Not too much to drive you to drink this week.
Here’s are some money stories for your weekend:

The Business Insider Green Sheet reported on the drop in venture capital flowing to green technologies. Come on guys, Earth Day’s coming! (Come back Monday for the ABCs of VC.)
SustainableBusiness.com covered the national youth movement to get Congress to pass stronger climate legislation to address emission reduction targets, transition America to 100% clean energy, and eliminates loopholes that allow companies to continue polluting.
The Third Sector looked at a new report on the financing crisis in non-profits. (In my community, the United Way just cut all distributions by …read more

A lot of the buzz seems to be swirling around regulatory issues this week.

Becker and Posner discussed mark-to-market rules and how they might be applied in the future.
Huffington Post called for a financial regulatory overhaul.
Illinois Senator Dick Durbin proposed a consumer-oriented regulatory agency to police financial products: the Financial Product Safety Commission. Cool idea, if your 401(k) is full of melamine.
Truthout weighs in on big banks, huge bailouts, gigantic potential losses.
Imus gives us 60s throwback activist Dick Gregory, who thinks his taking time off food will solve complex economic crises.
I covered the tax ramifications of mortgage debt forgiveness over on Business …read more

Accounting rules have been in the news a lot lately. One in particular, the mark to market rule, has become something of a scapegoat for the current economic crisis. I thought we’d take a step back today and look at the purpose of accounting standards and their role in our free market economy.
Why Do We Need Accounting Standards and Where Do They Come From?
To ensure uniformity in financial statements, publicly traded companies must follow a set of rules known as the generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). Basically, GAAP is designed to help investors (including bankers) compare financial apples to …read more