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The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday approved changes that make it easier for shareholders to nominate directors of public companies.
The 3-2 vote allows groups that own at least 3 percent of a company’s stock to put their nominees for board seats on the annual proxy ballot sent to all shareholders. The new financial overhaul law enacted last month gave the SEC the authority to make the change. Get the full story »
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Charles Evans said Tuesday the economic recovery is “extremely modest” but he believes it’s unlikely the economy will fall into a double-dip recession. Get the full story »
The viability of community banks is threatened by policies that have conferred “too big to fail” status on larger banks, reducing their cost of capital, Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Thomas Hoenig said on Monday.
Hoenig, in prepared testimony to a field hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations here, said the community bank model was still viable, especially if allowed to compete on an equal footing with larger banks. Get the full story »
The Treasury Department said Friday that the nation’s housing market “remains fragile” and reported that far fewer delinquent mortgage borrowers received loan modifications through a federal government program in July than they did in June. Get the full story »
The U.S. government proposed major changes Thursday to the way it works with companies to fight disease threats such as flu, including reform at the Food and Drug Administration and setting up centers to make vaccines quickly.
The report from the Health and Human Services Department said the U.S. ability to respond to new outbreaks is far too slow and it lays out a plan for helping researchers and biotechnology companies develop promising new drugs and vaccines. Get the full story »
Lobbyists for phone, cable and Internet companies including Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. met Wednesday to again try to agree on how to manage Internet traffic, three sources familiar with the meeting said.
The sources said the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Google Inc were not involved in the latest industry effort to agree on “net neutrality”, the concept that high-speed Internet providers should not block or slow selected information or make websites pay for faster ways to reach users. Get the full story »
Securities regulators will meet on August 25 to consider giving shareholders more power to nominate company directors.
The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday posted on its website an agenda for the meeting next week, in which it will consider whether to adopt the reforms, a contentious issue known as “proxy access.” Get the full story »
Chicago moved up two slots, to No. 6, in an updated ranking of global cities, coming in behind New York, London, Tokyo, Paris and Hong Kong.
The ranking aims to show how much influence a city has beyond its own borders. It was conducted by Foreign Policy magazine, management consulting firm A.T. Kearney and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and comes two years after the inaugural ranking by these same parties.
The top four cities retained their hold over the two-year period, though the ranking also showed growing momentum in Asia and the Pacific, with five of the 10 cities deemed most global. In addition to Tokyo and Hong Kong, those cities included Singapore, Sydney and Seoul. Get the full story »
The Obama administration invited banking executives Tuesday to offer advice on changing the government’s role in the mortgage market. Their response: stay big.
While the executives disagreed on the exact level of support needed, the group overwhelmingly advocated the government should maintain a large role propping up the nearly $11 trillion market.
The Federal Reserve on Monday published new rules aimed at protecting consumers from abusive mortgage practices, including clearer cost disclosures and a ban on payments to mortgage brokers for steering borrowers into loans with higher interest rates.
The Fed said it would ban payments from lenders to brokers based on interest rates paid by borrowers or other loan terms. The final rule, which takes effect on April 1, 2011, will end the so-called “yield spread premium” payments blamed for pushing millions of borrowers into unaffordable loans. Get the full story »
The majority of Americans do not favor making affordable high-speed Internet access a government priority, according to a study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project on Wednesday. Get the full story »
Illinois employers will no longer be able to run credit checks on those applying for jobs under a measure Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law today. Supporters say the move is aimed at preventing employers from turning away job seekers due to poor credit amid an economic crisis that has left many unemployed and struggling to pay the bills.
A deadline Saudi Arabia has fixed for BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion Ltd and local mobile phone operators to address security concerns has lapsed, but the handset’s services continue to operate normally.
The Communications and Information Telecommunications Commission (CITC) on Saturday gave the kingdom’s three mobile firms until Monday before it proceeds with a threat to cut the BlackBerry’s Messenger function for some 700,000 users in the kingdom, a threat which it had already delayed last week. Get the full story »
