Makati, Metro Manila, Philippines (AHN) – New board members of the Philippine Stock Exchange sought the extension of trading hours into the afternoon to provide more opportunities for investors to participate in the local bourse trading.

PSE Chairman Jose Pardo said that the new board members agreed at the Wednesday board meeting to have afternoon trading to make local stock trading markets align with global markets. Pardo said rules governing the proposed longer trading hours will be drawn by a PSE committee in the coming weeks.

Current PSE trading begins at 9:30 a.m. and ends at 12:10 p.m. The proposal is to have two more trading hours in the afternoon, from 2:30 through 4:30 p.m.

The PSE actually approved in 2008 a resolution to have longer trading hours, but the stock exchange set aside the proposal because of the unfavorable business climate at that time. Three years ago, oil prices started to soar and in 2009 the global financial crisis hit Wall Street and spread to other financial hubs.

The 2008 proposal slightly differed from the current plan. The board then proposed resumption of trading at 2 p.m. until 4 p.m. The proposal included a 10-minute run-off period from 3:50 to 4 p.m.

It was initially set for implementation by June 30, 2009, at the latest. The afternoon transactions, however, were to be considered off-floor trading.

View full post on Stocks Stories

Sacramento, CA, United States (KaiserHealth) – Blue Shield of California’s surprising announcement that it will cap profits at 2 percent and issue millions in policyholder refunds sparked hopes that other health insurers would follow suit, but many experts said yesterday that was unlikely.

The company, which made the announcement Tuesday, is better positioned than most to make that move. For one thing, as a nonprofit, it has more leeway to cap profits than its for-profit cousins who have to meet Wall Street earnings targets, says Peter Kongstvedt, a managed care consultant in McLean, Va.

The insurer, a major force in the California market with more than 3 million policyholders, also has substantial reserves and posted a profit margin of 3.1 percent last year, including income derived from its investments.

That’s more than the typical 2 percent to 3 percent margin typical of nonprofit insurers, says Uwe Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University.

“It’s an unbelievably good public relations measure,” Reinhardt said of the company’s decision, which includes refunding $167 million to policyholders.

While most insurers won’t embrace such an overt cap on profits, some nonprofits may try to “step up and match these rebates” as a way of improving their public image and attract new business, said Sheryl Skolnick, a financial analyst for CRT Capital Group in Stamford, Conn.

Two of the larger nonprofit insurers that operate in Virginia, Maryland and the District — CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield and Kaiser Permanente – declined to comment. Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for the industry trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, said insurers are “doing everything they can to keep coverage affordable,” but he did not speculate on whether others would join Blue Shield.

The announcement by Blue Shield comes as insurers nationwide are enjoying healthy profits, fueled in part by lower-than-expected use of medical services last year, as recession-stung consumers held off on seeking medical care.

At the same time, new rules are going into effect that put insurers’ profits and spending under closer scrutiny. The federal health overhaul law requires insurers to spend at least 80 percent of their revenue on medical care, leaving 20 percent for administrative costs, including profits. Insurers that don’t meet that target must issue rebates to policyholders next year.

And, starting in September, the law also requires government scrutiny of rate increases of 10 percent or more among policies sold to individuals and small businesses.

It does not, however, grant federal or state regulators the power to reject such increases. That authority lies with the states, about half of which currently give regulators that power over some types of insurance.

In California, lawmakers are debating a proposal to give that authority to regulators, who currently review increases, but can’t block them. The legislation – opposed by many insurers and one of the state’s largest physician groups — narrowly passed the Assembly, but its fate in the state’s Senate remains uncertain. Blue Shield’s announcement was immediately seized upon by supporters of the proposal, including Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, who told reporters that it showed insurers are making excessive profits.

The nonprofit insurer has been in the news lately, both for premium increases and the $4.6 million salary it pays Bruce Bodaken, the firm’s chairman and chief executive.

The insurer will increase premiums for its small business policyholders 9 to 11 percent later this year. A plan to raise rates even more for some individuals in HMO plans was withdrawn earlier this year.

Under its rebate plan announced Tuesday, consumers will get credits ranging from $25 to $415, while business customers will see $110 to $130 per employee, according to a Blue Shield release.

Doug Heller, executive director of the left leaning Consumer Watchdog, was not impressed, saying the average policyholder saw rates jump about 30 percent in the past two years. “It doesn’t make you feel much better,” he said.

