Social Accountability 8000

Recommended international standards

Management systems

Mot just minimum legal compliance

Replevy

This word, as used in reference to the action of replevin, signifies to redeliver goods which have been distrained, to the original possessor of them, on his pledging or giving security to prosecute an action against the distrainor for the purpose of trying the legality of the distress.

It has also been used to signify the bailing or liberating a man from prison on his finding bail to answer for his forthcoming at a future time. Brown.


The Law Dictionary: Replevy

M3

[not an acronym] economic indicator showing changes in manufacturing (manufacturers' shipments, inventories, and orders)

Contributory Negligence

Legal rule that an angry or injured complainant might have added to his own injury because of being negligent of known or obvious conditions.

What is CONTRIBUTORY NEGLIGENCE? definition of CONTRIBUTORY NEGLIGENCE (Black's Law Dictionary)

Immoral Practices

"One of the great triumphs of the nineteenth century was to limit the connotation of the word "immoral" in such a way that, for practical purposes, only those were immoral who drank too much or made too copious love. Those who indulged in any or all of the other deadly sins could look down in righteous indignation on the lascivious and the gluttonous.... In the name of all lechers and boozers I most solemnly protest against the invidious distinction made to our prejudice"

-Aldous Huxley

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Declaratory Relief

n. a judge's determination (called a "declaratory judgment") of the parties' rights under a contract or a statute often requested (prayed) for information in a lawsuit over a contract. The theory is that an early resolution of legal rights will resolve some or all of the other issues in the matter. (See: declaratory judgment)

Legal Dictionry Definition of "Declaratory Relief"

Epidemiology

the branch of medicine dealing with the incidence and prevalence of disease in large populations and with detection of the source and cause of epidemics  of infectious disease.

Sequestration

Sequestration

Originally a legal term referring generally to the act of valuable property being taken into custody by an agent of the court and locked away for safekeeping, usually to prevent the property from being disposed of or abused before a dispute over its ownership can be resolved. But the term has been adapted by Congress in more recent years to describe a new fiscal policy procedure originally provided for in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act of 1985 -- an effort to reform Congressional voting procedures so as to make the size of the Federal government's budget deficit a matter of conscious choice rather than simply the arithmetical outcome of a decentralized appropriations process in which no one ever looked at the cumulative results until it was too late to change them.

If the dozen or so appropriation bills passed separately by Congress provide for total government spending in excess of the limits Congress earlier laid down for itself in the annual Budget Resolution, and if Congress cannot agree on ways to cut back the total (or does not pass a new, higher Budget Resolution), then an "automatic" form of spending cutback takes place. This automatic spending cut is what is called "sequestration."

Under sequestration, an amount of money equal to the difference between the cap set in the Budget Resolution and the amount actually appropriated is "sequestered" by the Treasury and not handed over to the agencies to which it was originally appropriated by Congress. In theory, every agency has the same percentage of its appropriation withheld in order to take back the excessive spending on an "across the board" basis. However, Congress has chosen to exempt certain very large programs from the sequestration process (for example, Social Security and certain parts of the Defense budget), and the number of exempted programs has tended to increase over time -- which means that sequestration would have to take back gigantic shares of the budgets of the remaining programs in order to achieve the total cutbacks required, virtually crippling the activities of the unexempted programs.

The prospect of sequestration has thus come to seem so catastrophic that Congress so far has been unwilling actually to let it happen. Instead, Congress has repeatedly chosen simply to raise the Budget Resolution spending caps upward toward the end of the legislative session in order to match the actual totals already appropriated, thus largely wiping out the incentives that the reformed budget procedures were expected to provide for Congress to get better control of the budget deficit.

http://www.auburn.edu/~johnspm/gloss/sequestration

Quantitative Easing

Quantitative easing (QE) is an unconventional monetary policy used by central banks to stimulate the national economy when conventional monetary policy has become ineffective. A central bank implements quantitative easing by buying financial assets from commercial banks and other private institutions with newly created money, in order to inject a pre-determined quantity of money into the economy. This is distinguished from the more usual policy of buying or selling government bonds to keep market interest rates at a specified target value. Quantitative easing increases the excess reserves of the banks, and raises the prices of the financial assets bought, which lowers their yield.

Arbitrage

The simultaneous purchase and sale of an asset in order to profit from a difference in the price. It is a trade that profits by exploiting price differences of identical or similar financial instruments, on different markets or in different forms. Arbitrage exists as a result of market inefficiencies; it provides a mechanism to ensure prices do not deviate substantially from fair value for long periods of time.


Given the advancement in technology it has become extremely difficult to profit from mispricing in the market. Many traders have computerized trading systems set to monitor fluctuations in similar financial instruments. Any inefficient pricing setups are usually acted upon quickly and the opportunity is often eliminated in a matter of seconds.