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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: freechina who wrote (44513)	10/31/2005 9:27:16 AM
From: Knighty Tin	Respond to of 110194

freechina, That sounds like the story of the guy who started Paradise Poker. Big bucks for those dudes when they sold out to Sportingbet.com. Bogle is partially right. 1. If it weren't for off the beaten path government people, like Spitzer, there would be zero corporate governance. The SEC steps in on the big names AFTER their story has been reported in the paper. The SEC does do a lot of work to increase paper usage at brokerage and fund companies. The CFTC is even worse. They have almost no oversight of a firm like Refco. 2. Shareholders are sheep, and that includes the big fund and pension shareholders. Enron and Worldcom were not brought down by Calpers or Fidelity or American Funds. They sat around and signed proxies. 3. Fees are way too high. Free market solutions would include having a totally independent Board of Directors, where management can only be non-voting representatives. This doesn't solve everything, as a director is a part time person who doesn't dedicate his life to the company on whose board he serves. He can't know enough when management starts to pull the wool over his eyes. But, if they were all independent, they could demand better explanations of anything they catch. Independent analysts. Access makes whores of most of them, and the ones who speak out can no longer get access to management or the company. Which pretty much ends their careers. Totally separate banking and research. No research analyst can earn a fee on a banking deal or follow a company his company finances. Investment banks and brokers should be separate entities with no fee sharing arrangements. IPOs would all use a model similar to Google's. Make simple majority voting the rule for all corporate proposals. Getting a majority is tough for an outsider. Getting 2/3s, when maybe 5% are dead, many are in trusts, more are in funds, etc., is nearly impossible. Make fund fees dependent on performance over the long haul.