OT: Something to Remember Prior to the Elections
Bleeding Investors Flee Deregulated Marketplace - Killing the Golden Goose
San Jose Mercury News --- May 29, 2002
Back in 1994 freshly elected GOP House members marched onto the Capitol steps and declared that the meddling hands of government were holding back American business genius, and they had come to Washington to put a stop to it. Over the next four years they delivered on their promise. Conservatives aggressively loosened regulations on business, slashed the budgets of federal oversight agencies like the SEC and lashed out at regulators they felt were being too tough on industries. They encouraged regulators to defer to what they believed were the inherent wisdom and self-regulating prerogatives of the marketplace. And, they assured Americans that, since doing "the right thing" was in the long term self-interest of corporations, they would.
Now, eight short years later, Americans are faced with a corporate landscape marred by fraud, corruption, self-dealing and deception. Small investors, who during the 1990s invested their savings and retirement funds in the stock market, have suffered horrendous losses - not because they made poor investment choices, but because the companies they invested in had lied on their SEC filings. And, because the public accounting firms whose job it was to audit companies for investors were instead all too willing accomplices in deception.
In their vigor to squeeze more gold out of America's already productive goose, Congressional conservatives nearly killed the proud bird. And now, it is being starved of the very stuff it needs to grow and prosper - investment. Those who fed that goose have slammed their feedbags shut. America's investors have turned their backs on the stock market, saying in effect, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
"It's hard to know whom to trust anymore," Elaine Gould, a San Jose investor, told the San Jose Mercury News. She and her husband decided to hold off on any new investing in the wake of the Enron collapse, the accounting scandals and the dot-com meltdown. "We are watching, and waiting, and disgusted," said Gould, at "the greed that went on," including "analysts persuading people to buy and lying for their own greed so their salaries will be higher." Gould said she would continue to keep her money on the sidelines until she can have confidence that a regulatory crackdown will curb the excesses that led to the current round of corporate scandals.
The Mercury News investigation this week into investor sentiment also revealed those normally submissive shareholders are also becoming more militant in their demands for accountability. At shareholder meetings from E-Trade to Hewlett-Packard to Intel, investors are showing up at meetings and demanding that management justify their lavish pay plans and answer for poor performance. Many are also demanding that the companies they invest in conduct themselves in ways that assure they aren't "the next Enron."
But most investors are still voting with their feet. Through April, investors secreted $420 billion into bank accounts rather than mutual funds, which saw only a $125 billion inflow. Some are going back to investing in things they can see and hold, like gold and real estate. "People are saying: `I'm not going to put money in companies, I'm going to put money in real estate,'" said Joel Kotkin, a fellow at the Milken Institute in Los Angeles who has analyzed historical trends in stock-market and real estate investment.
Of course, there has been no mea culpa from any in the GOP class of '94 whose deregulatory jihad unleashed all this misery on investors. Instead they are on the attack. Democrats in Congress who try to strengthen out regulatory oversight are accused of "meddling in the affairs of the private sector."
Still-bleeding investors disagree. They are clearly saying that, if the last 8 years demonstrate the conservative view of productivity, can we have just a bit more 'meddling,' please. |
