Ron Paul vs. SOX

[GoodCallYouWin]

I call this true leadership; honest dissent when it is needed most.





Ron Paul vs. SOX
by Jennifer Haman


[i]Article deleted for copyright reasons. Link substituted.

[adios]

Sarbanes-Oxley is applicable to publicly held companies, one of the reasons we see the trend in taking companies private. A bad thing? I don't think so on it's face. The Enron fraud wasn't facilitated by cheap money. It was facilitated by fraudulant business practices and fraudulant accounting. A complicated scheme to hide round-trip trading in a privately established market in energy capacity contracts inflated Enron's revenue fraudulantly. Ill conceived government intiatives to privitize electric utilities was the driving force behind the market. World Comm made their acquisitions via stock swaps. Might want to read how "serial aquireers" earnings and revenue can be made to look alot better than they actually are. Many market players are well aware of how this can happen btw.

[Poofler]

I thought this was gonna be about baseball. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

[ConstantineX]

It makes disclosure rules unbearable, and gives way too much liability to corporate executives. It is the typical overreaction by the government when legitimate crises erupt, like the strangehold of our financial markets in the Depression, the S&Ls in the 1980s, and soon to be subprime. As a result of SOX, many smaller companies who want to float on public exchanges but don't have the cash to deal with the myriad auditing rules are migrating to cheaper and more vibrant exchanges like London (though that reaction is a tad overblown) or new innovative exchanges by the brokerages like Goldman Sachs' new GSTrue. GsTrue is aiming to be an exchange where private companies can float and be traded electronically by institutional investors; and well since these same institutional investors derive their money in some fashion by individual retail ones, it's not implausible to speculate that our shackled public markets could be replaced by innovative and self-regulated private electronic ones beholden to no agency and no government.

[Copernicus]

I agree that SOX is, in many parts, an overreaction. However in the areas of auditor's conflicts and contingency fee arrangements it was sorely needed. Pre-SOX I was offered a partnership in a major accounting firm and turned it down because a large portion of the responsibilities included selling... lets kindly call them "highly speculative"....tax deferral schemes on a contingent basis. The revenues dwarfed the consulting fees for real value added services.

[calmB4storm]

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I thought this was gonna be about baseball. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

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[govman6767]

[ QUOTE ]
I thought this was gonna be about baseball. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

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You saw the OP right ?