Here’s a switch. XTO Energy, the Fort Worth oil and gas company, promoted two executives last week and cut their pay potential for next year. It also eliminated the chairman’s bonus.

The curious timing of Mack Whittle’s retirement as CEO of The South Financial Group continues to test the boundary of what constitutes a golden parachute at a bank receiving emergency aid from the federal Troubled Assets Relief Program.

As a church pastor, Barry Minkow believes in forgiveness and redemption. As a crusader against fraud and resume padding, however, the born again former corporate con man likes to make his targets squirm.

Lewis Ranieri, who pioneered mortgage backed securities when he worked at Salomon Brothers in the late 1970s and more recently warned against their misuse, is the latest victim of the nation’s housing crisis.

Nate Silver, the Sultan of Stats behind FiveThirtyEight.com, referred to himself as a “poll Nazi” this past week when he criticized the methodology of some pollsters.

CEO Bob Simpson earned about $100 million from the sale of nearly 2.8 million shares of XTO early last week, as he raced to beat the meltdown of the market and his stock.

Risk-taking caught up to Aubrey McClendon, the outspoken energy company CEO who helped fund the Swift Boat attacks against John Kerry four years ago and has been busy touting the benefits of compressed natural gas in TV ads this election cycle.

Using expert consultants is common in business and government. SEC Inspector General David Kotz used one in his report that slams the agency for missing numerous red flags that foreshadowed the collapse of Bear Stearns.

Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons gave nearly $3 million to the American Issues Project so it can run a TV ad linking Barack Obama to 1960s anti-war radical William Ayers and the Weather Underground.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, defended her investment in T. Boone Pickens’ Clean Energy Fuels Corp. during an appearance Sunday on Meet the Press by saying she is investing in something she believes in.

While Bill Allen waits patiently to testify against Sen. Ted Stevens and others in ongoing corruption cases, the Alaska businessman and his children have set up several new companies that deal in energy, construction, real estate, tourism and aviation.

Larry McMurtry’s latest book, titled simply Books, is a memoir of his many decades as a book dealer. One of his favorite activities, he writes, has always been buying books. Lots of books.

It’s not clear what impact SemGroup LP’s bankruptcy ultimately will have on its publicly traded subsidiary, SemGroup Energy Partners. What is clear, though, is how closely the companies share executives.

T. Boone Pickens is spending $58 million on his national marketing campaign to promote alternative energy sources like wind for electricity and natural gas for cars. In the two weeks since he announced his effort, the stock market value of his company that supplies natural gas for vehicles has increased by about twice that amount.

Short-term results “can and will be lumpy,” Fortress Investment Group CEO Wesley Edens told investors after the firm announced first-quarter results earlier this year. When does “lumpy” become something more serious?

Four years later, many of the wealthy donors who funded the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry are still very active in molding public opinion.

If he is successful in acquiring the Pittsburgh Steelers, what kind of owner will money-managing whiz Stanley Druckenmiller be?

Federal regulators closed IndyMac Bank Friday afternoon and transferred operation to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Bringing donuts, Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, got in line at 4 a.m. Friday to buy a new iPhone 3G, just like thousands of Apple fans across the country.

The same Phil Gramm who this week said the economy is not as bad as people think and that we’ve “become a nation of whiners” once tried to peddle so-called “death bonds” to the state of Texas and its teacher pension fund.