So, Alistair Darling's first pre-Budget report. What are the chances of an attack on the inheritance tax? Surely he won't let the Tory upstart, George Osbourne, steal all his thunder...

Saying that, it will provide plenty of ammunition to the Tories if he were to offer up legislation which many would see as a copy-cat announcement to win back votes following the Conservative Party conference last week.

Oh, and private equity bosses (as if their industry hasn't got enough problems at the moment) are set to have some of their tax breaks taken away from them. Maybe they'll be downgrading to a Learjet...

You can follow all of the pre-Budget news on our sister website, Accountancy Age.

Apparently, yesterday was Citigrooup chief executive Chuck Prince's fourth anniversary in the top job. And what a day - the bank announced that it had suffered $6bn of writedowns and losses in Q3 due to turbulence in the credit markets. Many analysts are calling for his head.

Meanwhile, European banking giants Credit Suisse and UBS both issued profit warnings, with UBS announcing a Q3 loss of between £250m and £334m.

Not surprisingly, UBS took action and announced 1,500 job cuts. As part of the shakeup, chief financial officer, Clive Standish, will retire.

We can't help wondering if this is just the tip of the iceberg...

In March we ran a piece on how companies are failing to account for their technology assets; how millions of pounds worth of assets are being written off rather than capitalised simply because IT managers don't know what they have or what it's worth. (You can read the original column here.) 

The effect is two-fold. IT managers will continue to push for huge amounts of expenditure on technology despite having no idea if they need to; and all that data lying around your server rooms - some of it fairly sensitive - has compliance issues.

Today, the Financial Times has carried a story on its front page saying exactly the same thing. Research carried out by Insead, Micro Focus and KPMG found that fewer than half IT managers or finance directors had tried to value their IT assets. And 60% did not know the value of their software. (We covered that the research was going ahead, here.)

Hopefully, businesses are finally waking up to this issue. Finally realising that a business with servers that are only 15% utilised does not need to splash the cash on yet more servers. Time to rein in the IT department?