Mary Schapiro, America’s new top cop for the securities industry, said the current mass culling of journalists’ jobs is a concern because it could reduce the number of leads that regulators get as they seek to crack down on nefarious behavior.

“It’s an absolute worry for me because I think financial journalists have in many cases been the sources of some really important enforcement cases and really important discovery of practices and products that regulators should be profoundly concerned about,” the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission told the Reuters Global Financial Regulation Summit in Washington on Tuesday.

“But for journalists having been dogged and determined and really pursuing some of these things, they might not be known to the regulators or they might not be known for a long time,” she said.

But Schapiro, who was speaking a day after Conde Nast announced the closure of its glossy business magazine Portfolio only about two years after it launched, held out some hope for the business reporting trade. She said that some journalists should consider applying for jobs at the SEC.

“Investigative journalism actually would be a pretty interesting skill set for us to have. We’ve talked about financial analysis, we’ve talked about forensic accounting being skill sets that we really need — understanding of complex trading, strategies and systems, but it’s one of the things the SEC has to do. It has to really broaden its horizons and bring in people who think about things a little differently than it has historically.”

But what would having Mr/Ms Investigative Journalist working there do for the SEC’s tarnished media image? And how would a hard-nosed investigative journalist respond to all those agreements to let some of the bad guys off with a rap over the knuckles and a small fine (those infamous “did not admit or deny” settlements)?

When he was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox got slammed by many for failing to protect investors during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, including missing Bernie Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme. Now, to add insult to injury, his successor is showing little interest in his pet projects concerning corporate disclosure and accounting standards, and questioning whether at least one of them is even appropriate.

Cox’s interest in forcing listed companies to file financial reports using technology that makes it easier for investors to read and analyze the data became almost an obsession during his time at the SEC from August 2005 until this past January. Indeed, the SEC voted through a rule to require 500 of the largest public companies to begin filing their reports with the technology known as XBRL, or extensible business reporting language, by the middle of this year, with the rest instructed to comply over the following two years.

It is just about the last costly requirement companies want to hear about as they fight for their survival through these doom-laden times. Indeed, in the results of a national survey of CFOs and senior comptrollers conducted by accountants Grant Thornton LLP, that was issued last week, 64 percent of public companies said they had no plans to use XBRL despite the SEC mandate.

Now, they may be getting some relief from new SEC head Mary Schapiro. She made it abundantly clear that XBRL was very low down her priority list when she spoke at the Reuters Global Financial Regulation Summit on Tuesday, and she hinted that the SEC might allow for delays in compliance, though she didn’t know if that would be necessary. “I don’t mean to be dismissive of it in any way — it’s just not one of my highest priorities,” she said.

Even worse, unlike Cox she has little interest in promoting the initiative, though she does acknowledge it could become a useful tool. “I’ve only given I think three speeches and I don’t think those letters (XBRL) have slipped into into any of them,” she said.

Another Cox initiative was the decision to allow companies to use their websites and blogs to release market-sensitive information, and in some cases avoid normal distribution channels, such as BusinessWire, which is part of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc, and PRNewswire, a division of United Business Media Plc.

Schapiro said she had “a little bit of a visceral reaction” to the idea that investors might have to go and look for the information rather than getting it through a broader distribution, though said she would need to study the question more. She also noted that even now some investors don’t have easy access to the Web.

Just to rub it in, Schapiro also said that the SEC would be seeing whether Cox’s original roadmap for a possible move to international accounting standards in the U.S., possibly by 2014, still made sense given the cost of conversion and the current state of the economy.

It looks like Cox’s list of achievements in his time at the SEC may be about to get shorter.

As the president of the American Bankers Association, Edward Yingling has soaked up a lot of criticism of the nation’s bankers in the past year. He has also had to work many hours to fight to ensure that crisis measures by the government don’t cause long-term damage to his members. But the one thing he has had difficulty in coping with is the assault on banking as a profession and links made by politicians and the media between any financial institution that has problems and bankers. He told the Reuters Global Financial Regulation Summit on Tuesday he is angry about the “vilification of the banking industry” given that many bankers had nothing to do with creating the financial crisis. He said the word “bank” appeared in stories in which it didn’t belong. “AIG was not actually a bank,” he said.

Barney Frank indicated he isn’t as disturbed as some other lawmakers by revelations about the pressure that was brought to bear on Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis to complete the takeover of Merrill Lynch in the face of indications that Merrill’s financial position had deteriorated dramatically. Frank told the Reuters Global Financial Regulation Summit in Washington that “there was no right answer” over whether the government should have intervened to make sure the deal was done.

Last week, senior Republican Senator Richard Shelby joined House Democrats in seeking more details after New York’s attorney general said Lewis had testified he was pressured by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to do the merger, or lose his job. Shelby even brought up the question of possible securities fraud over the controversy.

Frank, who is the powerful chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, said that while there may be some disclosure problems over Bank of America’s failure to keep investors informed he didn’t believe it was as simple as saying that Paulson and Bernanke shouldn’t have intervened. If they had allowed Merrill to fail it could have led to disaster, said Frank, who had a less combative and brusque manner than he is sometimes known for in today’s 50-minute Q&A with the Reuters news team.

Frank’s way to avoid such problems in the future is to create an authority that can seize and unwind large institutions that are failing and creating systemic risk for the entire financial system.

VMware may be one of the most successful enterprise software companies of its generation with revenue continuing to grow at more than 50 percent even after it hit $1 billion, but they sure do seem to need a currency risk manager.

The company disclosed last month that its operating margins were hit by $10 million, or 2.25 percentage points, because of the weak dollar. That’s because, unlike many big technology companies which are benefiting from the impact of the declining American currency, VMware prices its products in U.S. dollars rather than the euro and other local currencies where it sells.

Not only that but it suffers a double whammy because it also has to pay operating expenses, such as staff costs, in local currencies.

It all adds up to a sizable problem for a company whose international revenues are growing at a 74 percent rate, and are close to overtaking U.S. revenues – the kind of problem that you think would be addressed promptly through a change in pricing policy and/or the adoption of a currency hedging strategy.

But asked at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York why Europeans were paying in U.S. dollars rather than euros, and why a new strategy couldn’t be put in place quickly, VMware CEO Diane Greene was almost at a loss for words.

After an uncomfortable silence, she said that the company “did not move to native currency and we have been selling in U.S. dollars and we are certainly looking at how to address that.”

Pressed further, Greene said after another hesitation that the company “will get there,” but then stressed that she had to be careful about what she said and asked for questions to move onto another subject.

Wall Street take note: these folks may need some advice.

PIMCO’s chief investment officer Bill Gross told the Reuters Investment Outlook 2008 Summit he expects the Federal Reserve to announce a 25 basis points cut in the federal funds rate on Tuesday afternoon but says much more will be needed.

Gross, who was speaking about three hours before the decision will be announced, said that to put a floor under the U.S. housing market,  the Fed will need to cut the rate to around 3 percent and will need to get the 30-year home mortgage rate for prime borrowers down to around 5 percent. The audio of his comments is attached.

Ford Motor Co acknowledges that it has a poor relationship with its U.S. suppliers and it plans to do something about it.

Global product chief Derrick Kuzak told the Reuters Autos Summit that he and purchasing boss Tony Brown will hold focus groups with chief executives from auto suppliers early next year in an attempt to improve relations, though he doesn’t expect change to come easily.

The auto company’s suppliers got hit by a slashing in its U.S. auto production by almost 30 percent at the end of last year and as a result were understandably not too happy with Ford, said Kuzak.

Not only that, but the suppliers have had to cope with Ford’s very complex platforms, technical strategies and different interfaces across the world. “We are working on every one of the issues,” Kuzak said. “Suppliers are partners. We are intertwined at the hip. We can only be successful if they are successful,” he added.

General Motors Vice-Chairman and head of global product development Bob Lutz said it is time the United States woke up to its lack of influence over the global economy and commodity prices in particular.

He told the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit on Tuesday that in the past when there was an economic downturn in the U.S., the prices of steel, aluminum, rubber and plastic, would fall and margins could begin to recover.

But now, demand from India and China is soaking up any excess.  ”We don’t have that clout anymore in the United States,” said Lutz.

“Whether our demand is up, down or sideways, the world little cares nor long remembers and China and India just suck it all in.”

He said that as a result a further interest rate cut might not be what the U.S. economy needs as it would likely lead to a further decline in the U.S. dollar and higher import costs.

United Auto Workers union chief Ron Gettelfinger still has difficulty in saying nice things about the private equity business.

Sure, he accepts that Cerberus kept its commitment to the union to largely stay out of labor talks over the new contract with Chrysler after buying the automaker and he is prepared to see subsequent job cuts as understandable adjustments given the weak U.S. autos market. But at the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit on Tuesday, he still had time to rip into the behaviour of the buyout firms.

“Private equity firms, a lot of them, they’re vultures, a lot of them are strip and flip. I think that can be said as a matter of fact, there are some of those folks that I almost feel dirty when they leave a room after I have met with them,” said Gettelfinger.

Still, with Chrysler, he said, there really wasn’t a viable option to a private equity buyer. Gettelfinger, does though, understand the contradictory nature of his comments.

“People said I am talking out of both sides of my mouth, maybe I am, I don’t know,” he acknowledged.

Auto-parts maker Tenneco Inc expects that negative cash flow it suffered in the third quarter will be reversed in the current quarter. 

“From a cash point of view today I feel pretty doggone good about the fourth quarter,” the company’s CEO Gregg Sherrill told the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit. 

He said that the negative cashflow in the third quarter had been caused by excess inventory of its South African-made products destined for General Motors.

“It was not an out-of-control situation in the third quarter — it was a very clearly identified problem that we had,” said Sherrill, who described it as ”certainly disappointing.”