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Strategies & Market Trends : Classic TA Workplace -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_K who wrote (45902)	7/17/2002 5:16:05 AM
From: AllansAlias	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 209892

Yeah, went to bed early and work up early. I am an hour ahead of NY time, so it's not quite as early here as you might think. Thanks for posting the update.

To: J_K who wrote (45902)	7/17/2002 5:38:01 AM
From: AllansAlias	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 209892

The blame game: apportioning blame, like regulatory reform, is the sort of thing that happens near bottoms. Hard to time using these events though. Like the indicators that have been flashing buy since March for folks like Hays and Stack, it can go on for quite a while. I have watched with curious indifference the partisan debate about who is to blame. Was it Clinton? Was it Reagan? Here's the trick answer: it was all of 'em and none of 'em. It's fascinating that folks could think it matters who was in the White House when the equities bubble hit the apex. Also, I think we could look at ourselves and find someone to assign some of the blame to. Now we hear the people cry out for reform and the leaders promise to deliver same, not because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the proper political move and, finally, they know they must do it to keep their money-machine humming. It is no more than that. When everyone is stealing money, everyone is a crook; happy to congratulate their great acumen in knowing to buy CHKP and happy to stay mute about that nagging feeling, that any person of conscious would sense, that "something" just isn't right. Anyway, now we are no longer all crooks. What we did during the years of easy money was unfortunate, but who can resist bending over to pick up piles of cash? It's as if we have no standard for conduct that is, well, a standard. The same crooks from the nineties are now speaking out of the other side of the mouths. What's worse, these same crooks are now the sheriffs who will clean up the town. Let's take our man Pitt for example. "If conservatives are serious about blaming him for Enron and WorldCom, they should focus not on Monica Lewinsky but on the decline in white-collar law enforcement that occurred on his watch. But, if they do, they'll notice that Clinton vetoed the 1995 bill that shielded corporate executives from shareholder lawsuits, and his SEC chief, Arthur Levitt, proposed barring accounting firms from consulting for firms they were simultaneously auditing. Unfortunately, Clinton's veto was overridden - a slight majority of Democrats voted to uphold it, but virtually every congressional Republican voted to override. Levitt's proposal was torpedoed as well. By my count, 33 of the 37 members of Congress who signed public letters protesting his reform were Republicans. And the lobbyist who spearheaded the accounting industry's campaign against the Levitt proposal was none other than Harvey Pitt, President Bush's pick to head the SEC. In other words, the '90s moral tone that made Enron and WorldCom possible wasn't Clintonism; it was Gingrichism. And that's one moral tone George W. Bush hasn't changed at all. nypost.com