Business Reform

The Obama administration this week will propose the most significant new regulation of the financial industry since the Great Depression, including a new watchdog agency to look out for consumers' interests. Under the plan, expected to be released Wednesday, the government would have new powers to seize key companies -- such as insurance giant American International Group Inc. -- whose failure jeopardizes the financial system.

The road to reforming financial regulations winds through the cornfields, hog farms and cattle ranches of America's heartland, and that complicates the Obama administration's already arduous effort to revamp oversight of Wall Street. Lawmakers from Iowa, Minnesota, Oklahoma and other farm-belt states who sit on the congressional agriculture committees have a surprisingly influential role in the administration's proposed overhaul, which Congress resumes debating Tuesday after its summer recess.

President Felipe Calderon on Tuesday called for a sweeping modernization of Mexico's state-owned oil company, outlining a series of reforms that would allow private firms to assume a greater role in the petroleum industry. "We must act now," Calderon said in a televised address timed to coincide with the formal presentation of his initiative to the Senate. "Time and our oil are running out." The reserves of Pemex, as the oil company is known, could disappear in a decade, officials say.

Henry Ford II was famous for saying "Big cars, big profits. Small cars, small profits." Now a better mantra for the country's second-largest carmaker might be "Big cars, no profits." Faced with crashing sales of big sport utility vehicles and pickups and an increasingly dim financial outlook as a result, Ford Motor Co.

An effort to consolidate industry self-regulation of U.S. securities brokers and dealers moved a step closer Sunday, the NASD said. Members of the NASD, formerly known as the National Assn. of Securities Dealers, approved bylaw changes needed to combine with NYSE Group Inc. and form one organization to regulate securities brokers and dealers. Consolidating the self-regulatory functions of the NASD and NYSE Group into one entity will help end duplication, reduce costs and make U.S.

Since the first Earth Day almost 37 years ago, U.S. companies have been eager to trumpet their environmental good deeds, even when they were more about public relations than clean air or water. But increasingly, corporate America is going green in new, serious and costly ways. After years of being prodded -- and in some cases punished -- by protesters, lawmakers, regulators and, now, even Wall Street, businesses are looking beyond the bottom line.

Congress should revamp securities regulation, shield accounting firms from litigation and take other steps to bolster American financial competitiveness, according to a new report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Echoing other recent studies by business and political groups, the report to be released today by a chamber-appointed commission says that U.S.

The California Public Employees' Retirement System on Thursday took its annual potshot at companies it has identified as corporate underachievers. The $230-billion government pension fund -- the biggest and most influential in the nation -- released a so-called Focus List of 11 companies in its portfolio that staff rated as having subpar earnings and undemocratic corporate governance policies.

With a push from the Bush administration, the Supreme Court is in the midst of steady, if little noticed, retreat from enforcing the antitrust laws that for decades have guarded against monopolies and price fixing. In the last year, the court has relaxed or repealed several rules designed to prevent anti-competitive schemes, and later this month will hear another widely followed case that could dramatically change the rules of the retailing business.

New rules are supposed to make executive pay reports more readable. But a recent Securities and Exchange Commission analysis of the proxies filed so far this year shows they're just as indecipherable as ever -- if not more so, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox told a Los Angeles audience Friday. The SEC asked a consulting firm to grade the readability of 40 proxies filed under new rules that demand "plain English disclosure." Cox was hoping the proxies would read like something in Reader's Digest.