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Archive for the 'Congress' Tag

Heads in the sand: Debt ceiling disclosures MIA in the filings

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

Given the steady and increasingly louder drumbeat of news about the debt ceiling — this morning brings the news that President Obama might summon key members of Congress to Camp David, where such weighty issues as peace in the Middle East have been hammered out — and the need to increase the debt ceiling to [...]

Pay ratio spat: The high cost of embarrassment…

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

News flash: Major corporations capable of ringing up billions in sales and hundreds of millions in profits are about to be brought to their knees by a government mandate that they — wait for it — figure out how much they’re paying their employees. OK, so we exaggerate a smidgen. But the very public spat [...]

Mining the filings at Newmont, Massey & more…

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

Six days ago, near the small town of Winnemucca, Nevada, a mine employee was carrying his lunchbox. Another employee maneuvered a large front-end loader around the mine’s maintenance shop. Corporate filings don’t normally include this kind of you-are-there detail. But these vignettes are now permanently enshrined in the database of the Securities and Exchange Commission [...]

Financial overhaul meets corporate governance …

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

The long-anticipated Wall Street reform bill just passed the U.S. Senate and is heading for President Obama’s desk. It still has a number of the investor-protection and corporate-governance provisions we mentioned before, but we were recently reminded that even some of the headline issues — bank capital standards, systemic-risk oversight, derivatives regulation — have a [...]

Wall Street reform bill expands disclosure rules …

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Earlier this week, we looked at an unusual disclosure provision that was added to the Senate financial-regulation reform bill. But now that the Senate has passed the nearly 1,600-page legislation, with a 59-39 vote last night, it’s worth looking at some of its other, farther-reaching measures with the potential to reshape disclosure and corporate filings [...]