And Tried To Warn Us Three Years Ago
I met Greg Farrell in 1999 while on a book tour promoting Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads. We shared a bottle of red wine at the Waldorf-Astoria’s Bull and Bear pub. Greg and I hit it off and we stayed in touch.
I remember making the phone call in 2002. “Greg, I’ve been thinking about what you told me and I want you to write a book called America Robbed Blind. Will you do it?” Greg wasn’t sure he had the time, so I emailed him my cover design: the Statue of Liberty wearing a blindfold, holding a bag full of cash.
The image was a double-prediction:
1. The American people, blindfolded, left holding the bag after a robbery.
2. The American people, blindfolded, about to be robbed of all they had.
Greg laughed when he saw the cover and said he would write the book. That was 2002. Wizard Academy Press published America Robbed Blind in January, 2005.
Back in those days Greg was an investigative reporter for USA Today. His job was to monitor the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and investigate Wall Street crime.
Greg was America’s only reporter in the courtroom for every minute of the trials of Enron, Worldcom, Tyco and Martha Stewart. As an investigative reporter Greg dug deep, full time, year after year. “Roy, the SEC is being set up to take the fall for a series of financial disasters,” he said. “This whole Enron thing is just the tip of the iceberg.”
“What do you mean?”
“The number of publicly traded companies has grown exponentially in recent years, yet the budget for the SEC had been increased by only a small amount. Think of it this way,” Greg said, “Andy and Barney did a pretty good job patrolling Mayberry, but now they’re being told they have to patrol Los Angeles without any additional help, and without any bullets for their guns.”
Greg went on to explain how Congress keeps the SEC under-funded so that big business can grow unimpeded, unsupervised, and unregulated. If Congress allowed the SEC to do its job, big business would cry, “The government has us handcuffed! We can’t compete with all these government regulations.”
Big companies donate big dollars to congressional candidates. Are you beginning to get the picture?
Page 68 of Greg’s book details the proposal made during the summer of 2000 by Arthur Levitt, chairman of the SEC at the time.
Levitt was absolutely convinced that a financial catastrophe was coming and begged Congress to give him the power to stop it.
“But several big firms whose campaign contributions to lawmakers on Capitol Hill gave them enormous clout, fought the proposal aggressively… Levitt went to extraordinary lengths to show Congress the dangers that lay ahead… But Levitt’s warnings fell on deaf ears. So he took the battle to the states… It was only in November of 2000, when he learned that Congress was threatening to cut the SEC’s budget if the new rule went into effect, that Levitt relented.” – Page 69, America Robbed Blind, (2005)
In essence, Congress told Andy to quit complaining or they would take away his budget to pay Barney.
When the whole Enron thing was over, I asked Greg if he thought anything like that could ever happen again. “You can count on it,” he said, “It’s inevitable. As long as Congress keeps the watchdog starved, muzzled and on a chain, the abuses will multiply. Arthur Levitt begged Congress to empower the SEC and they spanked him for it.”
Enron and his cousins robbed American investors of more than 500 billion dollars. Then on September 18, 2008, after it was learned that Americans would again be left holding the bag for a 700 billion-dollar bank heist, John McCain, a lawmaker on Capitol Hill for the past 26 years, said, “The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the president and in my view, has betrayed the public’s trust. If I were president today, I would fire him.’’
Wow. They’re trying to hang this debacle around the neck of the SEC and use them as the scapegoat, just as Greg said they would. (Hey, if Obama had said it, I’d be equally appalled, so don’t make the mistake of thinking I have a political bias. I don’t.)
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that Greg described exactly how to fix the problem in his book (pages 180-181,) but no one paid attention:
1. Allow the SEC to keep the fees
it currently collects from public companies. Self-funding would protect the financial health of the commission from the whims of its Congressional overlords, and allow the SEC to grow at the same rate as the financial markets it polices.
2. Give SEC attorneys criminal enforcement powers.
3. Give bonuses to successful SEC attorneys.
Plaintiff’s lawyers who bring cases against tobacco companies and asbestos manufacturers put years of effort into the cause because if they win, the financial payoff is astronomical. But an SEC lawyer has almost no incentive to take on difficult cases where the commission is outgunned by a public company’s army of lawyers.
Greg Farrell is a past winner of the Jesse Neal Award for investigative reporting, a recipient of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship for business journalism, a graduate of Harvard University (with an MBA from Columbia) and a cognoscenti graduate of Wizard Academy, where he also serves on the adjunct faculty. He was recently lured away from USA Today by the Financial Times.
You want to know what’s really happening in financial America? Pay attention to Greg Farrell. So far, he’s batting a thousand.
Roy H. Williams