And capping profits is expected to have little effect on how much customers will pay in the future, because the biggest chunk of a premium increase is tied to underlying health costs, with profits a much smaller portion, economist Reinhardt said.

“I don’t think the average American realizes how small profits are as a percent of premium.”

jappleby@kff.org

– Provided by Kaiser Health News.

View full post on All Stories

New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Billionaire Raj Rajaratnam has been found guilty on all 14 criminal counts in a massive insider trading scandal that rocked one of Wall Street’s largest hedge fund management firms. Rajaratnam, a Sri Lankan-American who worked at Needham & Company before founding the Galleon Group in 1997, became the subject of the largest hedge fund insider trading fraud in American history when he was arrested in 2009.

According to U.S. Justice Department prosecutors and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) analysts, Rajaratnam built a network of illegal informants, giving him the inside scoop on major companies and allowing him to illicitly take profits and mitigate losses based on confidential information.

The information came from household names including Google, Intel, eBay and Hilton. It also involved Wall Street movers such as Clearwire, Akamai Technologies and ATI.

Prosecutors say his information ring helped him take home more than $20 million in the three years leading up to his arrest. During the trial, several employees at Galleon aided prosecutors; 11 people have already pleaded guilty to their involvement in fraud while others await trial.

View full post on All Stories

United States (ProPublica) – by Minhee Cho

ProPublica had the immense honor of winning the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its series, “The Wall Street Money Machine.” The lead reporters, Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, take a moment to explain the series, how it all started and their reaction after reeling in ProPublica’s second Pulitzer, which was also the first ever awarded to a body of work that didn’t appear in print.

Read their series: The Wall Street Money Machine and the letter addressing the award from our editor-in-chief. You can also subscribe to all of ProPublica’s podcasts on iTunes.

TRANSCRIPT

Mike Webb: Hi, I’m Mike Webb, and welcome to the ProPublica Podcast. Each year, the Pulitzer Prize is awarded for outstanding achievement in the fields of literature, musical composition, and journalism. On Monday, April 18th, the Pulitzers announced this year’s winners, and ProPublica was once again honored to be among them. Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein won the award in the category of National Reporting for their outstanding Wall Street Money Machine series, which examined how some Wall Street bankers and hedge funds sought to enrich themselves at the expense of their clients and sometimes even their own firms through sketchy transactions that delayed and ultimately worsened the financial crisis.

On today’s podcast, we brought the two reporters in to discuss their stories, its impact, and what it’s like to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Congratulations and welcome, guys.

Jake Bernstein: Thanks. Jesse Eisinger: Thanks for having us.

Mike: All right, so listen, why don’t we recap the original three stories that you did. Jesse, why don’t you tell us how the Magnetar Trade story came together?

Jesse: Sure. So we were approached by the guys from Planet Money, Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg, in the summer of 2009. And they said. “We’ve done this great piece of radio journalism for This American Life called ‘The Giant Pool of Money,’ but we want a follow‑on piece. We want to know what happened afterwards.” And there had been an enormous amount of journalistic attention shed on the events of September 2008, when the global financial system collapsed, or was on the verge of collapsing. But there had been very little attention paid to the run‑up in late 2006 and early 2007. And we thought that was a great place to start looking for stories. And so we set out.

Jake: Alex and Adam had sort of done this soup‑to‑nuts version of the financial crisis, where they had looked at everything from housing to structured finance, and they had sort of seen the craziness of the boom. But they had felt, while they were doing their reporting, that there was another side of the story that they weren’t getting, which was that people knew that there was problems, knew that there were serious asymmetries that there were issues going on, bankers, people on Wall Street, and that they took advantage of that. And that in taking advantage of it, they may have made the crisis worse.

But they didn’t know exactly where that had happened and who was responsible, and so they sort of tasked us with trying to find that out.

Jesse: Yeah. This sort of basic, essential sort of journalistic question, “What did they know and when did they know it?”

Mike: And what was it that you found?

Jesse: We started looking at this world of CDOs, these bundles of mortgage securities called “collateralized debt obligations.” That was the nexus of the financial crisis. That seemed like a very natural place to look. And what we found was initially a lot of people in the CDO world telling us about a hedge fund out of Chicago that very few people had heard of called Magnetar.

Mike: Why Magnetar? Were they really that big of a player? They were the ones?

