* The streak continues.
When jobless claims reach a four-decade low, it’s hard not to feel encouraged about the state of the US job market pic.twitter.com/AxM7YLkmJr
— Steve Benen (@stevebenen) April 21, 2016
* New rules:
Wall Street executives would have to wait at least four years to collect most of their bonus pay and could be forced to return money if their companies lose big under rules being proposed to install one of the last major planks of the Dodd-Frank Act.
The ban on bonus practices that reward excessive risk-taking would strike hardest at senior executives and key employees at financial companies with more than $250 billion in assets, according to the long-delayed incentive compensation measures released by the National Credit Union Administration. NCUA, one of the six agencies that must adopt the rule, voted Thursday to put out the proposal for public comment. The other regulators, including the Federal Reserve and Securities and Exchange Commission, are expected to follow.
The proposal would let companies take back bonuses — even those already vested — if an employee takes inappropriate risks, draws an enforcement action or exceeds a firm’s risk limits and causes a loss. Clawbacks could happen for as long as seven years and would apply even to former employees who have left the company, according to the proposal, which represents six years of combined work from regulators to interpret one of the core provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law.
* Andrew Sprung writes: Minnesota considers a “public option on steroids.”
A bill introduced in the Minnesota state senate last month would create the first real “public option” in a state ACA marketplace. In fact the plan, if implemented, would create a state intervention in the marketplace more sweeping than the public option as generally understood by those who conceived the basic architecture of what became the Affordable Care Act.
* The pressure continues to mount on NC Governor Pat McCrory.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver on Thursday confirmed the basketball league will move its 2017 All-Star Game from North Carolina if the state doesn’t change its controversial anti-LGBTQ law, making the NBA just the latest, along with PayPal and Deutsche Bank, to pull its business from the state in response to the measure.
* Finally, the event that overshadowed all other news today is the untimely death of Prince. There’s nothing I can say that adds much to the accolades being written and broadcast all over the media right now. I’ll simply say that this is the image that moved me to tears.
All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems… But all these stars are silent. You-You alone will have stars as no one else has them… In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars will be laughing when you look at the sky at night..You, only you, will have stars that can laugh! And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me… You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure… It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince
