The blog Conglomerate pointed us to a paper, “The Fetishization of Independence,” by one of its one-time writers, Usha Rodrigues, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Georgia. They argue it is a “great” paper. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but is well documented and certain to cause a lot of debate. […]
Read more...Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report is out, and with it, Warren Buffet’s famous letter to shareholders. I took a quick look, and found the Financial Times’ take on the main points (“Buffet attacks hedge fund fees“) is as good as anything I could say: Warren Buffett, the world’s second-richest person, on Thursday stepped up his criticism […]
Read more...A good piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Shareholders Push for Vote on Executive Pay,”recounts the efforts of major institutional investors to exert pressure against excessive CEO pay via non-binding shareholder resolutions. UK funds have been in the forefront of this effort, because similar regulations are already in force there. Although the UK rules have […]
Read more...Those of you who live in New York City doubtless recall how Mayor Rudolph Giuliani initially secured his reputation. The city was perceived to be out of control. Crimes, petty and not so petty, were rampant. Most people felt a bit anxious on the street at night. Couples, once they had children, decamped to the […]
Read more...The open question is whether this is good news or bad news. Fannie Mae’s decision to cancel $44.4 million in top officer bonuses for 2001 through 2003 because they were based on earnings overstatments produced by violations of accounting rules is unquestionably the right thing to do. No one should profit from a fraud they […]
Read more...This post on Thomas Palley’s blog, which I found thanks to Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View, argues cogently for an expansion, rather than a rollback, of Sarbanes-Oxley, the corporate governance reforms implemented in 2002 in the wake of big corporate accounting scandals, such as Enron and WorldCom. Palley, an economist, observes that Sarbox has not stopped […]
Read more...For those readers who live outside New York City, the dramatis personae are Gretchen Morgenson, who writes a weekly column in the New York Times’ Sunday business section that regularly anatomizes the ways that CEOs enrich themselves, and Martin Lipton, who along with Joseph Flom was one of the top M&A lawyers in the 1980s, […]
Read more...Wonder why the Financial Times seems to do a consistently better job of reporting on topics that are inconvenient to American executives, like institutional investors taking serious steps to rein in their compensation, that the US media outlets covering the same beat, like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Bloomberg? This story […]
Read more...We’ve had accounting fraud, pay that seldom bears any relation to performance, and options backdating. And it appears we aren’t done yet. The next bit of CEO malfeasance that is getting a bit more press is that CEOs are working in concert with private equity firms to buy the companies they head on the cheap. […]
Read more...Thanks to footnoted.org, we have an example of the kind of behavior that gives CEOs a bad name. Except this CEO isn’t feeding at the trough of the company he currently heads, but one he USED to head. Oh, and to top it off, the company is already in the sights of shareholder activists because […]
Read more...There is a widespread belief in the US that editorializing in the Wall Street Journal is limited to the editorial page. We’ve seen in the past that this just ain’t so (see posts of January 12 and January 16). And today we have a doozy. We have a real news event, reported as the lead […]
Read more...This post picks up where the last one ended, addressing an article in the Economist’s survey on executive pay. The Economist says that CEO pay increases are for the most part warranted; we say they make the mistake of attributing corporate performance largely to CEOs. This next article on the rationale for high CEO compensation […]
Read more...This story just won’t go away. Today the Economist published a survey on executive pay, which is balanced and objective sounding, but comes away with an erroneous conclusion: that the rise in CEO pay is, for the most part, warranted. Why is this conclusion wrong? Because it rests on a false premise: that CEOs are […]
Read more...It’s refreshing that someone is treating Grasso’s efforts to hang on to his eye-popping compensation from his days as the head of the NYSE with the seriousness it deserves. From DealBreaker.com: In an interview today, former NYSE chair Dick Grasso told Bloomberg that the total costs of his lawsuit challenging his infamous compensation package maybe […]
Read more...In today’s New York Times, an article on the lofty sums some private equity firms are paying to former CEOs seems tosupport the thesis that their compensation is market driven: Flush with hundreds of billions of dollars, private equity firms are beginning to offer compensation on a previously unimaginable scale to the chief executives who […]
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