Jake: They were pretty big. But it was, we would talk to people, CDO managers and bankers and all kinds of people, and we’d just keep on hearing the same thing. “You really need to look at these guys.” These guys were responsible for a lot of deals, and they sort of epitomized this sense in ’06 and ’07 of folks who were really just sort of inflating the bubble bigger and bigger and bigger, even though they knew it probably wasn’t sustainable.

And what we found out after doing our reporting was that Magnetar was responsible for more than $40 billion worth of CDOs, which is a pretty big figure any way you slice it.

Jesse: Yeah, it was a huge figure. And they were by far the dominant player in going to Wall Street and asking Wall Street to make deals for them. And they would invest in the deal to make it happen, but really what they were doing was betting against the deal in a much greater proportion than they were actually investing in it. And so they had much more to gain from the collapse of the deals than their investment in the deals.

Mike: OK, and then the second story about how the banks allowed this to happen, or how the banks played a role in this.

Jake: Well, for our second story what we really wanted was to quantify this in some way. And so we managed to do some work with this wonderful data firm called Thetica, and they really crunched the numbers for us and allowed us to see sort of what was going in the CDO business. Because we increasingly were hearing that there weren’t that many investors in ’06 and ’07, that people were actually ‑ investors, real investors, real money investors ‑ were leaving the market. Because they kind of saw what was happening. And for other reasons as well.

But the volume of deals kept on growing, and really skyrocketing. So we wanted to know: who’s buying this stuff? So through our analysis of the data we began to see that, in fact, the biggest buyer for one key part of the CDO was just other CDOs.

And it was this huge sort of self‑dealing daisy chain, if you will. So that’s really what the second story was about.

Jesse: Right. And what was happening with those purchases was they were essentially being orchestrated by the banks themselves. The banks actually controlled, dictated, the purchase of parts of CDOs by other CDOs. And the banks were using that to veil, mask their own purchases of the CDOs. So essentially what they were doing was buying their own garbage, which had a wonderful effect of increasing the bonus pools for the bankers themselves that were creating these deals, but eventually led to the destruction of Merrill‑Lynch, the near‑failure of Merrill‑Lynch, the collapse of CitiGroup, UBS.

Eventually the Wall Street collapse, mainly because of CDOs, especially because they were regurgitating this kind of stuff and eating themselves.

Jake: And of course at the end of the day it was taxpayers who were on the hook for this.

Mike: Right. Now what was the broad scope of the third story.

Jake: The third story is we sort of dove deep into Merrill‑Lynch, which was the biggest producer of CDOs during this period, and really tried to figure out something that was kind of a question mark that we had. Merrill‑Lynch kind of did itself in by taking so much of their own product. They were eating their own cooking. And yet why would a bank, which is really concerned about profit and traders who are concerned about making profit because they want bonuses off of that profit, why would they take stuff that was losing money, that no one else wanted?

And so we dug deep into that and we found something that internally in Merrill was called the “subsidy.” And the way the subsidy worked was that the CDO group was not allowed within the bank to keep the stuff they couldn’t sell; they had to get rid of it.

And so what they were doing was they were essentially selling it to another division within the bank, another group of traders who were marking it at close to book value, at close to par. And then the CDO group was sharing its bonuses with that group as an incentive for them to take it.

Which was called the “subsidy,” and which explained how a bank like this could do this kind of thing.

Mike: OK, and last week the Senate issued a report that sort of talked about ‑ that I know mentioned some of your work ‑ and talked about some of the necessary reforms.

Jesse: Yeah. The Levin committee ‑‑ what is it called? It’s the…

Jake: The Permanent Sub‑Committee on Investigations.

Jesse: Yeah, the Permanent Sub‑Committee on Investigations, a well‑known bipartisan committee, came out with an enormous report on the CDO business. Largely on the CDO business, on the sort of financial collapse. And they cited ProPublica’s work numerous times.

Mike: Your work.

Jesse: Our work, which was very flattering. And I think that the central premise of our work, that CDOs were buying CDOs and propagating this machine, keeping this machine going to the benefit of individual bankers. That was a running theme in the report. And then the other running theme was that bankers knew the business was slowing down and took advantage of it. Goldman‑Sachs was the main focus of their report, Goldman and Deutsche Bank. So they’ve got an enormous amount of detail on that. We had focused on other banks: Merrill, Citi, primarily, and the Magnetar trade. But they were thematically very similar.

