Sec, Stock Market | featured news

Companies can use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to unveil key information about their operations as long as they’ve told investors where to look for it, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Tuesday.

Groupon is going to wait at least a couple of weeks before launching the final phase of its initial public offering because regulators still have questions for the daily deals website and the stock market is too volatile, a person familiar with the situation said on Tuesday.

Standard & Poor's, whose unprecedented downgrade of U.S. debt triggered a worldwide stocks sell-off, is pushing back against a U.S. government proposal that would require credit raters to disclose "significant errors" in how they calculate their ratings.

The Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled a long-awaited plan designed to protect the markets from volatile price swings following the May 6 "flash crash."

U.S. stock exchanges and regulators will likely propose market-wide safeguards to be launched in a six-month pilot program, starting June 14.

The top securities regulator said no single event had been found to explain Thursday's mysterious market plunge, but the shocking drop was unacceptable and additional safeguards were coming.

The SEC and the major trading exchanges agreed that a market-wide "circuit-breaker" system should be established to handle the type of market volatility demonstrated in Thursday's unsettling market plunge.

President Barack Obama said Friday that regulatory authorities were probing one of the wildest trading days in Wall Street history that left investors, government officials and traders scratching around for a cause.