ON Securities

At Thanksgiving, our thoughts naturally turn to gluttony of all sorts. So it seems like a fitting time to recognize a few companies for granting awards to their executives that look so ridiculous they practically beg Congress to speed up compensation reform. . . . So pass the cranberry sauce and gravy, here are my nominees for the “Compensation Turkeys of the Year”, all reported by footnoted.org in the past few weeks . . . . Of course, Goldman Sachs makes the list for its announcement that it is setting aside around $17 billion for compensation and bonuses, calculated to be more than $700,000 on average for each of the company’s 31,700 employees. . . . Last week I reported that RiskMetrics Group came out with its 2010 updates to its proxy voting guidelines, summarized here. . . .

Several new reports have been published that provide valuable information about what’s going on in the public company world . . . . Pearl Meyer & Partners released a survey report covering companies’ attitudes toward Say-on-Pay, which is currently required for TARP recipients but will not be required for other public companies until at least 2011 . . . . Frederick W. Cook & Co. released a report of its study of non-employee director compensation at the 100 largest New York Stock Exchange companies and the 100 largest Nasdaq companies . . . . One more update – hot off the presses: I noticed that RiskMetrics today published some of its 2010 policy information, which applies to all shareholder meetings occurring on or after February 1, 2010 . . . . [to read more, click on the link above]