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

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (2742)	7/20/2002 1:10:28 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Debt Valley by Jim Puplava financialsense.com <<...In summary, the largest credit bubble in history created the boom of the 90’s. The American economy rests on a pyramid of debt: debt at the consumer level, debt on corporate balance sheets, government debt, and enormous leverage in the financial markets. The economy and the financial markets are kept alive by a constant infusion of new credit. Stop the flow of credit and the whole system implodes. It is an economic and financial system in badly need of a diet and self-discipline. Until the system is cleansed of all of these credit excesses, there will be no sustainable economic recovery either in the economy or in the stock market. In the words of Peter Warburton, we live in a world of debt and delusion...>>

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (2742)	7/20/2002 2:28:36 PM
From: abuelita	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

jim - maybe it doesn't have as much to do with the monsoon as it does with the price. nationalpost.com{B2C8254D-4614-4B09-A0F6-72AFFB8E469E} In other parts of the world, such as India, consumers rush to buy when gold is cheap, and rush to sell when the price starts to rise. "Indians treat gold as a store of value. A woman's wealth is in her jewellery," says Michael Barlerin from the World Gold Council in New York. Demand for gold in India dropped 40% year over year in the first quarter when the gold price shot up in February.

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (2742)	7/20/2002 4:04:28 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Factors Impacting the Market, and How: Message 17767811

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (2742)	7/20/2002 5:48:34 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Stephen Roach... 'Still Blowing Bubbles' morganstanley.com

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (2742)	7/20/2002 6:00:32 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

SEC Expansion Awaits Funds, Markets Fret By Kevin Drawbaugh WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As scandal pours over the transom of corporate America and swamps Wall Street, Washington regulators are trying to bail out the markets with a thimble. That's the problem the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission faces these days. Everybody agrees the agency -- formed after the 1929 stock market crash exposed rampant fraud -- needs more money, but politics is getting in the way. With investor confidence bruised by seemingly endless revelations of corporate accounting chicanery, Congress and President Bush are pushing to boost the SEC's puny and long-neglected budget, but the hard-pressed market watchdog still is waiting for the actual check. The SEC is poised to hire up to 100 new accountants, lawyers and other professional staff -- a 5 percent increase -- to sharpen its crackdown on scandal-ridden U.S. companies. The hiring will start in a matter of days once Congress forks over the funds. "If that supplemental (appropriations bill) were to pass next week, you would see people hired the week after that," said SEC Executive Director James McConnell in an interview on Wednesday. His wish may come true sooner than he thought. Senate and House of Representatives negotiators on Thursday agreed to an emergency spending bill expected to see final approval next week. The measure includes $31 million for the new hires. The SEC is charged with checking up on 17,000 publicly traded corporations, 34,000 investment company portfolios, 8,000 brokerage firms and 7,500 financial advisers. It's a tall order. Since the Dec. 2 collapse of energy trader Enron Corp. (Other OTC:ENRNQ.PK - News) and accounting scandals at telecoms giant WorldCom Inc. (NasdaqNM:WCOME - News) and elsewhere, the SEC has stepped up enforcement. It's bringing more than one enforcement action a day: as of July 8, it had brought 399 enforcement actions in fiscal 2002, which ends Sept. 30, and is on pace to surpass the 484 actions in all of 2001. A MONEY MAKER In what is shaping up as the largest rewrite of securities markets regulation since the 1930s, Congress has proposed nearly doubling the SEC budget from its present level of $438 million for 2,900 employees, puny by federal standards. The SEC "desperately needs" these increased resources, says Maryland Democratic Sen. Paul Sarbanes, author of a sweeping corporate reform bill. The irony is that the agency actually has been a money maker. It reeled in more than $2 billion in fiscal year 2001 from fees on securities offerings, fines and other things -- five times as much as it spent. The balance will change in the future, as the SEC recently lowered fees on many services. That's why SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt has a good case for a budget increase. In a recent letter to the General Accounting Office, Pitt pointed out that federal financial regulatory agencies like the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. can keep the money they collect to pay their own bills. Passed unanimously by the Senate on Monday, the Sarbanes measure proposes boosting the SEC budget to $776 million in fiscal 2003. The House of Representatives last month voted to raise the budget to the same level, including $76 million to align SEC staff pay with that of other U.S. regulators. Bush has proposed only a $100-million increase in the agency's 2003 budget. For this fiscal year, he has asked Congress for $20 million to let the SEC bring on 100 new staff right away. But that request is hung up in Congress in a deadlock over a supplemental appropriations bill. PAPERWORK A PRIORITY Atop the agency's funding wish-list is a new, electronic document management system "so information isn't stacked in boxes and all over the place," said McConnell. A new headquarters building to accommodate its expanding work force is under way, but it will take at least two years before the SEC can move in. The new building also presents SEC with up-front costs for moving. The agency also needs to beef up physical security after the devastating Sept. 11 attacks, to ensure no files get lost. "We need to make sure the information we have is going to be backed up," McConnell said. "We lost a lot of documents in New York City, and a lot of electronic files, just because we don't have ... robust back-up." The SEC also is moving ahead with a "pay parity" program to raise the salaries of employees who earn less than their peers at other federal financial regulatory agencies, contributing to inordinately high staff turnover. "The president's most recent budget amendment fully funds pay parity for 2003," McConnell said. FASHIONING LARGER SEC Officials are gearing up to reshape the agency, yet lawmakers from both parties have called on Pitt to step down based on perceptions he is too cozy with business and accounting firms. Pitt has dismissed the resignation demands and pressed on with a reform agenda that, while slammed as inadequate by some, dovetails in many ways with proposals from Bush and Congress. Both parties in Congress and Pitt want a new, SEC-supervised oversight board for the accounting industry, as well as a reinvigorated Financial Accounting Standards Board, a private panel that sets rules for U.S. corporate accountants. The legislative reforms and Pitt's proposals still need to be reconciled, but they promise to result in a bigger SEC. "If these new oversight boards are created out of the Congress, we'll need to dedicate staff to oversee them and work with them," said SEC spokesman Brian Gross.