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Michael Sam has been selected as the winner of the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. The former Missouri defensive end, who likely will be taken in this week's NFL draft, will receive the award given to individuals who transcend sports at the 2014 ESPYS on July 16. Sam, the SEC's defensive player of the year this past season, has announced he is gay and would become the first openly gay player in the NFL. He said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America" on Tuesday that he hopes to inspire other athletes.

On Wednesday, ESPN announced that Brent Musburger will leave his partnership with Kirk Herbstreit on ABC's Saturday Night Football broadcast to join Jesse Palmer to call games for ESPN's new SEC Network. It is believed that ESPN did not want to lose Chris Fowler's services in a contract year, and the GameDay host is the favorite to be in the booth with Herbstreit. There may be a bigger role for Rece Davis as well.

Mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac tumbled Tuesday on news of a deal to close them down. Both stocks lost about 40% of their value in one hour. An announcement of the deal, crafted by the Senate Budget Committee's top Democrat and Republican, did not disclose a timeline for the closure but said a draft of the legislation would be released soon. It is likely years away from its final approval. With multiple bi-partisan efforts and the support of President Obama congress managed to dissolve billions of investors retirement funds.

Forget hiring a top hedge fund to manage your portfolio. Your better bet might be an employee at the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a new report suggesting that regulators are trading on inside information relating to investigations and upcoming enforcement actions. In the report titled "The Stock Picking Skills of SEC Employees," researchers found that SEC employees' stock purchases look like your average person's. But when these employees sell their stocks, they appear to systematically beat the market by making sales within weeks of costly enforcement actions by the agency. "These results suggest that SEC employees potentially trade...

Stock Picking Skills of SEC Employees Jawad M. Addoum, Alok Kumar, Kelvin Law Abstract: We use a new data set obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate the trading strategies of the employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). We find that a hedge portfolio that goes long on SEC employees’ buys and short on SEC employees’ sells earns positive and economically significant abnormal returns of (i) about 4% per year for all securities in general; and (ii) about 8.5% in U.S. common stocks in particular. The abnormal returns stem not from the buys but from...

Michael Sam, the SEC’s Defensive Player of the Year and Missouri’s All-American defensive lineman, told ESPN’s Outside the Lines and The New York Times on Sunday that he is gay. Sam is projected to be a mid-round pick in the 2014 NFL Draft after leading the SEC with 11.5 sacks and 19 tackles for a loss, but he’ll be happy playing for whatever team wants him.

WAR EAGLE! BCS BABY!

Ricardo Louis scored on a deflected 73-yard pass on fourth and 18 with 25 seconds left to lift No. 7 Auburn to a stunning 43-38 victory over No. 25 Georgia on Saturday night. The Tigers (10-1, 6-1 Southeastern Conference) had blown a 27-7 lead but pulled out one more huge play to continue the biggest turnaround in major college football. From 3-9 last year, they can win the SEC West with a victory in two weeks against No. 1 Alabama. Auburn's Nick Marshall heaved the ball downfield with two defenders around Louis. It bounced off safety Josh Harvey-Clemons and right...

How to fight 21st century financial crime with 19th century tools A US House of Representatives committee is investigating whether federal securities regulators are using last century's tools to review corporations' books. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa penned a stiff missive to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White asking for an explanation of why the regulator has been so slow to embrace the use of eXtensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL. White has been wanting more funds to hire additional staff but apparently is less interested in moving to XBRL. Issa pointed out that interactive data in financial...

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a lawsuit against Bank of American over the BOAMS 2008-A securitization of a pool of adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs). Here is the complaint filed by the SEC. The theme of the complaint is “fraud.” Let’s take a look inside the deal. Here is the prospectus supplement for BOAMS 2008-A dated January 25, 2008. The BOAMS 2008-A was a senior-subordinated, structured finance securitization. boams2008atr The pool of mortgage underlying BOAMS 2008-A were mostly from California, 100% were ARMs originated or refinanced in 2007, boams2008acollatcomp 83.1% of the loans had borrowers with FICO scores of...

