Barney doesn’t want to get frank
Watch video here of a testy exchange on the issue of regulation of executive compensation between CNBC’s Mark Haines and Democrat Rep. Barney Frank. Frank didn’t like the line of questioning so … he walked out of the interview.
This isn’t the first time Frank, the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, has had a heated exchange with a cable TV news host. Bill O’Reilly ripped into him last October for his significant role in the collapse of the banking industry, and Frank lashed out at him in turn.
And speaking of regulating executive compensation, check this out:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration struck a delicate balance on executive pay Thursday, blaming flawed compensation packages for encouraging disastrous risk-taking but insisting it doesn’t want to dictate how corporations reward their top people.
Gene Sperling, a top counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, conceded to a congressional committee that imposing compensation caps on companies could lead to a flight of talent.
“I can say with certainty that nobody in the Obama administration is proposing such a thing,” he said.
Yet, at the same time, he and officials with the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission laid out a case for how payment structures rewarded short-term gains at the expense of long-term performance and contributed to the nation’s financial crisis.
The administration plans to seek legislation that would try to rein in compensation at publicly traded companies through nonbinding shareholder votes and by decreasing management influence on pay decisions.
But some Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee said Thursday the administration’s efforts to hector the private sector into reforming executive pay might not go far enough.
“I do differ with the administration in that hope springs eternal and their position seems to be that if we strengthen the compensation committees we will do better,” said the committee chairman, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.
On top of all this, make sure to read how the government is slowly but surely taking over yet another industry, this time, the tobacco industry.
Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.