Jake: The Levin committee found this thread of a lack of transparency and just incredible greed and self‑interest on the part of Wall Street. And that was the same thing that we had found, so they sort of cited our work, particularly about Magnetar, to sort of demonstrate what was going on and what they were seeing with a bunch of other banks and players.

Jesse: And the essence was that there was a conflict of interest, where the banks were serving their interests or the interests of one customer, and not disclosing the genesis of these deals to other customers. So they weren’t saying, “We’re betting against this.” Or, “The hedge fund that helped create this is betting against it, it’s not betting for it.”

Mike: Right. And that was a key point in your story.

Jesse: In the Magnetar story, yeah.

Mike: Right. What other reforms came about because of your work? Or what other impact have you seen it have?

Jake: The jury’s still out, because they’re kind of writing the rules. But the Magnetar story was cited on the Senate floor by Senator Chris Dodd during the debate over what eventually became the Dodd‑Frank financial reform. So that’s sort of still in the process. The SEC has been doing some work around the stuff that we’ve written about. They’ve issued Wells Notices to some of the people who are involved in the Magnetar deals. A Wells Notice is a notice that you’re under investigation and that they might be bringing charges against you.

One of the deals that we focused on was a JP Morgan deal called Squared, and that’s the deal that they’ve looked at. They’ve also looked at some other deals that are under investigation that we wrote about first. That’s one sort of movement.

But there really hasn’t been as many prosecutions and as many consequences for what was the largest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And it surprised a lot of people.

Mike: And you wrote about that in a recent column.

Jesse: Yeah. I think that everybody from the outside is utterly shocked that there haven’t been more people charged, going to jail. From the mortgage originators like Countrywide or New Century to Washington Mutual to the investment banks, Bear Sterns, Lehman. I think that you could make very good cases that some of these banks mislead their shareholders at the least; that were misleading in testimony to the Senate. And that they lied about their books.

Mike: So your work will play a role in some of the lawsuits that end up being filed.

Jesse: I think that, yeah, we’ve already been cited in civil lawsuits. So I think that that’s one place where this is going to play out. And as Jake said, the other place this is going to play out is the SEC. But I think that to a large extent the perpetrators of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression are going scott‑free.

Mike: I want to find out how you guys responded to winning the actual award. How did you hear about it first and what was your reaction?

Jesse: We won something?

Jake: It was quite special. We all gathered around the computer here in the office, the entire staff, waiting for the three o’clock hour to strike and the committee to put up who were the winners. And then we saw our names and knew that in fact it was real. And it’s obviously one of the great honors and pleasures that a journalist can have in their career, so it’s pretty terrific.

Jesse: And I think that we can say with straight faces that we we’re not in it for prizes, but when you win one, it’s quite wonderful.

Mike: People have pointed out that business journalism doesn’t generally do well with the Pulitzers.

Jake: We were very surprised that we would get an award like this, simply because our story’s very difficult. It’s a very complicated story. It really requires some work on the part of the reader, because they have to go with us and really try to understand these things. And it was a hard story to put together. So it’s just very gratifying. And the other thing is, it appears that our series is the first series that was published online before it was in newspapers that’s won a Pulitzer. I think we’ll see a lot more of those in the years to come, but to be the first one is pretty cool.

Jesse: And we were cited especially for bringing this to a level for the lay reader. And I think we took a lot of pride in that. Our editors really worked with us. They worked and worked and worked with us, Steve Engelberg and Eric Umansky, to make our points comprehensible, jargon‑free, accessible to the average reader. And the This American Life guys helped us structure the narrative in a way that was accessible to people and drew them in and drew them along in the story. And so we’re grateful for that. And I think that was one of the great accomplishments of this story, this kind of collaboration and partnership that allowed the storytelling to really come through.

Jake: Yeah, certainly. That was our biggest challenge, is we really wanted this to be something that a general audience could appreciate. And we put a tremendous amount of work in it and we’re very pleased.

Mike: All right, guys. Congratulations. We’re really thrilled for both of you.

Jesse: Thank you.

Jake: Thank you.

