who operate it), and that is why the income from it flows directly to Gingrich and shows up as one big number on line 17 on the IRS 1040 personal tax return. Because only Newt and Callista Gingrich’s personal return was disclosed, we only know the amount in profit, after the personal holding company’s “expenses,” that flowed to them personally; what we don’t know is what kinds of expenses Gingrich Holdings paid on Newt’s and Callista’s behalf before that profit was calculated. What amounts for meals or luxury hotels, for example, were picked up by the personal holding company and therefore became a pre-tax benefit not subject to income tax? What about cars, or even clothing, or rent on an apartment somewhere? Suppose, for example, that that $3.1 million in income was net of, say, $2 million in these kinds of expenses? Then, the tax rate would arguably have been 19 percent, not 32 percent.

Nor, of course, do we know who paid Gingrich Holdings for what.

So, assuming Gingrich stays in the race for a while, who’s going to be the first reporter to ask for the Gingrich Holdings tax return?

PHOTO: James Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, arrives at a business forum of the German daily Die Welt in Berlin, January 11, 2012. REUTERS/Thomas Peter