From the category archives:

JPMorgan

Outrage of the Week: Harsh is the Tether That Does Not Bind When Shareholders Face Say on Pay

May 22, 2008

Owners of American corporations have rarely spearheaded the kind of landmark reforms the capital markets have needed to ensure public confidence or avoid the club of government regulation. They are reprising their Laodicean roles by failing to force a say on executive compensation. More than a decade ago, we described the growing trend of inflated [...]

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What the Fed Could Learn From a Jar of Jif Peanut Butter

May 15, 2008

We have cast a skeptical eye in recent months on the Fed’s response to the subprime meltdown, and its handling of the Bear Stearns bailout. In The Wall Street Journal today, Greg Ip writes: (subscription required) Since the credit crisis began last August, the Fed has expanded the volume and types of loans it is [...]

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The 29 Billion Dollar Men

April 16, 2008

If you see a lot of people going around with neck collars soon, it’s probably because they got whiplash when reading today that the top 50 hedge fund managers last year earned $29 billion. The number-one winner, John Paulson, made $3.7 billion in 2007. If the U.S. Treasury issued them, and it may have to [...]

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Outrage of the Week: Missing the Roles that Dimon, Fuld and Immelt Played as New York Fed Directors in Wall Street’s Big Bailout

April 11, 2008

The absence of any discussion concerning all the roles held by these important Wall Street figures, including in the governance of the Fed itself, does a disservice to the stakeholders who are entitled to all the facts. It is widely held, even by Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, that the Federal Reserve System helped to [...]

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Did Bear Stearns Really Have a Board? | Part 2

April 2, 2008

Bear Stearns’s collapse confirms that excessive CEO pay, along with the feeble corporate governance that permits it, continues to be one of the most corrosive forces in modern business. It offers further evidence that, far from aligning pay with performance, oversized compensation induces risks that lead to disaster. It comes at a price that is [...]

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Did Bear Stearns Really Have a Board? | Part 1

March 25, 2008

How this 85-year-old icon of Wall Street was governed was also a clue as to how it might fail. When rumors were circling the company and threatening its survival, it responded by issuing a strong statement denying liquidity problems. The board agreed. But astonishingly, the company disintegrated less than 48 hours later and was quickly [...]

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Prisoners of Irony: America and the Fallout from the Bear Stearns Bailout

March 17, 2008

Americans cannot permit free enterprise to reign just when CEOs and companies are making piles of money only to have it replaced by socialism when they are teetering on disaster. It was the kind of deal you might expect to see among business and government cronies in China. A large bank gets into trouble. Another [...]

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