How to Rip Off Your Investors

摘要

If you're an investment professional who's hellbent on picking people's pockets, try to follow these simple rules. Get caught when the stock market's rising. Take a little money from a lot of peo- ple, so you won't create dramatic, sympathetic victims. Make sure you're doing something so complicated that it takes at least two sentences to explain. And, finally, try not to have Washington connections that will turn your sleazy behavior into a political story. If you follow all these rules, you don't have to worry about being reviled on the front pages and on TV day after day, the way the likes of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling of Enron, Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom and Jack Grubman of Salomon Brothers were. These guys, firmly established as villains, haven't been convicted of anything and, in some cases, not even indicted. But they made a lot of money acting badly while other people lost their life savings. Today, though, mutual-fund perps are admitting wrongdoing right and left― and no one outside the business world knows their names. There's nothing like a bull market―stocks are up 35 percent in the past 13 months-to defuse outrage.