The Securities & Exchange Commission may force public companies to disclose more information about how they compensate their lower-ranking employees, but there's a catch: They still wouldn't have to say how much they're paid.

The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) that "The Securities and Exchange Commission plans to propose that companies disclose in general terms how they compensate lower-ranking employees, expanding disclosures for the first time beyond the executive suite."

Something that has bothered me for a while is the deafening silence coming from management in defense of their companies. When their stock values are being pummeled on a daily basis, the fact that they have so little to say for themselves creates further doubt and hurts them more.

I'm not advocating talking heads with smiling faces proclaiming that everything is fine and trying to build confidence with optimistic speeches. I am advocating that they tell us what is working and what is not working, and what their short-term strategy is to ride out the storm or turn things around. When there are things they are concerned about, they should share those too.

Earlier this week I wrote about what a bad idea the SEC's new rule requiring short selling hedge funds to disclose their positions was:

Mandatory disclosure of short positions will expose fund managers to issuer retaliation, frivolous lawsuits and harassment. What's so ridiculous about this rule is that a short position in a stock does not represent ownership of a security, and other than subjecting short sellers to harassment, there is no reason to require that the positions be publicly disclosed.

The SEC failed miserably in its responsibility to protect investors, and now it's compounding that mistake by targeting the wrong enemy.

Happily, the SEC has since seen the light. Short sellers will now be required to disclose their positions to the SEC -- which is fine -- but will not be required to make those disclosures public. If you like PDF files, you can read the announcement here.

What's so hypocritical about this is that while press releases posted prominently on the SEC website were made available for the crackdown on naked short selling and mean trash-talking hedge fund managers, you have to do a bit more digging to find the new announcement that backtracks.

It just goes to show what many of us have been saying all along: the "crackdown" on short sellers was just pathetic grandstanding by an agency that failed miserably in its duty to protect investors from misleading statements by public companies.

The SEC and regulators who have to look at the antitrust implications of Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) using Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) search advertising system should make the companies disclose the financial details of the deal.

But, the two companies are being allowed to cover-up those details in regulatory filings. The partnership, meant to allow Google text ads to run on Yahoo! search pages, should increase the portal company's revenue. It will also create a near-monopoly in the industry because the two companies together have over 80% of the search market in the U.S.

According to Reuters, "Yahoo has said it expects to generate an additional $250 million to $450 million in additional cash flow in the first 12 months after the agreement goes into effect." But, those are estimates and are not based on the substance of the contract between the two companies that is currently being examined by the federal government.

The SEC has favored significant disclosure on almost all important corporate financial and operating information. It seems that Google and Yahoo! have dodged that.

Douglas A. McIntryre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Newspapers and blogs have been on fire after Apple reported its earnings with speculation about the health of its chairman and CEO Steve Jobs. Is the pancreatic cancer he dealt with in 2003 back? Why is he so thin?

BloggingStocks' Peter Cohan wrote that "The Times quotes Charles R. Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Company, who suggested that without Jobs, Apple stock could easily lose a quarter of its value in an instant. I agree. And that's why I think it's time for Apple to formally disclose Jobs' condition to shareholders."

That makes perfect sense: Jobs' health is clearly material to Apple shareholders, and it would be good for the company to disclose, in the form of an 8-K, what exactly is going on. It's time to put the rumors to rest.

But here's the problem: How far do you take that? Should companies have to tell their shareholders everything about their top executives' personal lives that could impact their job performance?

This could get messy in a heartbeat. Imagine a proxy statement that, in addition to the usual report of the audit committee, also included an opinion from Dr. Phil on the state of the CEO's marriage, and whether his son's drug problems were depressing him and taking his time and focus away from the company's operations.

If you agree that companies should update shareholders on an important CEO's health, then it isn't such a stretch to suggest that other personal factors impacting job performance should be disclosed too. But who would want to be the CEO of a company where one's personal life is exposed in Perez Hilton-detail in SEC filings?

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted unanimously to consider changes to help investors compare choices in the nearly $12 trillion mutual-fund industry through use of summary information. Here's a link to the actual press release from the SEC itself.

Though not a binding vote (passage of the changes would require a second SEC vote), the proposed changes sound like a relatively good thing for investors. Investors looking at mutual fund investments would have more "plain-English" sales and disclosure literature to access. In addition to a full-blown prospectus that each mutual fund publishes, a greater use would be made of summary information through a variety of channels, including greater use of the Internet.