The Foreign Investment and National Security Act of 2007 applies to takeovers of U.S. businesses by non-U.S. persons. That law formalized the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to review foreign investments that could impair national security Back in November, I was looking at how the new CFIUS regulations would affect real estate … Read more »
Category: Compliance Bricks and Mortar
Madoff Hearing at the Senate Banking Committee
I will be covering today’s Senate Hearing (”Oversight of the SEC’s Failure to Identify the Bernard L. Madoff Ponzi Scheme and How to Improve SEC Performance“) along with several guest panelists via the interactive discussion below. Please visit this page today at 2:30 pm to join me, Bruce Carton of Securities Docket, Compliance Week editor … Read more »
Rating Agencies and the First Amendment
Rating agencies have long argued that their ratings of securities are constitutionally protected opinions. Many people have pinned some of the responsibility for the financial markets meltdown on the rating agencies. It sure looks like they gave a fair number of these securities a high rating when they were actually toxic. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank … Read more »
Blink and Compliance
I am a little late to the game when it comes to reading some of Malcolm Gladwell’s books. Last week, while on vacation with the family, I managed to read Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The book is about rapid cognition, the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. … Read more »
42
In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 42 is the number from which all meaning could be derived. A group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought. It takes Deep Thought 7.5 million years to compute … Read more »
Radical Transparency
The current buzzword in the markets is “transparency.” Companies want to be more transparent so investors, customers and partners can better understand the company. Some of this came from Enron, whose operations and financial statements were often called “opaque.” With the growing Web 2.0 it is harder to get secrets as anyone with an internet … Read more »
Reliable Investment Advice from Dilbert
New Compliance and Disclosure Intepretations for Regulation FD
As part of the Updates to Compliance and Disclosure Interpretations, the SEC has published new compliance and disclosure intepretations for Regulation FD. I found these CD&I’s particularly interesting in light of the SEC’s loss in the Cuban case. The SEC seems to be providing a better roadmap for disclosure of information. Here are a few … Read more »
Updates to Compliance and Disclosure Interpretations
The staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Corporation Finance has updated a bunch of Compliance and Disclosure Interpretations. Here are a few questions that caught my eye, with a snapshot of the answer. Follow the question’s link for the complete answer. There are many more new and revised questions under the Securities … Read more »
Free and Law Firms
I just finished reading Chris Anderson’s new book: Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Given that I am a lawyer, I kept thinking about how his concepts apply to law firms. Let me say a few things up front. First, this is an excellent book that will make you think about how these concepts … Read more »