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Archive for the 'SEC stuff' Category

The cost of doing business for Goldman Sachs …

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Robert Khuzami made a splash, as intended, today when he announced the biggest Wall Street penalty in the SEC’s history, a $550 million deal with Goldman Sachs (GS). We’re just not sure the long-term view will be as kind. The blogosphere has been quick to blast the deal as too little, too soon. Goldman shares [...]

The SEC turns its attention to the proxy …

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Over the last 30 years, the mimeograph has given way to PDF, and rotary dial phones have been replaced by voice dialing and Bluetooth headsets. Stock ownership has exploded into the middle class from the ranks of the elite. Meantime, the U.S. proxy process hasn’t changed much. Now the SEC is thinking about doing something [...]

On Goldman and disclosure…

Monday, April 19th, 2010

One of the big issues that has popped up since Friday’s surprising announcement by the Securities and Exchange Commission that it was charging Goldman Sachs with fraud is whether Goldman should have been more forthcoming in their routine SEC filings that an investigation was pending. On Saturday, Bloomberg reported that the investigation began 9 months [...]

The perks that ate infoGROUP …

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

One key principle here at footnoted is that the small stuff does matter. Look no further than Vinod Gupta, who, yesterday evening, became the Securities and Exchange Commission’s poster child for perks run amok. Of course, in Gupta’s case, the little stuff turned out not to be so little, as the SEC tells it. We’ll [...]

Will proxies come earlier this year?

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

Yesterday, by a 4 to 1 vote, the SEC approved a series of changes to the way companies have to disclose compensation. For those of us who already bemoan a 20-plus page Compensation Discussion and Analysis section that often says next-to-nothing, but takes a lot of words to do so, here’s hope that the new [...]