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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSI who wrote (232294)	2/28/2002 4:02:07 PM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

The reporter for NYTimes said that the day before yesterday on PBS's Charlie Rose. You still don't get it. The PBS panel basically said that the Senate hearing revealed that the debt was revealed in the SEC filings but that the analysts had missed it. So the questions are: Why did the analysts miss it? And why, after granting the exemption, did the Clinton SEC not become alarmed at what Enron was doing with the exemption? For the analysts, none had suspected that the Clinton SEC had exempted Enron from the law. That's why. They had no reason to suspect that Enron was hiding its debt through an SEC exemption. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't have looked. The bigger question is why, after granting the exemption, did the Clinton SEC not become alarmed at what Enron was doing with the exemption? That's what Levitt has to answer, in addition to why his SEC granted the exemption in the first place in defiance of Congress. The bottom line: it was the exemption, not accounting plus the lack of oversight by the Clinton SEC after granting the exemption that allowed Enron to get away with what it did for the time that it did. W/o the exemption, no offshore debt. With exemption and w/o SEC oversight you get Enron.