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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (148353)	7/15/2002 5:39:27 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1577178

This Market's Mess Won't Fix Itself By James J. Cramer 07/15/2002 02:30 PM EDT Throughout this downturn, the Republican position is one of "We don't want to overdo" it, or "no need to overreact." The reason they haven't wanted to "overreact" is that they think the market can take care of itself. What a terrible misread of the situation. If left to its own devices, the market would speak like this day after day after day, because the American people have determined that the market is rigged. Understand, I don't think it is "rigged." If I really thought the whole shootin' match was rigged, I would be selling and telling you to sell everything. I do believe, though, that the sheer number of cheaters and scoundrels and scamsters at the very top of corporate America is much higher than anyone realizes. And I do believe the notion that we shouldn't "overreact" is downright silly. We have created a huge mess, just like the mess of the savings and loan scandals, and we didn't spare anyone in that crisis. We sued, we put people in jail, we took away assets, we created a separate board to clean them up, and we gave that board independence, because we didn't trust the systems that we had in place. Just like we don't now. You could argue that we did "overreact" to the S&L crisis by doing that. But empirically, it worked. Half of the readers probably don't even remember how bad things were back then. Right now it seems we don't have the resolve or the political will to be as tough as we were then on the miscreants. I think that's because the Republicans are worried about overreacting. I am worried that if the president doesn't move harder and tell the House to embrace the Sarbanes bill, with options and independent oversight board regulation, we will end up with true class warfare in this country, with polemicists like Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt ramming through policy. Now that would be a disaster. That would mean that we ain't seen nothing yet on the downside. Chilling. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- James J. Cramer is a director and co-founder of TheStreet.com.