To follow up on Steve Taub's blog from the other day, more companies are running into resistance from shareholders to what they see as excessive executive compensation.

True, the latest rebellions are occurring in the UK, but governance practices increasingly know few boundaries, or at least find the pond not much of one.

The violent backlash against the rescue plan that Europe has come up with for Greece should be a warning sign for those who think the bond market should rule public policy.

Yes, Greece must get its act together in terms of the black market and corruption, and tighten its belt on public finances. It simply has no other choice. But austerity isn't going to help the country repay its debt, not when the global economy continues to suffer from weak demand.

This suggestion for tightening up the rules for issuing private placements would go a long way toward addressing the fundamental issue in the Goldman Sachs case.

By increasing the legal liability for fraud, underwriters would have more incentive to disclose the risks in private placements like the Abacus deal, and that would cut through all the back and forth over whether sophisticated investors have enough information to compete with those on the other end of such deals.

Either Andrew Sorkin or Warren Buffett is wrong about the due diligence that was possible for investors to undertake on the dodgy securities in the Abacus deal that are at the heart of the SEC's case against Goldman Sachs. Or perhaps both Sorkin and Buffett are wrong.

Sorkin says Buffett has no sympathy for the investors who lost money on the deal, chiefly the German bank IKB and the Dutch bank ABN Amro.

Lost in the hubbub over the end of the GOP filibuster of bank reform and Goldman Sachs' role in the crisis that spawned the need for it is the news that Tim Geithner's spine has stiffened on what exactly to do. Or at least that's how I read this Times article.

I'm talking about Geithner's position on the so-called bank tax. Several months ago, he threw cold water on the idea of a special levy on banks, despite pressure for such a tax from his European counterparts.

Goldman Sachs' defense of its actions in creating the Abacus deal that landed it in hot water with the SEC rests on the bank's claim that its role was that of a market maker, not an underwriter.

Essentially, the bank is saying it was doing nothing that market makers don't normally do when taking the other side of a deal to execute a client's trade.

One bit of commentary I've noticed in the blogosphere following yesterday's Goldman show is that the bank could toggle back and forth between being an investment advisor and a broker dealer when it came to any fiduciary duty it owed to investors in its crappy mortgage deals.

That may or may not be a loophole that needs closing, as Senator Collins' line of inquiry suggested. Surely, banks like Goldman shouldn't be able to use it as such.

I didn't catch yesterday's Beltway circus act over Abacus et al except for a few silent TV close-ups afterward of sweaty, tight-knitted brows and Carl Levin's 40-year old reading glasses perched perfectly at the tip of his warty nose, this while downing a few with Matt Quinn and a couple of former colleagues. Oh, and I did notice that the senator has a potty mouth.

So I will leave the lawyering as well as the moralizing to others.

It's hard to see why CFOs who want to use derivatives to hedge risk would oppose efforts to improve the transparency and collateral backing swap trades. But according to this New York Times article, such opposition persists.

As we reported last week, however, proposals to require trading of standardized derivatives through exchanges or at least settle the transactions through central clearinghouses would require counterparties to post more collateral but mitigate, at minimum, any increase in cost through narrower spreads between bid and asked prices.

Paul Krugman's column today called my attention to a paper that anyone interested in financial reform should check out.

The paper completely contradicts the conventional wisdom that innovation in finance is a good thing.