This is the disclosure gap worrying the SEC?
In what we first took to be satire from The Onion, the SEC has ruled that companies should warn investors of global warming risks. The story can actually be found in the 1/27/10 New York Times.
After a couple humiliating years of being behind the curve on protecting investors, and despite being still short of manpower, the SEC has nonetheless found the time to address one of the most alarming deficiencies in corporate disclosures that exists today: the absence of boilerplate in every 10-K addressing the problem of global warming.
A better idea: let investors know that “legislation concerning global warming” (as opposed to global warming itself) poses a risk to business. But given that 10Ks can’t possibly be long enough to encompass all the bad potential legislation out there, maybe companies just need to disclose that “Your government poses a myriad of potentially devastating threats to our and all businesses. Please call your Congressman if this worries you.”
UPDATE: this video from 1/29 at WSJ’s News Hub makes our points and even steals our opening quip:
