<HTML>In a message dated 7/20/2002 2:21:04 AM Eastern Daylight Time, peterk@enteract.com writes: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">Whoosh, unawares I was at a bar and someone mentioned the Dow dropped 400 today. Huh? And narry a comment on LBO-list. I guess the system is just "correcting itself." And "dealing harshly" with those miscreants who misrepresented their basics to the market. Meanwhiles, retirees' savings are being wiped out. I hope Democrats water down anti-corporate legislation, as they appear to be doing. Sooner or later they'll reap the shitstorm. </BLOCKQUOTE> Proposals of installing yet another layer of bureacracy such as a fraud task force, or additional auditing committee (the FASB already exists to set accounting standards, and the SEC is supposed to read the filings they receive from corporations to detect fraud), and higher penalties for white collar crime (which is useless cause no CEO or CFO is being indicted for anything beyond minor art collection tax fraud) will not correct the market and will not help retirees. The Democratic suggestions are as much window dressing as the Republican ones (i.e 'citizen' McCain). Neither have given the market confidence as indicated not just by yesterday's fall, but by the 11% drop since Bush's corporate integrity speech last week. True reform might start with slicing a percentage of every CEO's cash-out and giving it back to the employee retirement funds they raped, or how about even freezing their assets? Nomi</HTML>