Word: spitzers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Wall Street would love to see Eliot Spitzer realize his immediate political ambitions--becoming, say, Governor of New York or possibly landing a role in a Kerry Administration. Not that financial types wish him well; they just wish he would move on. As New York's attorney general, Spitzer, 44, has pushed through reform of stock-research and investment-banking practices, lobbied for a reduction in mutual-fund fees and left a trail of disgraced executives in his wake. Spitzer carved another notch in his belt last week. After drawn-out negotiations, Richard Strong, the former chief executive of Strong...
Those are high-profile enforcement efforts, and yet they're only two of the 10 cases that Spitzer is personally working on. His caseload isn't entirely about corporate wrongdoing. He's also challenging a federal attempt to pre-empt states from enforcing predatory-lending laws, and a few months ago won a ruling that forced the Bush Administration to reverse its rollback of pollution regulations that applied to big utilities. "The EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] cases are huge," he says. But Spitzer clearly sees Wall Street as his bailiwick; an avid and aggressive tennis player, he keeps...
...sense, Spitzer is taking on the whole clubby system that keeps driving CEO pay higher. Boards stacked with cronies too often still rubber-stamp excessively rich packages. In most cases, CEO pay is a question not of what is legal but of what is right. "The nature of CEO compensation is something that deserves additional scrutiny. One of the things that will emerge from the Grasso investigation," he says, "is the failure of compensation committees to fulfill their obligations." The Grasso case involves some of the most high-profile executives on Wall Street--the people who approved his payout...
...Spitzer's view enjoys broad support among institutional shareholders. "Excessive executive pay undermines the very principles of free enterprise," says Phil Angelides, the California state treasurer and a board member of the California Public Employees' Retirement System. He endorses recent efforts to rein in those eye-popping stock-option grants but notes that CEOs still seem to find a way to get richer at their employer's expense. Grants of restricted stock have in some cases replaced the value of options for executives. Retirement benefits and deferred-compensation packages can also amount to millions of dollars and yet remain relatively...
...serve investors "in the most efficient, honest and economical way possible." In his 50-year career he has never wavered from those principles. Bogle's success in making Vanguard an industry giant demonstrates that it is possible to do right by the customer and still do well. --By Eliot Spitzer, attorney general of New York