Infectious Greed: Restoring Confidence in America's Companies

Chapter 10. The Securities and Exchange Commission

For a while, everyone was enjoying a tremendous bull market. Business seemed to be booming. Investors were excessively speculating in the stock markets, optimism was very high, and some people were even pondering early retirement. Then, all of a sudden, quite dramatically, all of it changed. Large corporations began going bankrupt. Corporate officers were found to be deceiving the public. Executives became engaged in courtroom battles that grabbed the nation's headlines. As a result, investors became leery of corporations and the stock market plummeted.

While this may sound like 2002, we are actually describing the way things were during the late 1920s and early 1930s. This period spawned the Great ...