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When the Securities and Exchange Commission released its CEO pay rule this week, many cheered it as a way to shame companies into moderating outlandish pay packages. The rule, which goes into effect in 2017, mandates that publicly-traded companies disclose the gap between what their top executives are paid and what their rank and file workers make. As the New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson put it, "because the rule will generate an easily graspable and often decidedly shocking number, it may energize a cadre of new combatants in the executive pay fight." It could have the opposite effect.

The chief executive of General Electric raked in a $37.3 million pay package last year, a large sum by any standard. But how much larger was it than the average pay of the 305,000 employees who helped General Electric earn billions in profits that year? The industrial giant did not disclose that comparison, and corporate America rarely reveals how the compensation of the chief executive stacks up against that of the workers in the ranks below. That will soon change. After a long delay and plenty of pushback from corporations, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved in 3-2 vote on...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal regulators have approved a long-delayed rule requiring companies to reveal the pay gap between CEOs and their employees. The Securities and Exchange Commission voted Wednesday to order most public companies to disclose the ratio between their chief executives' annual compensation and median, or midpoint, employee pay.

PSU 2015 Hype Video #1PSU 2015 Hype Video #2James Franklin delivering season tickets

An injunction issued against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by federal judge Leigh Martin May could spell the beginning of the end for Administrative Law Courts and with them, 80 years of unconstitutional abuse of power by the Executive branch. Administrative Law “…allows for the creation of public regulatory agencies and contains all of the statutes, judicial decisions, and regulations that govern them.” These regulatory bodies include the EPA and the SEC. Many came into being during the reign of Franklin Roosevelt, the one president more arrogant and power hungry than Barack Obama. The law itself “…is created by...

Banks want assurances from U.S. regulators that they will not be barred from certain businesses before agreeing to plead guilty to criminal charges over the manipulation of foreign exchange rates, causing a delay in multibillion-dollar settlements, people familiar with the matter said. In an unprecedented move, the parent companies or main banking units of JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), Citigroup Inc (C.N), Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS.L), Barclays Plc (BARC.L) and UBS Group AG (UBSG.VX) are likely to plead guilty to rigging foreign exchange rates to benefit their transactions. The banks are also scrambling to line up exemptions...

In recent presidential primary cycles, the influence of Southern states -- with the exception of Florida, whose "Southern status" is perhaps more locational than anything else -- has been minimal. While pundits like to say that GOP presidential nominees have relied heavily on a "red state" electorate based in the South, that same base has had little to say in determining the nominee. After all, neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney had much in common with the region. Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp sensed that voter turnout intensity in the region could be stronger in November 2016 if...

The SEC still hasn’t stopped manipulative high speed traders from ripping off investors, even though the abuses have been self-evident for years to anyone paying attention. A series of events have brought the subject of high frequency trading abuses once again to the forefront of the financial news reportage. These events include: The recent arrest of Navinder Sarao, a British trader, who has been accused of being complicit in the infamous “flash crash” that occurred five years ago. Within minutes, the May 10, 2010 incident sent the Dow tumbling almost 1000 points before it recovered, sending shockwaves throughout our financial...

An epidemic of federal employees watching pornography on government computers during work hours has gotten so out of control that legislation has been introduced in Congress to contain the embarrassing crisis. Porn has for years been part of the job at some government agencies and in fact a number of federal audits have long documented the enraging details of how our tax dollars are being wasted. Judicial Watch has also reported on this for years, especially the porn crisis at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency charged with policing the nation’s financial industry. While the economy crumbled, the...

With less than two minutes left in the Sugar Bowl on Thursday night, Ohio State, ahead by 7 points and having just recovered an onside kick by Alabama, tried a deep pass along the left sideline — Ohio State’s sideline. Standing near the bench, Jim Delany, the commissioner of the Big Ten Conference for 26 years, sprinted a few steps toward the field to catch a glimpse of the ball as it hurtled through the air. The pass fell incomplete, but his actions were a sign of the investment that not only Buckeyes fans, but fans of all Big Ten...

