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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (2399)	7/17/2002 10:15:32 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Lend Half an Ear to This Doomsayer biz.yahoo.com <<...Prechter comes to this conclusion less from economics than psychology, his major at Yale University. Later, while at Merrill, he picked up the "wave" theories developed during the Depression by an accountant named R.N. Elliott. These hold that market prices follow definite patterns driven by a natural rise and fall in human emotions. In this deterministic scheme, the higher that emotions--and markets--rise, the further they must eventually fall under the weight of an economywide accumulation of too much debt and the ensuing defaults. So in his Elliott Wave charts, Prechter sees an inevitable stock market collapse that has already begun, an economic depression, and a breathtaking deflation in the prices of most every type of asset. Houses worth $500,000 today will wind up going for $150,000--or less. Banks and insurers will fail, so Prechter's book points readers to those with the safest balance sheets. Given such a climate, he thinks George W. will be another single-term Bush. "Most radical political developments occurred at or near social-mood bottoms, which also were major stock-market bottoms," he said...>>

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (2399)	7/17/2002 10:31:23 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Harvey Pitt: Can 'pit bull' be a good SEC watchdog? By Ron Kampeas The Associated Press Wednesday, July 17, 2002 WASHINGTON — The government's securities watchdog catches a highflying company reporting losses as gains. Investors are devastated, but the chief executive officer won't admit wrongdoing and hires the best securities lawyer in the business — known to friends and rivals as a "pit bull" — and gets off with a fine. The story is so 2002, right? Wrong. MicroStrategy was caught cooking the books two years ago, and CEO Michael Saylor's "pit bull" was Harvey Pitt. Pitt nowadays is the watchdog. MicroStrategy, Merrill-Lynch, Arthur Andersen, KPMG — Pitt's old client list reads like a rogue's gallery of the corporations accused of driving the economy south. Congressional critics, including a few Republicans, are wondering whether it's a résumé fit for the chairman of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). "It would be better for everyone if Mr. Pitt stepped down," Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said over the weekend, to give President Bush "the opportunity to appoint somebody totally independent." MicroStrategy, a marketing-analysis-software maker fined $11 million to settle fraud allegations, was not the only Pitt client to classify losses as gains. In 2000, America Online paid a $3.5 million fine for counting the computer disks it mass mails as assets — based on projected earnings — instead of an advertising cost. And a 1990 SEC memo shows that Pitt persuaded the agency to allow Arthur Andersen to continue its "indirect" business consultancy with a client it was auditing — the same pretzellike arrangement that eventually bedeviled the accounting firm's relationship with Enron, the failed energy trader. (The 1990 memo does not name the Andersen client.) Pitt says defending unsavory clients is par for the legal course. "This guilt by occupation is really a needless diversion," said Pitt, who has strictly followed SEC rules that require commissioners to remove themselves from adjudicating former clients for their first year on the job. Not all critics hold Pitt's past against him. David Yellen, dean of Hofstra University Law School in Hempstead, N.Y., said forcing him out because of past clients is a precedent that would make filling the job nearly impossible. "If you want to bring in someone with a breadth of experience, you want someone who has been in private practice," Yellen said. "And any private attorney is going to represent people who have done questionable things." Arthur Levitt, the last SEC boss now canonized by Democrats as the anti-Pitt because of his tough regulatory policies, is also riled by the tactic. "The fact that he represented the accounting profession does not disqualify him in any sense from being able to deal with those issues, any more than the fact that I chaired the American Stock Exchange disqualified me from dealing with market-structure issues," Levitt said. More troubling than his former clients, his critics say, is the laissez-faire philosophy that he evinced in defending them and that he would not abandon that philosophy when he assumed the SEC job. But Pitt has announced tougher regulations, including requiring clearer and earlier debt statements by companies in trouble. David Ruder, who chaired the SEC from 1987 to 1989, said that Pitt is aggressive in pursuing wrongdoers but that his professorial style has kept him from claiming credit where it is due. "He could have launched a more vigorous, defensive campaign," Ruder said. "Take the list (of new rules) and put it out there!" Instead, they appear on the SEC Web site under the bland rubric "Regulatory Actions." Some critics have shifted gears in recent days, suggesting that Pitt is less the problem than the administration that sets his policy. "It's the atmosphere that has been created by the president, by the Republicans over the years," said Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y. "You can get rid of Harvey Pitt tomorrow, and you're still going to have the problem."