Yes. All this is true. However 'we', the investors, share some blame, too. After all, capitalism enshrined in the equities markets, though much better than any other system designed so far, is built on both information and greed. Not only the greed of the money amangers and corporate crooks, but our own greed as investors/speculators. Bad (untruthful or unshared) information + greed = the results we've seen from these high-flying crooks.
Sorry to say that a few ethics courses in business schools may only be salve, rather than radical surgery for our best and brightest...the 'me' generation.
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By Bill Mann (TMF Otter)
November 6, 2002
"Several months ago, we opined that investors would gain some confidence in the U.S. stock market when they began to see the masterminds of the big corporate scams doing perp walks.
Well, we were wrong. In the last few weeks, Andrew Fastow, the Enron CFO whiz kid who engineered the myriad off-balance-sheet rat holes to hide
company debt, was arrested. A few days earlier, two former top Tyco (NYSE: TYC) executives, Mark Swartz and Dennis Kozlowski, were charged with theft of some $400 million. Tyco responded by suing to recover a severance
package of $45 million paid to Swartz. He is fighting, saying that he negotiated the severance in good faith. To which I say, "Good faith?! How dare you?"
I haven't lost directly from the big corporate scandals, though I didn't get rid of Qwest (NYSE: Q) when I first had doubts about the veracity of its top brass. But these scandals have hurt all of us; they've jolted our confidence in the U.S. markets. And mostly, they let us know just how little some people in power care about the "good faith" investors put in them."...
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