Mike: That was Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger. You can see all of the elements in their series at ProPublica.org/wallstreet. And now for our Officials Say the Darndest Things Tumblr Quote of the Week. “I always thought I was gonna have like really cool phones and stuff. We can’t get our phones to work. C’mon guys, I’m the President of the United States! Where’s the fancy buttons and stuff and the big screen that comes up? It doesn’t happen.”

Who said it? Well, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that 100 percent of our listeners identified the remark as coming from President Barack Obama, as he was overheard speaking to campaign donors about White House technology and other issues.

OK, that does it for this week’s show. Thanks to Minhee Cho for producing this podcast and to our former producer Brent Gardner-Smith, for his valuable input this week as well. For ProPublica, I’m Mike Webb. We’ll see you next time.

Transcription by CastingWords

– Provided by ProPublica.org

View full post on All Stories

Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments Monday in a case that could make it easier for corporations to get rid of lawsuits by shareholders angered when their stocks lose money.

The business community is intensely interested in the outcome, as evidenced by a large number of amicus, or friend-of-the-court, briefs filed in the case of Erica P. John Fund Inc. v. Halliburton Co.

It involves a lawsuit by shareholders of construction giant Halliburton. They accuse the company of securities fraud by misrepresenting its assets and liabilities in financial statements.

When the truth was disclosed later, Halliburton’s stock value dropped, making shareholders lose investment value.

Afterward, the shareholders got together to ask a federal court in the Northern District of Texas for class action status to sue Halliburton. Class action refers to a single lawsuit that represents the interests of many people.

They say Halliburton violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Securities Exchange Commission Rule 10-b5.

The shareholders reasoned it would be easier for them to prove they suffered damages in a joint lawsuit than as individuals.

The proof of damages has become the key issue in the lawsuit before the Supreme Court.

The Court must decide whether shareholders must prove misguided actions of the corporate directors caused their losses before they can sue in a class action.

Under current law, a jury decides at trial whether corporate bungling made shareholders lose money.

If the Supreme Court rules damages must be proved before shareholders get authorization for a class action, the number of lawsuits proceeding to trial is likely to plummet, according to securities lawyers.

Legal experts say fewer shareholders would try to sue if they know their chances of reaching trial are small.

Halliburton comes to the Supreme Court with a history of recent controversy.

Oil giant BP accuses Halliburton of shoddy work in construction of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico last year, leaking millions of barrels of oil into the water.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was the company’s president until 2000.

Suspicions followed him into the White House about whether he used his political influence to improperly steer defense contracts to the company. Halliburton has played a big support role for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Shareholders are alleging similar behind-the-scenes moves in the financial statements that led to their lawsuit.

They say the company’s directors downplayed their liability for asbestos claims. They also say the directors misrepresented Halliburton’s likelihood of collecting revenue from construction contracts and exaggerated the benefits from a merger with Dresser Industries.

Later audits revealed what the shareholders say were misrepresentations. Wall Street responded immediately with a sharp drop in the company’s stock value.

Halliburton argues in its Supreme Court briefs there is no benefit to leaving decisions on evidence for a class action lawsuit to a jury.

Instead, a judge should resolve any class action authorization issues before trial, thereby eliminating costly, drawn-out and often frivolous lawsuits, Halliburton says.

The company’s brief also argued shareholders should not be granted a class action lawsuit because the evidence was too weak they lost money from the company’s incorrect financial statements, thereby “sever[ing] the link between Halliburton’s alleged misrepresentations and that market price.”

So far, Halliburton has won at the lower court level.

The Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that before the shareholders can sue for securities fraud, they must prove a stock price decline “resulted directly because of the correction to a prior misleading statement.”

The Erica P. John Fund has not proved Halliburton’s “misleading” statements made shareholders lose money, the court said.

View full post on All Stories

Product Description
Casino Wall Street: A Trader’s Seven-Year Education in Delusion and Deception recounts the author’s experience of trading the markets for seven years, and of losing a small fortune in the process before finally giving up. Aside from the dismal odds of success for the average “outsider” trader/investor, the author explains the reasons why the financial markets in general, and Wall Street in particular, are nothing more than giant slot machines, and like any casin… More >>

Casino Wall Street: A Trader’s Seven-Year Education in Delusion and Deception

It cannot be a reasonable adjustment, if a person has obtained a statement of profit on the stock exchange, and each time he made the same investments. This is because the Indian stock market is a place of liquidity, volatility and volatility related to the definition of three aspects of evergreen stocks and other financial securities, the entire program. Understand the stock market Option Tips. Many people use the market to build retirement savings accounts online. This is best left to who is better prepared to manage multi-currency investment tool in the financial advisor. Have a certain comfort from knowing experts are to prepare their own financial future. There are certain strategies, so you take advantage of the beautiful movements of the stock in the term of office of the advantages of fast. These measures include identifying and responding to persistent organic pollutants and stock prices, volatility play, trade window, day trading low. With the right research and information you can use these strategies, so that any short-term trading profits. You have to believe you can correctly identify the market trend and its impact, however.

