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...sales trip to Vegas - to name another recent, and recently canceled, source of Washington outrage - is a triviality. The AIG bonuses, on the other hand, are emblematic of the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose nature of Wall Street pay. This incentive structure was a major cause of our current crisis. It is an Important Thing, and the danger in the current Washington frenzy to do something is not that it will go too far but that it won't go far enough...
Members of Congress are talking up bills to levy a 90% or 100% tax on current bonuses at AIG and other financial-industry wards of the state. But if such selective tax increases are constitutional - and it appears that they can be - another approach would make far more sense (I am brazenly stealing it from financial blogger Steve Randy Waldman): impose a less punitive (50%?) but retroactive tax on the past four years of bonuses above a certain amount ($1 million?) paid out by any financial institution that receives a bailout. That is, spread the net wider to catch...
Meanwhile, the agencies' business model morphed from one in which investors paid for ratings to one in which bond issuers did. That generated more revenue, but it also created a massive conflict of interest, often cited in the current mortgage mess. In 2006, the SEC took regulatory authority over the agencies, in part because of their failure to ring more alarm bells concerning companies like Enron. SEC head Mary Schapiro is now signaling that the ratings system might need to be changed further, particularly who pays for ratings...
...member governing body of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—the proposed name change to “The Committee on the Study of Ethnicity, Migration, Indigeneity, and Human Rights” would address the numerous academic dimensions that may not be fully represented under the current title. “This new name will better reflect the intellectual work that’s being done in these areas—very exciting work, I might add,” said committee member Deborah D. Foster about the four focus areas featured in the proposed moniker. Unlike...
...School. The proposals were drafted after the Kennedy School requested each of its divisions to submit three budgeting options, including one normal budget with no raises for faculty or staff members and contingency plans for five and ten percent reductions. “We don’t know currently how long or how deep the economic crisis will run,” said Melodie L. Jackson, associate dean for communications and public affairs at the Kennedy School. “At this stage, the contingency plans are designed to try to plan ahead for worst case scenarios...