The Street's Dark Side

摘要

The hammer came down quickly on Wall Street after the stock-market bubble burst. Regulators and lawmakers, under pressure to avenge the losses of millions of average Americans duped by unscrupulous brokers and corporate book-cookers, imposed swift reforms. Eliot Spitzer, the crusading New York state attorney general, demanded big brokerage firms overhaul their fraudulent stock research (they had been hyping companies that paid them huge investment banking fees). Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to tighten up accounting and other standards for corporate behavior. With the reforms in place, Wall Street was again "an environment where honest business and honest risk-taking will be encouraged and rewarded," William Donaldson, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, declared in a speech last year.