The Stock market goes slowly after the start of investment funds. The stock market is not waiting for the place. People get rich people to poor in Wall Street. Even the big boys have lost a lot of rich people’s money is allowed investors to take greater risks. Trading patterns, with the BSE’s market strategy to meet the NSE are never fade, not limit, nor is it down to zero on the number of stocks and exchange control risk factors. To help investors, even in the stock and Nifty Option Tips other related products trading experience, very nice options out comprehensibly. Not in daily trading. Stock market investment is a risky business and variables affecting the stock market every day and often unpredictable. Day traders rarely live in the market are often lost and tied. Online investment account for investors who can exercise patience. As a way to increase revenue or savings market. There are indications that individuals need to be carefully observed, while some of the investment NSE BSE, the market risk or loss of any opportunity to level can be reduced to the maximum possible number of factors. Do not trade in an attempt to earn more money to help the unexpected financial problems. Financial difficulties are a good reason, insist on market uncertainty, and not risk money. Blue chip stocks, for example, you may be linked to plans for years prior to the maturity of your profits. In the case of a value stock, you may stick a few days or weeks. However, this may be the long-term stock, its location within a few dramatic changes in the potential term.

For more information on investing in Stock Markets visit http://www.optiontips.in/

Product Description

The gold rush that is revolutionizing Wall Street and the markets–the story of day trading as it’s never been told
In The Day Traders, Gregory Millman goes behind the scenes to reveal the truth about a modern gold rush that has people from all walks of life playing the market online, in real time, just like Wall Street’s biggest pros. This is the story of the extreme investing scene, where the upside dazzles and the threat of financial injury is dire. And wh… More >>

The Day Traders: The Untold Story of the Extreme Investors and How They Changed Wall Street Forever

D.C., Washington, United States (AHN) – The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission joined legislators and stockholders who want to rein in exorbitant Wall Street bonuses, pinpointed as the prime incentive for large banks, brokerage companies and hedge funds to take excessive risks.

The excessive risk taking, in turn, is being blamed for the global financial crisis in 2008.

The SEC proposed to mandate companies to provide the regulator details of all bonuses paid out to staff as part of their incentive-based pay. The SEC would have the power to prohibit the award of excessive bonuses.

The regulator proposed the oversight over bonuses because of the 2008 global financial crisis, which highlighted the risks large banks place on the financial system and subsequently the national economy. The proposal is similar to regulations suggested by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and required by the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law.

The SEC proposal came right after Wall Street firms handed out performance incentives amounting to millions to their staff while majority of Americans are still reeling from the impact of the crisis.

Bank of America Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan got a $9.05 million bonus in restricted stocks and Thomas Montag, head of BofA’s global banking and markets, got $14.3 million in restricted stocks and $900,000 in cash.

Other companies, in response to pressure from regulators on bonuses, increased instead base salaries. Goldman Sachs gave Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein a $12.6 million stock bonus and hiked his base salary to $2 million for 2011 from $600,000 last year.

Citigroup hiked CEO Vikram Pandit’s base pay to $1.75 million from $1 million.

The SEC proposal would give more teeth to shareholders’ opinion on compensation after the regulator allowed stockholders in January a nonbinding vote on salaries, bonuses and retirement packages.

View full post on All Stories

Product Description
Meet the new leaders of the twenty-first-century stock market-each an Internet stock-trading legend. Each a cyber-guru in the vanguard of the millions of people trading and talking about stocks on the Internet. Each with legions of eager followers and determined foes, and the ability to make stock prices leap-or plummet-at the click of a mouse. Colorful, charismatic, and often outrageous, they are reshaping the way we invest and how Wall Street works.Scam Dogs and M… More >>

Scam Dogs and Mo-Mo Mamas: Inside the Wild and Woolly World of Internet Stock Trading