http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/us/politics/22regulate.htmlWASHINGTON — The Obama administration will call for increased oversight of executive pay at all banks, Wall Street firms and possibly other companies as part of a sweeping plan to overhaul financial regulation, government officials said.
The Caucus
The latest on President Obama, the new administration and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.
More Politics News
The outlines of the plan are expected to be unveiled this week in preparation for President Obama’s first foreign summit meeting in early April.
Increasing oversight of executive pay has been under consideration for some time, but the decision was made in recent days as public fury over bonuses has spilled into the regulatory effort.
The officials said that the administration was still debating the details of its plan, including how broadly it should be applied and how far it could range beyond simple reporting requirements. Depending on the outcome of the discussions, the administration could seek to put the changes into effect through regulations rather than through legislation.
One proposal could impose greater requirements on the boards of companies to tie executive compensation more closely to corporate performance and to take other steps to assure that outsize bonuses are not paid before meeting financial goals.
The new rules will cover all financial institutions, including those not now covered by any pay rules because they are not receiving federal bailout money. Officials say the rules could also be applied more broadly to publicly traded companies, which already report about some executive pay practices to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Last month, as part of the stimulus package, Congress barred top executives at large banks getting rescue money from receiving bonuses exceeding one-third of their annual pay.
Beyond the pay rules, officials said the regulatory plan is expected to call for a broad new role for the Federal Reserve to oversee large companies, including major hedge funds, whose problems could pose risks to the entire financial system.
It will propose that many kinds of derivatives and other exotic financial instruments that contributed to the crisis be traded on exchanges or through clearinghouses so they are more transparent and can be more tightly regulated. And to protect consumers, it will call for federal standards for mortgage lenders beyond what the Federal Reserve adopted last year, as well as more aggressive enforcement of the mortgage rules.
The plan is being put together in advance of the meeting of the Group of 20 industrialized and developing nations in London, which is expected to be dominated by the global financial crisis and discussions about better oversight of large financial companies whose problems could threaten to undermine international markets.
An important part of the plan still under debate is how to regulate the shadow banking system that Wall Street firms use to package and trade mortgage-backed securities, the so-called toxic assets held by many banks and blamed for the credit crisis.
Officials said the plan would also call for increasing the levels of capital that financial institutions need to hold to absorb possible losses. But in a sign of the fragility of the economic system officials said the administration would emphasize that those heightened standards should not be imposed now because they could discourage more lending. Rather, they would be put in place after the economy began to rebound.
“The argument some are making is that they don’t want to be stepping on the gas pedal and the brake at the same time,” said Morris Goldstein, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former top official at the International Monetary Fund.
Administration officials are also debating how tightly to supervise hedge funds. A broad consensus has emerged among regulators and administration officials that hedge funds must be registered and more closely monitored, probably by the Securities and Exchange Commission. But officials have not decided how much the funds will have to disclose about their investments and trading practices.
A central aspect of the plan, which has already been announced by the administration, would give the government greater authority to take over and resolve problems at large, troubled companies that are not now regulated by Washington, like insurance companies and hedge funds.
That proposal would, for instance, make it easier for the government to cancel bonus contracts like those given to executives at the American International Group, which have stoked a political furor. Under the proposal, the Treasury secretary would have the authority to seize and wind down a struggling institution after consulting with the president and upon the recommendation of two-thirds of the Federal Reserve board.
Long before he became Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner had sought broader authority for the government to resolve problems at financial institutions that were not under the supervision of bank regulators.
The government now has the power to take over only the banking unit that controls federally insured deposits of large troubled institutions, not the parent company, a limit that could pose problems if large financial conglomerates like Citigroup or Bank of America continued to spiral downward.
In unveiling the regulatory plan this week, President Obama would signal to Europe that he intended to crack down on the risk-taking and other free-wheeling practices by the financial industry that resulted in the global economic meltdown.
France and Germany especially have suggested that the better response is not more government spending but tighter regulation.
The Obama administration has urged European nations to do more to restart their economies through financial stimulus. Mr. Obama is hoping that by showing a serious commitment to tighter regulation he can more easily persuade other countries to increase government spending and stimulate demand by consumers and businesses that would help pull the global economy out of a serious decline.
