Investors Confidence In SEC Drops
by Mike Fleming - Axcess News
The Securities and Exchange Commission has stood fast in its practice of revealing nothing to the public while at the same time it may hold information that would potentially help Americans make more informed investment decisions. It may even be well reasoned that the SEC uses its power to hold back investigative information so that it does not have to actat all.
The SEC's disinterest in conducting serious investigations and holding publicly traded companies accountable for violations has essentially created an economic storm that has been so severe as to push our seniors back into a workforce that is witnessing some of the highest unemployment numbers
published in years. Some even offer that the SEC's silence insofar as corporate corruption cases are concerned is an issue of National Security. It is no secret that terrorism groups throughout the world have targeted the nations economy.
Political science majors have long lost confidence in the government's role of regulating the publicly traded corporations with the absence of arrests and prosecutions of major Enron and Worldcom figures. To add insult to injury, Kenneth Lay walked away free. Meanwhile the government is spending millions of dollars to prosecute Martha Stewart whose crime was menial compared to what Lay, one the Bush Administration's top donors, reaped on small investors.
A current example of the SEC's poor judgement can be found in the case of eBay, Inc. in relation to their subsidiary, PayPal. Consumers have filed literally hundreds of complaints to various state and federal agencies, including the SEC, over such issues as money market fraud, conflict of interest allegations, insurance fraud and unfair business practices that relate to banking (See, "eBay Facing Multiple Probes by State and Federal Regulators"). The SEC says that it takes such matters seriously, but the company is profiting at a rate that has astonished Wall Street and has an uncanny resemblance to that period preceding the Enron collapse in which investors held that stock in a valuable light.
Enron's stock was virtually worthless overnight. And for good reason, the company was worthless many months before but hid much from the investment world with the assistance of the SEC's silence. Today insiders at eBay have been dumping stock at a record setting pace. There is troubling evidence that, time and again, the SEC has disregarded allegations of trouble on the exchange floor with the larger companies and consciously has ignored serious corporate misconduct which has sent the message to Wall Street that crime does in fact pay. |
