• While Wall Street executives fret about how financial reform may hamstring their operations, business is booming and jobs are abundant at the Securities and Exchange Commission. [Bloomberg]
• Wall Street, long known for its adoration of Barack Obama, has gotten over its presidential crush, thanks mainly to the commander in chief’s insistence on strict regulation of financial services. [NYT]
• A section of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill will force companies to say by how many orders of magnitude their executives’ pay dwarfs that of the typical workaday grunt. CEOs have concluded that this law will create a “logistical nightmare.” Long division is difficult! [Financial Times]
• On a related note, a recent survey indicates companies are planning on granting meager pay increases to employees in 2011. Those plans, however, depend on whether the economy emerges from the sinkhole in which it currently resides. [MarketWatch]
• Ben Bernanke, Dick Fuld, Sheila Bair and Robert Steel will gather this week for a two-day Panic of 2008 Reunion Concert hosted by Congress’ Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. They’ll play renditions of such classics hits as “Too Big to Fail,” “Financial Meltdown,” and “So Long, Lehman Brothers.” [Reuters]
• “Robo-tripping,” also known as “skittling” — the practice of teenagers getting high on Robitussin — is the latest moral panic, and so regulators may place additional controls on cough medicine. Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, two of America’s leading dextromethorphan dealers, think additional regulation would place an unnecessary burden on law-abiding syrup swillers. [Bloomberg]
