For those of you who aren’t aware that there is this thing called a “Fox Business Channel” which tens of Americans watch everyday, most believing that they are tuning into FearNet, well… there’s a Fox Business Channel. And if you were lucky enough to be, say, trapped under a heavy piece of furniture in your own home, and unable to reach the remote to change the channel, you might have seen a segment on SEC regulations, featuring Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com.


 
 President Barack Obama says Americans’ values are offended by excessive paychecks for executives whose companies were bailed out by taxpayers. Speaking at the White House on Thursday, Obama praised the Treasury Department’s decision to order seven big companies that haven’t paid back last year’s government bailouts to halve their top executives’ average compensation. But he said more must be done, and urged Congress to pass legislation to give shareholders a voice in executive pay packages


 
 Shares of Ameriprise Financial Inc. surged to a new year high Thursday after the financial services company posted a third-quarter profit that beat Wall Street’s expectations, prompting an analyst to upgrade the stock. The stock added $2.23, or about 6.3 percent, to $37.72 in afternoon trading.

It would be hard to dream up a story as incredible as this: The same financial institutions that drove a record foreclosure crisis, sent our economy into a deep recession, and needed billions upon billions in taxpayer bailouts are spending money like never before to defeat financial reform that would prevent a future meltdown. The meaning of this incredible story in the lives of everyday Americans couldn’t be more disparate than that of the continuation of life in the clouds for Wall Street CEOs.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve for the first time would police banks’ pay policies to ensure they don’t encourage employees to take reckless gambles like those that contributed to the financial crisis, according to a proposal unveiled Thursday. Unlike a Treasury plan to slash pay at certain companies that were bailed out with large sums of taxpayer money, the Fed proposal would cover thousands of banks, including many that never received a bailout.

For months now, the lobbyists for America’s Health Insurance Plans have been publicly expressing support for the Democratic health-care reform bill — at least in its broad strokes. And yet, it didn’t come as such a big surprise really on Thursday morning when a top lobbyist for AHIP urged Republicans in Congress not to support Democratic reform proposals because doing so would be “giving comfort to the enemy who is down.” Steve Champlin, a lobbyist for the Duberstein Group who represents AHIP, made those comments at an AHIP conference. The only real surprise was that he was so blunt — and in public.


 
 Fiserv, Inc. has released version 5.6 of its Investment Management Solution. The solution is a soup-to-nuts trading platform that supports everything from account screening and portfolio validation to order generation and trade execution.