On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 10:56 AM, boo_lives <boo_li...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, I am the eternal <l.shad...@...> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 10:14 AM, Rick Archer <r...@...> wrote:
>> > From: Jivan Hall [mailto:jivanh...@...]
>> > Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 12:27 AM
>> > To: jivanh...@...
>> > Subject: Update on Je-Ru Hall
>> > Latest Update: Je-Ru is still awaiting sentencing!  After being postponed 3
>> > times, it appears that Je-Ru's sentencing trial will finally take place
>> > tomorrow, Monday, March 23rd at 9am.  His lawyer will argue for a minimum 
>> > to
>> > zero sentence, and/or for an appeal, and for release on bail pending the
>> > appeal.
>>
>> I would not want to be awaiting sentencing during these times of
>> popularism gone wide with Congress passing bills of attainder and the
>> Administration asking for the power to nationalize any company that's
>> misbehaving.
>>
> Please reference how the Administration is asking for this???  It's nonsense. 
>  The Administration hasn't even nationalize banks that are broke and being 
> subsidized by the gov't.
>

I posted this yesterday with a URL to the video Oh hail our Savior
Obama popular during the campaign.  We had caught on by then already.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/us/politics/22regulate.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=print

http://tinyurl.com/ctnoa4


March 22, 2009
Administration Seeks Increase in Oversight of Executive Pay
By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will call for increased
oversight of executive pay at all banks, Wall Street firms and
possibly other companies as part of a sweeping plan to overhaul
financial regulation, government officials said.

The outlines of the plan are expected to be unveiled this week in
preparation for President Obama’s first foreign summit meeting in
early April.

Increasing oversight of executive pay has been under consideration for
some time, but the decision was made in recent days as public fury
over bonuses has spilled into the regulatory effort.

The officials said that the administration was still debating the
details of its plan, including how broadly it should be applied and
how far it could range beyond simple reporting requirements. Depending
on the outcome of the discussions, the administration could seek to
put the changes into effect through regulations rather than through
legislation.

One proposal could impose greater requirements on the boards of
companies to tie executive compensation more closely to corporate
performance and to take other steps to assure that outsize bonuses are
not paid before meeting financial goals.

The new rules will cover all financial institutions, including those
not now covered by any pay rules because they are not receiving
federal bailout money. Officials say the rules could also be applied
more broadly to publicly traded companies, which already report about
some executive pay practices to the Securities and Exchange
Commission. Last month, as part of the stimulus package, Congress
barred top executives at large banks getting rescue money from
receiving bonuses exceeding one-third of their annual pay.

Beyond the pay rules, officials said the regulatory plan is expected
to call for a broad new role for the Federal Reserve to oversee large
companies, including major hedge funds, whose problems could pose
risks to the entire financial system.

It will propose that many kinds of derivatives and other exotic
financial instruments that contributed to the crisis be traded on
exchanges or through clearinghouses so they are more transparent and
can be more tightly regulated. And to protect consumers, it will call
for federal standards for mortgage lenders beyond what the Federal
Reserve adopted last year, as well as more aggressive enforcement of
the mortgage rules.

The plan is being put together in advance of the meeting of the Group
of 20 industrialized and developing nations in London, which is
expected to be dominated by the global financial crisis and
discussions about better oversight of large financial companies whose
problems could threaten to undermine international markets.

An important part of the plan still under debate is how to regulate
the shadow banking system that Wall Street firms use to package and
trade mortgage-backed securities, the so-called toxic assets held by
many banks and blamed for the credit crisis.

Officials said the plan would also call for increasing the levels of
capital that financial institutions need to hold to absorb possible
losses. But in a sign of the fragility of the economic system
officials said the administration would emphasize that those
heightened standards should not be imposed now because they could
discourage more lending. Rather, they would be put in place after the
economy began to rebound.

“The argument some are making is that they don’t want to be stepping
on the gas pedal and the brake at the same time,” said Morris
Goldstein, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International
Economics and a former top official at the International Monetary
Fund.

Administration officials are also debating how tightly to supervise
hedge funds. A broad consensus has emerged among regulators and
administration officials that hedge funds must be registered and more
closely monitored, probably by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
But officials have not decided how much the funds will have to
disclose about their investments and trading practices.

A central aspect of the plan, which has already been announced by the
administration, would give the government greater authority to take
over and resolve problems at large, troubled companies that are not
now regulated by Washington, like insurance companies and hedge funds.

That proposal would, for instance, make it easier for the government
to cancel bonus contracts like those given to executives at the
American International Group, which have stoked a political furor.
Under the proposal, the Treasury secretary would have the authority to
seize and wind down a struggling institution after consulting with the
president and upon the recommendation of two-thirds of the Federal
Reserve board.

Long before he became Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner had
sought broader authority for the government to resolve problems at
financial institutions that were not under the supervision of bank
regulators.

The government now has the power to take over only the banking unit
that controls federally insured deposits of large troubled
institutions, not the parent company, a limit that could pose problems
if large financial conglomerates like Citigroup or Bank of America
continued to spiral downward.

In unveiling the regulatory plan this week, President Obama would
signal to Europe that he intended to crack down on the risk-taking and
other free-wheeling practices by the financial industry that resulted
in the global economic meltdown.

France and Germany especially have suggested that the better response
is not more government spending but tighter regulation.

The Obama administration has urged European nations to do more to
restart their economies through financial stimulus. Mr. Obama is
hoping that by showing a serious commitment to tighter regulation he
can more easily persuade other countries to increase government
spending and stimulate demand by consumers and businesses that would
help pull the global economy out of a serious decline.

But the administration’s efforts, especially on tighter regulation of
hedge funds, are not expected to assuage some European countries.
Moreover, the hedge fund industry has significant influence on Capitol
Hill and has shown that it can defeat proposals it finds onerous.

While a growing number of hedge fund advisers have voluntarily agreed
to register with the S.E.C., many of the most prominent ones are
expected to oppose efforts to require them to provide what they
consider proprietary information about their holdings and trading
practices, even on a confidential basis.

>From the outset of the Obama administration, officials and European
leaders have disagreed over how much to limit pay. And Mr. Geithner
has discouraged the administration from imposing across-the-board
limits on compensation of all employees at troubled companies
receiving federal assistance and more burdensome pay restrictions at
healthy institutions that the administration is trying to encourage to
take government money so they can increase lending.

Last week, Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, also called
on regulators to supervise executive pay at banks more closely to
avoid “compensation practices that can create mismatches between the
rewards and risks borne by institutions or their managers.” In advance
of Mr. Obama’s trip to the economic meeting, which begins on April 2,
Mr. Geithner will describe the regulatory plan when he appears before
Congress on Thursday.

Much of the plan would require the approval of Congress, where
divisions are already forming over how best to overhaul financial
industry oversight.

Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the
House Financial Services Committee, said he believed that giving the
government new authority to take over troubled companies could be
adopted by the House relatively quickly, particularly after the furor
over the A.I.G. bonuses.

“This would give the government the same powers that you would get as
if the company were in bankruptcy,” Mr. Frank said in an interview
shortly after meeting with Mr. Geithner on the plan.

But Mr. Frank and other lawmakers said other elements of the plan
could take more time, like expanding the authority of the Federal
Reserve to become a systemic regulator.

In a hearing on Thursday, Senator Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut
Democrat who heads the banking committee, expressed skepticism about
that proposal.

“Whether or not those vast powers will reside at the Fed remains an
open question,” he said, pointing out that the Federal Reserve had
failed to apply tough oversight of the companies it now regulates.

Landon Thomas contributed reporting from London.


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