A Course of Inaction
Legal Affairs, March, 2004 by John C. Coffee Jr.
THE FIRST WAVE OF SCANDALS CAME IN 2001. Beginning with the fall of Enron, a host of similar cases of accounting irregularity quickly followed, most involving overstated earnings and understated liabilities. These events culminated in 2002 with WorldCom's record-setting bankruptcy and the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Later that year, a second wave erupted, this time involving securities analysts, who New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer showed had behaved more like cheerleaders than objective umpires. Barely had these scandals been resolved—with a $1.4 billion settlement and complex institutional reforms to protect the independence of analysts—when a new and even more surprising controversy exploded in 2003. Mutual funds, long the cleanest sector of the financial...
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