BofA directors continue to support Lewis
This is a bad sign for shareholders everywhere. The shareholders voted out Lewis as chairman, but the directors want to keep him on as CEO, The Wall Street Journal reports. How is this good corporate governance? The financial crisis will not be fixed until the people who caused it pay for their mistakes. Booting Lewis from BoA would be a step in the right direction.

Buffett faces a grilling from investors
Warren Buffett will be in the hot seat this weekend, the Financial Times says, as he meets with Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Buffett has made some mistakes, such as buying shares in ConocoPhillips at the peak in oil prices and stock in two Irish banks that later cratered. However, I’d rather have Buffett investing my money than any other active manager. He and his associates have demonstrated real skill in picking investments, whereas you could beat the performance of most money managers with a low-cost index fund.  Bonus: WSJ has a good backgrounder on Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charles Munger.

Goodbye Naked Shorting
The Naked Shortseller is a dying breed, says New York Times columnist Floyd Norris. Naked shorting means selling shares short without borrowing them. Many publicly traded companies, especially smaller ones that aren’t performing well, blame naked shortsellers for causing stock prices to tank. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s restrictions on short selling last fall during the start of the financial crisis have all “but eliminated the number of companies where such selling seems to be occurring,” Norris says. I find naked shortsellers to be easy scapegoats for companies that don’t want to fess up to their own problems and bad actions. While naked shorting is a shady practice, short selling itself is good for the market. Shorting helps the market find a reasonable price for stocks and eliminating the practice would encourage more stock bubbles, not less.

CEO pay dives in a rough 2008
This story drives me crazy. USA Today does a survey of CEO pay that misses the point. Of course CEO pay should fall because earnings fell and sales slowed. The story should have answered the question: Did CEO pay fall enough? The lede sentence of the story is terrible:CEOs had a rough 2008. Really? I think shareholders and employees had a rougher 2008.