America Robbed Blind

Book excerpt: Just months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, American investors came under attack. Two of the nation's biggest corporations, Enron and WorldCom, admitted that they had overstated their earnings by billions of dollars. As those two titans collapsed into bankruptcy, shareholders were stuck with almost $200 billion in losses.Accounting scams were also exposed at Adelphia and HealthSouth. Tyco's board of directors eventually realized that its earnings needed to be restated, even as its top two executives were charged with larceny.The people and organizations responsible for protecting investors?Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the big Wall Street banks that lent billions to these fraudulent enterprises?fell down on their jobs. Worse, Congress actually wrote laws that provided incentives for executives to cheat their own investors.Throughout the 1990s Congress systematically starved the SEC to the point where the securities cops could barely do their jobs.America Robbed Blind exposes the root causes of the accounting scandals that wiped out $500 billion worth of investments in U.S. stocks. It explains how a series of seemingly minor Congressional actions--from a law penalizing corporations for paying salaries in excess of $1 million to a Senate vote to scuttle a rule calling for the expensing of stock options--created the conditions that led to the accounting abuses that eroded investor confidence among the 95 million Americans who own stocks.One of the reasons that ethically challenged corporations were able to fool investors for so long is that most Americans don't have the time to sift through mountains of corporate filings or detailed financial reports laden with accounting jargon and legalese. In simple, explanatory prose, America Robbed Blind makes it easy to understand the fraud that occurred in recent years and proposes several reforms to ensure that these abuses never occur again.202 pagesHardcover