Olympus Books $9.7 Million Loss [WSJ]
Olympus Corp. said Monday that it booked a net loss of ¥756 million ($9.7 million) for the fiscal third quarter, while predicting a full-year net loss of ¥32 billion. The third-quarter net loss for the three months ended December by the Japanese maker of cameras and medical equipment, which is trying to emerge from one of Japan's biggest corporate accounting scandals in years, was a sharp reversal from a net profit of ¥2.04 billion in the same period a year earlier.
Is no one safe?
For two decades, politicians have promised — and failed — to overhaul the tax code to make it simpler and fairer. This time they have a deadline of sorts. On Jan. 1, 2013, a major part of the current code turns into a pumpkin. That is when income tax rate cuts — a host of expanded tax deductions and credits, and generous changes in the taxation of dividends, capital gains and inheritances — are set to disappear. That day of reckoning was supposed to have come in 2011, but President Obama signed a two-year extension of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, along with temporary tax cuts of his own, most notably the two-percentage-point cut to the payroll tax. This time around, Mr. Obama has vowed that he will not extend the tax cuts for upper-income Americans, and no matter who wins the presidential election in November, Mr. Obama will be in the White House on Expiration Day. That will put pressure on Republicans in Congress to prevent a sudden return to the tax code of the 1990s.