The result is an absurd combination of creative accounting, pointless penny-pinching and helpless inaction.

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Only seven cars completed the race in Melbourne, a combination of engine problems and accidents accounting for the majority of the field.

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But this revealed billion-dollar holes in pension plans on both sides of the Atlantic, created by a combination of poor management, poor accounting oversight and the poor incentives of profit-minded managers who strive to keep company pension funds as lightly funded as possible.

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For starters, any combination might change the bank's favorable accounting for its stake in the brokerage.

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In history, such crashes have always produced economic traumas of some kind, generally a combination of banking collapses, corporate bankruptcies, accounting scandals and waning confidence among consumers and investors.

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And then there is Vivendi, a sewerage-to-films conglomerate that Jean-Marie Messier, its French boss, ran into the ground through a combination (familiar to Americans) of hubris and creative accounting.

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Northern Europe has the edge, thanks to an inviting combination of less bureaucracy, a more developed legal system, better accounting systems and easier ways to transfer intellectual property, says Marco Da Rin, associate professor in finance at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

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The custodians are all regulated by the SEC and FINRA, audited by a nationally recognized accounting firm, and each account is protected for loss of securities by a combination of SIPC insurance and commercial excess Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC).

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