executive compensation

The Federal Reserve on Thursday proposed a new program of monitoring executive compensation at the nation’s largest financial institutions, a move designed to prevent banks from using pay incentives that encourage risky transactions like those that recently toppled the global economy.

Well, at least one banking executive is personally feeling the pain of the foreclosure crisis: Wells Fargo has fired a top employee who moved into a foreclosed Malibu beach house and threw lavish parties all summer there, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Cheronda Guyton, a senior vice president responsible for commercial foreclosed properties, broke company rules [...]

President Obama called on Wall Street today to stop fighting financial regulation and to instead embrace reform, Bloomberg reported. Speaking at Federal Hall in New York City on the first anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers, Obama used plain language to explain to all the financial wizards who brought us this crisis that they [...]

Here’s the money quote from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, interviewed Monday by CNN about the role of government in regulating Wall Street:
The financial markets are too important to the economy to be left to the markets alone. You need a strong framework of regulations, a much stronger framework than we had.

I know it’s not helpful to have knee-jerk reactions to Wall Street pay, given that compensation is often more complicated than portrayed, but there’s no subtlety here: Bailed-out financial firms are on track to pay their employees as much, or more, than they were rewarded with during the pre-crisis days, The Washington Post reports.
Here are [...]

Just how tough are the Obama administration’s new executive compensation limits for bailed out firms? Well, as a hint, Wall Street sees them as no threat at all. Indeed, The Washington Post today gets a few telling quotes from bankers who are giddy that these are the only standards they’ll be held to.
“Our people kind [...]

The Obama administration is poised to tap Kenneth Feinberg, the mediation guru who headed the 9/11 victim compensation fund, to monitor the nation’s bailed-out firms for compliance with executive compensation limits, The Wall Street Journal reported today. First, though, the White House has to sift through the tangle of executive pay restrictions imposed by Congress [...]

Bank employees may not be digging into their pockets to make campaign contributions they way they used to, as Elana reports today, but those pockets are apparently becoming deep as they were during Wall Street’s boom times. According to The New York Times, Wall Street compensation is climbing again and may reach the same levels [...]

Just a few weeks after Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) requested information from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner about White House plans to sidestep executive pay limits for bailed out firms (information that still hasn’t been provided), Towns is asking Geithner about his role in Bank of America’s reportedly shady acquisition of Merrill Lynch in December.
Yesterday, the [...]

You might have heard that Detroit’s automakers have been struggling recently, and also that the federal government has stepped in with offers to help the dying companies weather the storm if only they’ll revamp their business models and make some concessions regarding employee compensation.
Well, it seems that some industry executives haven’t been willing to take [...]