The SEC, Arthur Samberg, and Pequot Capital have announced a settlement in which, as the SEC press release put it, they "agreed to settle the SEC's charges without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations against them. Pequot and Samberg agreed to pay a total of nearly $18 million in disgorgement of trading profits and prejudgment interest as well as $10 million in penalties. With the exception of certain activities aimed solely at winding down Pequot, Samberg also has agreed to be barred from association with an investment adviser."

It'll be interesting to see whether the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee will now return the $28,500 that Mr. Samberg gave in August of 2007 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee then headed by Senator Schumer. Mr. Schumer is a member of the Senate Finance and Judiciary Committees that were probing the SEC's handling of the Pequot investigation. We wrote about the donation and the SEC case back in May 2009.

From a transcript of today's Presidential press conference:

Okay. Last question, Major.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Good afternoon.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Good afternoon.

Q Two issues. Some in your government have said the federal government's boot is on the neck of BP. Are you comfortable with that imagery, sir? Is your boot on the neck of BP? And can you understand, sir, why some in the Gulf who feel besieged by this oil spill consider that a meaningless, possibly ludicrous, metaphor?

Secondarily, can you tell the American public, sir, what your White House did or did not offer Congressman Sestak to not enter the Democratic senatorial primary? And how will you meet your levels of expressed transparency and ethics to convey that answer to satisfy what appear to be bipartisan calls for greater disclosure about that matter? Thank you.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The -- there will be an official response shortly on the Sestak issue --

Q From you?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: -- which I hope will answer your questions.

Q From you, sir?

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial on the ten suicides at Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, which makes electronics for Apple and other firms: "A young manager killed himself last July after an Apple iPhone prototype went missing, and his final messages to friends suggest he had been interrogated and beaten. In a separate incident the following month, the company confirmed its guards beat employees after the incident was caught on video." Nevertheless, the Journal concludes, "for the time being Foxconn seems to be taking its responsibility to its workers' health seriously and deserves the benefit of the doubt." While the plants are in China the company is based in Taiwan.

China is popular today because the country's positive noises about Europe are credited with sending the stock market upward. But there's a disconnect between the actions recounted by the Journal editorial and Apple's image as a company that empowers and liberates individual creativity.

One of the themes we've been harping on around here is that government jobs often pay more than private sector jobs. The New York Times today carries an op-ed piece by money manager David Einhorn that makes this point: "Public sector jobs used to offer greater job security but lower pay. Not anymore. In 2008, according to the Cato Institute, the average federal civilian salary with benefits was $119,982, compared with $59,909 for the average private sector worker; the disparity has grown enormously over the last decade."

After Blackstone Group strategist Byron Wien uttered the apparently unutterable truth that "The retirement benefits for state workers, really not only in New York, California and New Jersey but throughout the country, are very generous, too generous," the New York City pension funds, whose boards include a bunch of Democratic politicians and union officials, demanded that he retract the comment while making threatening noises about what they were planning to do about the $750 million they have invested with Blackstone, Bloomberg News reports.

The president and CEO of the National Federation of Independent Business, Dan Danner, has an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal spelling out some of the problems with the new health care law:

Adding insult to injury, the law also requires all businesses to issue IRS 1099 forms to document every business-to-business transaction of $600 or more. To someone who's never run a business, this may sound like nothing. But Congress hopes to raise $17 billion in added tax revenues and fees from this new mandate. That's hardly nothing.

The burden of raising that expected revenue falls again on the backs of small business owners who already suffer under unmanageable federal paperwork burdens. What's worse, this new reporting requirement has absolutely nothing to do with health-care reform. It was included to help pay for the nearly trillion-dollar price tag of the bill. Why should small business owners have to pay for a bill that causes them so much harm? They shouldn't, which is why NFIB is fighting against this law in court.

Democrats are working "to impose the most punitive tax rates on investment income in recent American history," reports a Wall Street Journal editorial, calling the effort to raise taxes on the "carried interest" of money managers "merely the first step in an effort to tax all capital gains as regular income."

At least one black conservative is unimpressed by the spectacle of all the conservatives rushing to condemn Rand Paul for his initial take on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Larry Elder writes:

Rand's critics also unintentionally expose the condescending way "compassionate conservatives" deem that blacks -- still standing after slavery and Jim Crow -- are in need of protection by rare "noble" whites from the bigot-infested world through which blacks are obviously incapable of navigating. Why else throw overboard the just and basic principle that private actors, short of engaging in force or fraud, should behave as they wish?

A lot of people probably are tired of this issue by now, but if you aren't, Mr. Elder's whole column is worth a read.

"From 2000 through 2008, sales of 'Atlas Shrugged,' which was published in 1957, averaged a remarkable 166,000 a year. Since Barack Obama took office, more than 600,000 copies have been sold," George Will writes in his column, which is about a U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin.

New York magazine sees past Warren Buffett's image: "Look beyond Buffett's old-timey outsider shtick, the circus of an annual meeting, the notion that all he does is drink Cherry Coke and play online bridge with Bill Gates, and he's just another Wall Streeter." And: "In some ways, he might be even more extreme, because his outsize reputation means he often gets a free pass on behavior that others get called out on."

This is a point we've been making regularly around here in our coverage of Mr. Buffett. Thanks to the reader-participant-content-co-creator-community member-watchdog who sent the link this morning.

Vice President Biden has booked 300 seats for his entourage at the opening game of the World Cup soccer match in South Africa, the London Review of Books reports. (Via The Browser.)

My former New York Sun colleague, Liz Peek, has a dispatch from the New Jersey governor's appearance at the Manhattan Institute: "Yesterday I fell for an overweight married man from New Jersey..." Here is a link to Governor Christie's prepared remarks.

Binyamin Appelbaum, the New York Times reporter responsible for that surprisingly good and skeptical piece the other day on financial "reform," is becoming a byline to watch for in that paper. Today's installment from Mr. Appelbaum: "one of the most consequential decisions about new restraints on the banking industry — how much more capital banks should hold in their rainy day reserves — is being decided not on Capitol Hill but far from Washington, by a committee based in Basel, Switzerland."

More: "The world's largest banks have responded with consternation, arguing that the proposed standards would tie up too much money that otherwise could be used for lending, a loss that would curtail economic growth....For instance, analysts for JPMorgan Chase estimated that banks would need to raise prices by 33 percent to maintain profits. They also predicted that the Basel proposals would reduce the gross domestic product of the United States by 'a multiple' of $30 billion."

Thomas Friedman has a really excellent New York Times column today on Iran and Brazil that would have been even better had he asked Lula's big cheerleader, Jamie Dimon, for a comment.

In the Washington Examiner, Timothy Carney gets a piece of the story on Washington lobbying firm Brownstein, Hyatt. He reports:

In a June 2007 banking committee hearing, Schumer used his chairman privileges to praise a staffer: "This is the last hearing for somebody who has served this committee and me and the people of New York and America extremely well, and that's Carmencita Whonder, my banking person, who's going on to other things."

Those "other things," included (1) lobbying Congress on behalf of hedge funds, and (2) raising money for Schumer from hedge funds.

When the K Street firm Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Schreck announced Whonder's hire, they quoted Schumer's on-the-record praise in the press release -- including his telling description of her as "my banking person" -- which couldn't have hurt Whonder's client recruitment.