The so-called mighty SEC West was embarrassed this bowl season. The state of Mississippi has not taken this type of beating since Grant's Vicksburg Campaign. Both Wisconsin and THE Ohio State University ran the ball down the state of Alabama's throat. The SEC as a whole plays horrible non-conference schedules and the apologists claim that is because the SEC is too tough. Sorry but that is BS. The Top 4 SEC West teams as a whole only played perhaps 4 quality non-conference games: West Virginia, Kansas State, Boise State, Wisconsin. Whatever you thing of FSU they alone played four legitimate...

Search SHARETWEETMORE SUBSCRIBELOG IN DealBook Lending Club Set to Debut, and Industry Is Watching By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED DECEMBER 10, 2014 When Lending Club makes its debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, it will carry the hopes of an entire industry. The company, whose online marketplace matches people who are seeking loans with investors willing to provide them, emboldened its peers late Wednesday when it raised about $870 million in its initial public offering, surpassing expectations. Lending Club’s offering — which values the company at $5.4 billion — will set a template for potentially dozens...

Meet the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talking By Matt Taibbi | November 6, 2014 "It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street," she says. "I thought, 'I can't sit by any longer.'" Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing. Back in 2006, as a...

For the first time in the 145 years of college football, a 12-member playoff selection committee has set to convene. It will spend Monday and Tuesday in the arduous seven-stage process of tabulating its inaugural weekly top 25, and it will release that list on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. ET. That will begin a much-anticipated process of seven weekly meetings in Grapevine, Texas, near the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. The meetings will run Monday-Tuesday into early December, then the final announcement of the playoff field will come on Sunday, Dec. 7. That announcement will name the four teams which will...

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) grades our drinking water a D in their annual report card. Local systems leak an estimated 7 billion gallons of water daily. And more than 850 billion gallons of sewage escape into surface water annually.And I wouldn’t rely too heavily on our electric grid.ASCE gives that a D+ due to outages and disturbances that cost up to $180 billion in annual economic activity. The electric grid is at risk of cascading failures until energy production becomes decentralized.These risks are growing by the day. The government that is supposed to be protecting and serving...

"Governor Brownback's administration took prompt action in 2011 to adopt new disclosure policies and procedures and to include the relevant KPERS information in the CAFR (comprehensive annual financial report)," Kansas Secretary of Administration Jim Clark said in a statement. "The SEC has considered these changes and we are pleased that the SEC did not seek any financial penalties or make any claims of intentional misconduct based on the actions of former administrations. We remain committed to complying with all disclosure requirements and require training and updating of the policies and procedures annually."

What do four adult entertainers, 138 engineers, a handful of pilots and a pastor have in common? They all think they have hot tips about an alleged financial fraud. They are also among the more than 6,500 people who have offered confidential information under the whistleblower program of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The agency set up the program in mid-2011 with hopes of eliciting dirt on corporate wrongdoers. It offers a bounty of up to 30% of penalties for any monetary sanctions the agency extracts that exceed $1 million. The potential windfall has attracted tips from at least 68...

A Chinese Internet giant is expected to win approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for potentially the largest ever U.S. initial stock offering despite a myriad of investment and security risks posed by the IPO, critics say. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., a Chinese company whose online retail sales exceed those of U.S. competitors, such as Amazon or Ebay, currently awaits SEC approval for the stock sale that could raise as much as $20 billion. The SEC has assented to several IPOs of Chinese companies with similar corporate structures since 2000. However, critics of the offering say the potential...

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson thinks courthouses should be “immigration enforcement-free zones,” reports the Washington Times. “Courthouses are special,” he said in testimony before Congress Thursday, meaning that the government ought not target illegal immigrants who may be there–a status already granted to schools, hospitals, and places of worship. (RELATED: Immigration Enforcement Isn’t Smart, Obama Says) The issue came up during the House Judiciary Committee’s Homeland Security Department Oversight hearing when Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) asked Johnson whether he thought courthouses ought be added to this list of “sensitive locations.” “People have been apprehended by ICE when they went to...

In a world where texts, tweets and emails can potentially be used against you, billionaire investor Mark Cuban launched Cyber Dust, an app for disappearing text messages and photos. Once the recipient views the note, it vanishes in seconds. Cuban says he was inspired to create this service after being challenged by the FCC over insider trading allegations, of which he was eventually cleared. “What I learned very quickly was they took old emails and messages and created whatever context they wanted to create for it,” says Cuban. Cuban took his idea to app developers and launched Cyber Dust to...