The New York Times WorldCom Says It Hid Expenses, Inflating Cash Flow $3.8 Billion
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"When WorldCom's stock was rising, Mr. Tice said, investors cheered its acquisition binge and paid little attention to how the company generated its profits. That attitude, he said, encouraged the company to stretch accounting rules and take ever-bigger risks in an effort to keep its stock rising.

During the late 1990's, "the executives, the money managers, the auditors, the C.F.O.'s, the C.E.O.'s, the ones that got ahead were the most reckless, the least ethical," Mr. Tice said.

"The most reckless guys were the ones that ended up having the most power and the highest market valuations," he said."

Dan Gillmor Corporate sleaze carves into our trust

"I fear we're nearing a classic tipping point. The primary reason we didn't have a worse recession in the wake of the market downturn was that consumers kept spending. Now their confidence is dropping.

Rational people are starting to assume something that isn't necessarily true. They're becoming convinced that the system is hopelessly, irrevocably rigged against everyday investors by a corrupt cadre of insiders in boardrooms and on Wall Street, willfully assisted by regulators and elected officials who are either corrupt themselves or simply blind.

redux [06.04.02]
Salon "It was just stupid"

"This was a valuation bomb, not a disclosure bomb. Enron and Global Crossing -- those are issues of disclosure. They simply didn't tell us how bad things were. If you go back and look at all the dot-com prospectuses, they're filled with how bad things are.

The great Wall Street promotional machine accentuates whatever happens to be the mood of the public. Wall Street was complicit and the public was complicit and the companies were certainly complicit and the venture capitalists were complicit.

It takes all of those to make it happen."

redux [05.10.02]
Forbes Cramer's Troubles Could Get Worse

"The transcript includes some eyebrow-raising anecdotes relating to Cramer's cozy relationship with CNBC television personalities Maria Bartiromo, David Faber and Mark Haines."

"In some instances, according to the taped interview, Cramer would call the anchors with a possible news lead on a company after he had already established a position in that firm. Says the trader in the taped interview: "Before he'd call Maria maybe we'd buy five or ten thousand shares of something. You know, the name that he was about to mention. He would position the firm so that when it did come out, it would be the positive or negative short or long, depending on, you know, what information he gave.""

USA Today Scandals shred investors' faith

"A drumbeat of corporate misdeeds has helped crush stock prices and eviscerate pension plans. But the biggest victim may be trust -- investors' trust in financial advisers, stock analysts and Corporate America."

"Trust keeps the financial system together. Once lost, it can take years for Wall Street to regain it. Signs of how badly trust has eroded are everywhere."

Business2.0 Who's to Blame for the Dotcom Insanity?

"And yet, as compared with previous bubbles -- say, junk bonds in the '80s -- the dotcom fiasco owed relatively less to Wall Street's lack of ethics and relatively more to willing contagion by the public itself. "The market wanted these stocks," Blodget observed to CNBC, and Blodget was right. By the millennium's waning months, it was common, for example, to see engineers in Silicon Valley with CNBC in one pop-up window on their computer screens and their brokerage accounts in another, and they would -- or so I'm told -- trade all day and scarcely attend to their jobs.

Of course, the financial press -- CNBC in particular -- fanned the flames, but faulting it or any other group misses the epidemic nature of the contagion, which naturally infected the whole of society without distinction."

SatireWire MEDIA CONVICTS MEDIA OF UNFAIRLY CONVICTING MEDIA IN MEDIA: MEDIA

""Lately it has been popular in the media to try and convict the media for exaggerating the importance and influence of the media on issues such as the economy and the Internet," said the report's co-author, recently retired CNN anchor Bernard Shaw. "We in the media felt it was time to take a look at the way the media has been looking at the media looking at the media's coverage, and we were appalled at what we found ourselves finding ourselves finding out about ourselves."

The report, however, drew immediate criticism from Shaw, who blasted himself in a two-hour televised panel discussion."

redux [03.13.01]
The Washington Post Who Blew the Dot-Com Bubble?

"Henry Blodget, Wall Street's loudest cheerleader for Internet stocks, made it to the front page of the New York Times last week. And thereby hangs a tale about the media and the bubble."

"For it was the mainstream media -- which now take such delight in scolding those involved in the dot-com mania -- that helped push the idea that anyone could get rich by playing the market.

"The media invented Blodget," says Christopher Byron, a columnist for Bloomberg News and MSNBC. "In a bull market everyone loves to cheer, and Henry Blodget was everyone's first phone call. . . . Where were they when companies were trading for 150 times revenues? They were repeating the words of these guys. It's disgusting."