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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (1307)	1/17/2001 7:53:59 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 93284

Levitt Says He'll Pursue Shareholders' Interests By Kathleen Day Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, January 17, 2001 ; Page E02 Individual investors deserve a scorecard to monitor how their representatives and senators vote on shareholder-protection issues, outgoing Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. said in an interview yesterday. Levitt said he expects to help create such a scorecard when he steps down from the SEC early next month, but he added that he has not worked out details. "I don't know exactly what I will be doing, but I will continue to champion the cause of the individual investor," he said as he traveled by train from Washington to Philadelphia, where he later delivered a speech urging investors to become active in the politics surrounding financial services legislation and regulation. "I want to alert investors to the importance of the political process to shareholder interests," he said. "They need to know when they vote for their congressman or their senator: How did they vote on investor issues? What is their record on these issues?" Securities lobbyists already have been preparing to try to persuade the incoming Bush administration to reverse some of the rules the SEC imposed on the industry during Levitt's eight-year tenure. The rules are intended to give investors faster, better information on a range of topics, from mutual fund fees and auditor independence to situations that could move an individual company's stock up or down. The securities industry has particularly targeted a rule adopted in August known as the full-disclosure regulation. It forbids executives from giving potentially market-moving information about a company to analysts before making it available to the public. Levitt said he doesn't expect industry to persuade the Bush administration to roll back the fair disclosure rule after he leaves. But he nevertheless warned investors that they must become more active politically to counter the influence ofsecurities, banking and accounting firms on lawmakers and regulators in Washington. The ability of shareholders to do just that was demonstrated earlier this year, when a torrent of some 6,000 e-mails and letters from individual investors to the SEC helped the agency adopt the full-disclosure rule, despite heavy protests from Wall Street. "Until individuals weighed in on that regulation, I think it would have been dead," said Jay Perlman, associate general counsel of Alexandria-based Motley Fool Inc., which urged visitors to its investor-education Web site to write the SEC in support of the full-disclosure rule. "It allowed the SEC in their discussions with the Wall Street establishment to hold up those letters and say, 'Look. Individual investors really care about this,' " he said. In the past, individual investors have never been able to organize into a potent political force. But Levitt has said that several factors have changed to make it easier to organize investors, including the Internet, the surge in the number of individual investors, and even the market downturn. "Remember, these are your markets," Levitt told the audience last night. "You, the individual investor, has risen tobecome a force America's marketplace cannot ignore." washingtonpost.com © 2001 The Washington Post