Company with ties to Terry McAuliffe is under SEC investigation By Tom Hamburger and Ben Pershing, Friday, August 2, 12:32 PM E-mail the writers An electric-car company co-founded by Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe (D) is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission over its conduct in soliciting foreign investors, according to law-enforcement documents and company officials. The SEC subpoenaed documents in May from GreenTech Automotive and bank records from a sister company, Gulf Coast Funds Management of McLean. The investigation is focused, at least in part, on alleged claims that the company “guarantees returns” to the investors, according...

A serious data breach at the Securities and Exchange Commission transferred personal data about current and former employees into the computer system of another federal agency, a letter sent by the SEC to staff reveals.The July 8 letter, obtained by The Hill, is from Thomas Bayer, the SEC’s chief information officer and senior agency official on privacy. It warned that personal employee data had been discovered on the networks of another, unnamed federal agency.It said a former SEC employee “inadvertently and unknowingly” downloaded the names, birthdates and Social Security numbers of employees onto a thumb drive, and then transferred them...

"Failure to Supervise" is the charge in the civil action being leveled by the SEC against legendary hedge fund manager Steve Cohen. This story has been running ad nauseum on CNBC since Friday afternoon. There is little information to go on but my conjecture is that this is another agency being directly used and abused by the Obama Administration to accomplish greater control over anything financial. Based up the well established pattern, his finger prints can be found anywhere intimidation is being exerted by government agencies. The default assumption with this President should be that every federal agency is being...

The Securities and Exchange Commission accused Miami and its former budget director of securities fraud related to several municipal bond offerings. The city and Michael Boudreaux made materially false and misleading statements and omissions about interfund transfers in three 2009 bond offerings totaling $153.5 million, the SEC said in a statement Friday. Boudreaux orchestrated the transfers to mask growing deficits in the city’s general fund, the SEC said. The SEC in 2010 started cracking down on state and local governments for not providing investors in the municipal bond market with accurate information about pension liabilities. Since then, Illinois and New...

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made –Groucho Marx I suspect the SEC, FINRA, and CFTC are big fans of Groucho Marx, or at least his observations on fair dealing. How else could they justify turning a blind eye to a global media powerhouse such as Reuters selling early access to market-moving information? How could these authorities not condemn a practice like high-frequency trading (HFT), which causes significant market disruptions on a daily basis and destroys investor confidence? Why would agencies that are charged with oversight of the most...

Verizon, the phone company whose disclosure of customer data to the federal government is at the center of the furor over cooperation by technology companies with top-secret national security programs, has offered a precise, clear, but little-noticed public explanation of why it did what it did. The Verizon explanation is not in the vague and cryptic memo the company issued last week after the Guardian exposed its program. It came, instead, in the company’s annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, included in Verizon’s annual report to shareholders.

A resolution calling for the boycott of Israeli firms will not be put to a vote at TIAA-CREF’s upcoming shareholders meeting. The move comes after the pension fund giant received approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to “take no action” on a submission by pro-Palestinian activists. This followed the company’s warning by an Israeli civil rights group that passage of the resolution would violate NY and Federal law. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center, stressed that the development was “a major defeat for the extremist Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement taking aim at Israel.”...

Wall Street investors hungry for advance information on upcoming federal health-care decisions repeatedly held private discussions with Obama administration officials, including a top White House adviser helping to implement the Affordable Care Act. The private conversations show that the increasingly urgent race to acquire“political intelligence” goes beyond the communications with congressional staffers that have become the focus of heightened scrutiny in recent weeks. White House records show that Elizabeth Fowler, then a top ­health-policy adviser to President Obama, met with executives from half a dozen investment firms in 2011 and 2012. Among them was Kris Jenner, a stock picker with...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The Senate on Monday unanimously approved Mary Jo White, a former U.S. attorney who supervised the prosecution of New York mob boss John Gotti, to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York judge has approved Bank of America's $2.43 billion settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by shareholders over the company's acquisition of former competitor Merrill Lynch. A judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Manhattan approved the settlement Friday. The bank proposed the settlement in late September. The agreement resolves allegations that Bank of America did not disclose the state of its finances or those of Merrill Lynch when it agreed to buy Merrill in September 2008. Judge Kevin Castel said the settlement was "hard fought," but called the...